Dan Saffer, like many designers, likes to quote Charles Eames. But unlike many designers, Saffer–Director of Interaction Design at Smart Design–wrote a whole book inspired by one of his favorite Eames quotes: “The details are not the details. They make the design.” Saffer’s book, titled Microinteractions, takes Eames’s maxim to heart and then some.
“For the last decade or so, designers have been encouraged to tackle ‘wicked problems’ and to address systems,” he tells Co.Design. “But when you’re working on such a macro scale, the details sometimes get lost, and it’s the details that make systems feel more human, and more humane. So I wanted to write a book that took a look, almost at the atomic level of design, of what makes details work.”
