Well, you are right, ID is not a private area of Computer Science, at all, but the arising technologies and their integration in every aspect of our everyday life, apart from their inherent difficulties to be used through the poor interfaces and weak ways to connect with us, make, all of it, CS the most important client of Interaction Design, by far.

Interaction design is about the relationship between people and technology. Currently much interaction design is about the relationship between people and computers.  However we see start to see intersections between people and other new technologies eg.  biotech.

I also agree with Juan Falgueras's opinion. In design field, the "interaction" term is used not only for information technology but also for every type of "artifacts". 

I  agree with Mr. Falgueras too. The reason Interaction Design rarely appears in other context than computer-related technology might be that ID of non-digital artifacts is considered part of product design/industrial design even though it's ID as well. Don Norman's "The Design of Everyday Things" should be mentioned here. Apart from that, ID is not interchangeable with HCI due to their different point of views.

I see that interaction design should involve every sort of events, where a human is interacting with technology interfaces, whether it was a computer, a system, a machine, or any other sort of a product - or service. However, typically the term Interaction Design seems to be specifically related to designing software interfaces (screens, gestures). When we speak of interaction with the world, other people and products in a larger scale, it seems that the better term is User Experience design.

I don't find the difference between User Experience and Interaction Design… Both pursue the same goals and the only difference between non-electronic and electronic-software programmable devices is the latter can be really more complicated up to the point of being cognitively challenging for their users (Hutchins.1985.Direct Manipulation Interfaces).

In any case, regarding the ID or UX engineers, the only aspects to study are those of the interaction with the human, and not those behind or supporting the interaction. So this differentiation seems to me artificially created where no practical difference exists.

 I agree with Juan, that the separation with interaction design and UX design seems rather artificial. Anyway in their essence they are about same things. Maybe the difference is that by designing better ways to interact with technology we can create great user experiences? The interaction is about the perception and behavior, and the experience is about the emerging mental event itself?

Interaction design and UX Design are clearly related, but they need not be the same. If we apply both terms to something less familiar than software (e.g. a hospital), the user experience covers all the facets of using the hospital (interactions with people, with rules, will billing, with medical procedures, with the building and with technology / software). User experience design covers the design of a common (coherent) experience across all of those facets that achieves the hospital's goals for its users.

Interaction design is the discipline (expertise) that enables that user experience to be implemented and delivered at some of those facets - the technology /software / artifacts mainly. One would not necessarily expect an interaction designer to be responsible for the interactions with people (that might be organizational design), but they might deal with signage and the finding of people.

Thus, the user experience is made up of lots of interactions with different things and interaction designers are a vitally important expertise in delivering pieces of the user experience.

For a more familiar example, consider the design of a customer support system for a service company. Interaction designers might design the online faces of that customer support system (the customer-facing and the agent-facing systems) but they would rarely be involved in the training and person-person interactions that are an equally vital part of the user experience.

Finally it is possible to finesse some of this and say that the user experience is only in relation to the technology / software and that the rest is customer experience - but a little thought should reveal that this doesn't make sense from the user's perspective as they don't have two different experiences.

Thanks all.

David - are you saying that Interaction Design (ID) is definitely a subset of a User's Experience (UX) but UX is not a subset of ID?

Did I simplify it too much?

Sort of, but they are also different kinds of things - in much the same way that industrial design is part of product design / management. User experience design is not a discipline in the way that interaction design is - just as product design / management is not a discipline, but industrial design is. User experience design and product design are activities that produce something and involve many different disciplines to do so. Interaction design is a discipline / expertise that is applied in the process. 

Just as industrial design produces the shape and structure of the physical product, so interaction design produces the shape and structure of the user interface. 

"Towards a Shared Definition of User Experience.Law.2008" is a good collection of definitions of UX. All the definitions share, more or less, the idea of a user's integrated experience. On the other hand, studying and driving every step to a particular UX require designing and orchestrating things. Those things can be based on software, hardware, and, why not, aesthetics, signage, protocols for users interaction with personal, etc. All things considered and going back to the original question, neither ID nor UX are exclusively bonded to computers or software.

http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=1358628.1358693

Juan

I totally agree.  Hence my concern because we seem to have ignored the foundational papers and now move towards focussing on computer-related technologies/interfaces and such...  It was a bit disturbing hence my question to my research colleagues.

Thanks for taking the time to walk this through with me

Noup, It is also very useful in the design of complex systems. For instance, the transport system of a big city necessarily requires of research in interaction design these days. Or commercial systems, advertising and so on.