On communicating design intent:
I'd like to throw a thought out and make an analogy between interaction design and mechanical design. In mechanical design, the communication between the disciplines of designer and builder (machinist) are so well developed that they have in essence a common language. The medium of a mechanical drawing is so accurate that the engineer knows exactly what to expect when the finished product comes back. To take this even further, by setting tolerances on the drawing, the engineer even knows approximately how close to his original design the output will be when the product comes back. The tolerances are intended to bring more attention to precision where precision is needed and allow for less effort where it is less important in the design.

In interaction design, there is as yet, nothing that comes close to that level of accuracy for communicating interactive behaviors to software developers. And by inference, there is very little in the way of a medium which communicates attention to precision and tolerance for interaction that could reduce the opportunity for misinterpretation.

This may suggest that all interaction designers will eventually need to develop the same proficiency with a dynamic tool (Flash) as mechanical engineers with CAD. Or perhaps it's that we're in that primitive era when mechanical design was done with two-dimensional representations before solid modeling and we, as interaction designers, need new tools that will allow us to efficiently and accurately document temporal interactions.

What if you could create a tool such as a finite element analysis -used for predicting engineering stresses in mechanical design - for software interaction design; an application that could predict how hard it was to construct any interaction design.

...more thoughts to come