> xian: > I may be mixing this up with something else, but didn't user-centered > design start as a method that actually involved users in the design > process? I have vague memories of a story involving a Scandinavian > country and something like city planning?
<pompous_lecture> There are several threads in the pre-history of user-centered design. The one I believe you are thinking of is the Participatory Design thread. Participatory Design, or PD, is basically about users as co- designers. Not data points for a persona or test subjects in a lab, but full-bodied experts in their respective domains. PD is a method, and/or a philosophy, and/or a set of techniques, aimed at combining the users' expertise in their domain of practice with designers' expertise in the design material in order to initiate sustainable change processes supported by new technology. More plainly: Users and designers create new products and services together, doing what they are each good at, and learning from each other. There are PD projects in industrial engineering and automation back in the 50s, and in architecture/urban planning in the 60s. For our purposes, the history of PD starts in the 70s when a series of information systems development projects was performed by Swedish, Norwegian and Danish researchers in collaboration with workers in, e.g., mechanical maintenance, healthcare and newspaper typesettting. The projects were heavily supported by labor unions and motivated by political, emancipatory reasons. Basically, workers were threatened by management attempts to make their work more efficient through automation. The PD projects were performed to explore alternatives that were more respectful to the skills and professional value of the workers. The 80s saw a slow and steady growth of PD projects and knowledge. Still political and emancipatory, still oriented towards workplace settings, thus most favored in countries with a strong social- democrat tradition and strong labor unions. In the early 90s, there was a temporary surge of US interest in a re- interpreted notion of PD as a way to increase user acceptance and customer buy-in. Not very popular among the purists. More recently, developments in PD have mostly concerned ways to address non-workplace settings, heterogeneous user populations, discretionary and hedonistic use, and innovative (as opposed to incremental) design. There is a moderately lively academic community in the field, which you can explore through fora such as the annual Participatory Design Conference and the Co-Design journal. </pompous_lecture> Other threads in the pre-history of user-centered design include academic human-computer interaction (with concepts such as usability, task analysis, experimental user testing, etc.), the human factors movement in product design and engineering (think ergonomics and cognitive ergonomics), the interest in field studies and ethnographic methods within product design and architecture, and so on. Regards, Jonas Löwgren (Malmö University, Scandinavia) ________________________________________________________________ *Come to IxDA Interaction08 | Savannah* February 8-10, 2008 in Savannah, GA, USA Register today: http://interaction08.ixda.org/ ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
