We live in a changing world, this is something that we have known for many years. The information age exploded into our lives during the 1990’s and has continued to grow exponentially ever since. The shift has been from the creation of products, to the handling of information, of which there is now an overwhelming amount.

Videos, documents, music, encyclopaedias are all bow deeply integrated within digital mediums such as the internet.This influx of information is staggering for the human mind, so this has led to the creation of interaction design.

There is too much information in the world for anybody to access it in it’s raw form. Interaction Design was formed as a way of creating ways to easily access and manipulate data, in ways that make natural sense. This has led to the evolution of the internet and in turn, the extension of the internet into our everyday lives. Now we can access information from almost anywhere we desire, from computers, laptops and cellphones.The evolution of the internet has also led us to the age of Web 2.0, a shift in focus of the internet from being a static collection of pages with meaningful links between them, to focusing more on user generated content and the manipulation of existing information by said users.

Community orientated websites such as Facebook and Youtube have offered the user for the first time, the ability to EASILY make a place for themselves on the internet without having to delve into the dark world of programming.

But as demand and the volume of information grows, new methods need to be developed for people to interact with their data. In the future, how will we interact with our data in not only cyberspace, but the real world as well?These new future methods of interaction are already in development, such as the proliferation of radio (RFID) tags for giving real world items a presence on the Internet and the constant development of wireless technologies, for allowing us constant access to reams of data which become more and more relevant to our actions in the real world.

So in conclusion, what technologies and methods will interaction designers provide us with for interacting with online communities in the future?

Bibliography:

Dan Saffer – The Future of Interaction Design: Berkley, New Riders 2007

Virtual-Communities, Virtual Settlements & Cyber-Archaeology: A Theoretical Outline - Quentin Jones JCMC 3/12/97 - http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol3/issue3/jones.html

JCMC VOl 10 Issue 4 - Online Communities - http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol10/issue4/

Ethnomethodology and the study of online communities: exploring the cyber streets -  Steven R. Thomsen, Joseph D. Straubhaar, Drew M. Bolyard - http://informationr.net/ir/4-1/paper50.html

Second Life Research - Guido Lang - http://secondliferesearch.blogspot.com/ 

Social Interaction Design Guide: Social Media, Social Practices, Social Content - Adrian Chan - http://www.gravity7.com/articles_G7_SxD_Social_Content-12-21-06.html