I'm offering up a diversion in this thread from a conversation about the form and function of this little site toward a conversation about the content of the site.
Interestingly, the site compiler makes no distinction between things that are poorly designed and things that are poorly placed, such as the mop sink. This mop sink is probably not poorly designed relative to what it was intended for. It's placement leads to mis-interpreation of its function or perhaps disregard for its function, if it is understood not to be a urinal. Also dismissed are the lines between "badly designed" (the fridge door and the file cabinet) and "I didn't read the directions and couldn't make it work, so it therefore must be poorly designed" (the parking pass) and "I have never experienced this before; everything should work like something I'm already familiar with" (toothpaste and master butter knife, which is for serving butter not for cutting things). So the question in my mind is, why are these distinctions *not* important? I think they are. Context and intent *are* important. The implication becomes, when these distinctions are moot, that everything needs to be intuitive and familiar. Yet, what is intuitive to me may not be intuitive to another. What is familiar some else may be foreign to me. What happens to pushing the envelope of design and functionality if the criteria of familiarity and intuitiveness rule judging the design? Did the design(er) inherently fail if the implementer has placed something out of context? Lynn On 10/11/07, Matthew Nish-Lapidus <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > The actual design of this site isn't very good.. but the content is fantastic. > > http://www.baddesigns.com/examples.html ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://gamma.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://gamma.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://gamma.ixda.org/help
