Jess at ia/ sums up Tog's call to arms in support of a new name for interaction design well.

I can understand Tog's point about the need to explain the task of interaction architecture in a way that recognises its value, but interaction design, like usability and experience design, need not be sharply delineated separate disciplines. Roles, tasks and people are ususally much more fluid than that. Sure, we all may need titles of some kind, but these do not necessarily encapsulate "what we do". As Jesse James Garrett has said recently, roles and disciplines do not always have a 1-to-1 mapping.

We sat by the river this afternoon pondering "words like this" (;-) and thought a bit about our desire to see, plan and build succesful online social applications that are both smart (where the computer does the processing, not the human), simple, .. and err ..... social (conceived, built and managed socially, social in essence and supporting some kind of real world social interaction). This is a different kind of service aggregation, including but not limited to those mentioned by Jess and Tog. We want to create "moments" arising from from connectedness, so it is basically about interaction, but it is also a lot wider than that. It is about answering the "why", "how" and "for what" questions as well. It has a context.

I think interaction architecture sounds nice, but I don't think it should be done by one "profession".