I know I shouldnt get into another fruitless discussion with you but your post is just too off base to ignore. I promise to the list this will be my one and only post on your points.
I said: What I don't agree with is the idea that you must discard the past to move forward. For me, that's too cheap and easy an approach. Your reply was: "The past" is filled with far more examples of products, innovative thinking, and success stories based on activity-centered research, magic, genius design, and just plain luck than UCD can claim even on its best day. How do you know this? Where is your data? Do you know what UCD has accomplished and how are you comparing it to magic? You cite activity centered design as a different thing from user centered design. For those readers who are not familiar with the background, in 1968 the computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra's wrote a letter in Communications of the ACM titled "Go To Statement Considered Harmful. This has become a popular title for academic critical essays. In 2005, Don Norman wrote an essay for Interactions (also published by ACM) titled Human-Centered Design Considered Harmful. In this essay he stated The purpose of this essay is to provoke thought, discussion, and reconsideration of some of the fundamental principles of Human-Centered Design. These principles, I suggest, can be helpful, misleading, or wrong. At times, they might even be harmful. Activity-Centered Design is superior. Its worth reading the article and also the clarification in which he said: The problem, however, is that HCD has developed as a limited view of design. Instead of looking at a person's entire activity, it has primarily focused upon page-by-page analysis, screen-by-screen. As a result, sequences, interruptions, ill-defined goals all the aspects of real activities, have been ignored. And error messages there should not be any error messages. All messages should contain explanations and offer alternative ways of proceeding from the message itself. Now the title is cute and the point a really good one. I agree with it completely. But to suggest that ACD is the replacement for 30 years of development is really simplistic. Norman was doing exactly what I suggested in my original post suggesting how to improve on existing techniques. But I doubt that he would seriously suggest that we need to abandon user centricity as a goal. In fact, he said just the opposite. Next you said: What's cheap and easy is the idea that we can dissect a chef's work and call it a recipe. That we can simply analyze genius and come out with a one-size-fits-all plan for success. Now I love genius chefs! I watch Iron Chef several times a week (both the Japanese and American versions). But, Robert, how many cookbooks have been published? I was going to ask chacha.com but my cell phone battery is about dead. So instead I went to amazon.com and typed in cookbook. I realize that this is an underestimate but I got back 78,981 results. So guess what. Most of us, we will continue to cook with recipes. Some of us will be pretty good cooks, some will be less good. I suspect that most of the genius chefs honed their skills on lots of recipes. There may be someone in a garage somewhere who is thinking out of the box, has never read a cookbook or studied sautéing will come up with a great new way to prepare food. But since Im more of a journeyman cook, Ill hang on to my Joy of Cooking. Here is what I propose: 1. Lets agree that putting the user at the center of our thinking is still a really good idea. 2. Lets agree that the world has changed since 1982 when UCD was first created and lets expand and extend it with activity centered design and every other good idea we can come up with so we create even better tools. 3. Lets acknowledge the great contribution that design has made to the process and work hard to integrate it into UCD (or whatever we want to call it). I think we should stop equating UCD (or whatever you want to call it), which has 30 years of effort and research behind it as if it were irrelevant. Personally, as long as the design approach creates a product that is useful to the user and usable, I dont care what name you give it. Charlie ============================ Charles B. Kreitzberg, Ph.D. CEO, Cognetics Corporation ============================ From: Robert Hoekman Jr [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, June 24, 2008 5:44 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: Scott Berkun; IXDA list Subject: Re: [IxDA Discuss] Is UCD Really Broken? What I don't agree with is the idea that you must discard the past to move forward. For me, that's too cheap and easy an approach. I greatly respect your willingness to pay close attention to and consider opposing arguments, but this particular point bothers me. What's cheap and easy is the idea that we can dissect a chef's work and call it a recipe. That we can simply analyze genius and come out with a one-size-fits-all plan for success. -r- ________________________________________________________________ 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
