I would say it's most important to not think about people based on
whether their profession was IxD or not - given that the term and
title have only been around for less than a decade, yet people have
been 'doing' just that for a bit longer. Leonardo Di Vinci was
certainly not an industrial designer or an anatomist, yet that is
exactly what he was because that is exactly what he 'did' - just as
Englebart could not possibly have been an IxDer because the title
didn't exist, yet he is exactly that because that is what he 'did' -
we need to throw titles out the window and focus on what great
contributors DO/DID - not what their title was. :-)
Though Linux is universally understood by lay persons and designers
and the worst possible IxD of all time, it is completely relative to
the audience so - for the intended audience, was linux really good
IxD? Depends on who you ask - but i think "intentionality" is key here
- did Torvald give a rats ass about IxD, interface, and use goals,
needs, activities when he set to work on it? Would he have been just
as happy if the interaction model was command line - and all that GUI
stuff was just for fun - or because X-Windows had it? Not sure.
~ will
"Where you innovate, how you innovate,
and what you innovate are design problems"
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Will Evans | User Experience Architect
tel: +1.617.281.1281 | [email protected]
http://blog.semanticfoundry.com
aim: semanticwill
gtalk: semanticwill
twitter: semanticwill
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On Feb 18, 2009, at 5:08 AM, Eirik Midttun wrote:
You may not think of Linus Torvalds as an interaction designer, but he
is sort of a rock star in the software and open source community.
And if you think of Linux as a product for scientists, engineers, sys
admins, and programmers, he really has made it user friendly by
sticking to interfaces that is already understood and accepted. Even
better, by making it open source the user is included in the design
process. Looking at the quality and richness of some open source
software, the whole consept of open source software is in my view a
beautiful systems.
I don't see Linux as universally user friendly, but that wasn't the
original goal. The ills about Linux is not understanding how it is not
ready for the consumer market, or seriously underestimating the
efforts to do so (or is that just indicating the quality of
commercial software?). That said, things are improving.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Posted from the new ixda.org
http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=38833
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