Perhaps we could ask our clients or employers: "I'm sure this product is great, and I trust there's a market for it. But, why the need to make it a bad experience?"
Or, we could ask our bosses: "Why the division into silos? It sure seems tribal." While most of the (human) world's ills can be traced to humanity's knee-jerk reactions, much of it's pleasures and splendor can be traced to spontaneous responses to pressures from the outside world. There's pressure to compete at work. And, in looking at new UX practitioners joining the field, many of them are well-read, but few of them have experience applying their academic or book-based training in a realistic environment. It is common to have the very presence of UX questioned by people you work with on a daily basis, who are happy to march into design and development without any UX work. It is common to have UX activities seen as distracting from the work and superfluous, so much so that it's trimmed from the budget early on. It is common that we must alter the theoretical methods we read about into an applied version that works in our immediate context. A lecture-based conference with alcohol-based social activities is not a realistic preparation for our working environments. A competition is. As for moving the practice beyond the polar bear paradigm, you've ushered in the elephant. It's an interesting development that an author of the polar bear book might have already done more to educate us beyond the polar bear than an un-polar-bear conference would. You've brought mental models, comics, storytelling - each a significant step forward from the original organization, navigation, search, and labeling. If we're counting buzzwords, you've helped the paradigm shift beyond the earlier paradigm you helped construct. I appreciate the discussion and the books, Jay On Wed, Feb 11, 2009 at 11:22 AM, Louis Rosenfeld <[email protected]>wrote: > Dead polar bears... > > Sure, it's a provocative subject line. And I'm sure it's all in > good fun. > > But why the need to kill? > > Instead of killing the polar bear, why not evolve a new species? Or > build on it? Or anything that's at least constructive in some way. > I think this is a poorly-chosen metaphor, as cute as it may seem, and > could get your event off on the wrong track. > > Instead of tilting at ancestors, why not fight new battles? > > Even if I wasn't the co-author of the book, and even if I wasn't a > proud information architect, I'd still be skeptical of what your > philisophical bent, simply because it smacks of tribalism. > > Most of the world's ills can be traced toward humanity's knee-jerk > instinctual us-and-them-edness. And yet here we go again, repeating > this nonsense within our own family when we ought to know better. > > Your event sounds interesting, and I personally enjoy far northern > extremes, having visited continental Europe's northern tip, > Nordkapp. But man, seems like if I had the bread to make it > Svalbard, I guess I'd expect a pretty, er, cold reception. Too bad. > > > Happy hunting. > > > . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . > Posted from the new ixda.org > http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=38517 > > > ________________________________________________________________ > 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 > -- ________________________________________________________________ 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
