On Feb 18, 2009, at 8:53 AM, Christopher Fahey wrote:
The difference you describe exists today, but it didn't exist ten or twenty years ago. We can hardly blame folks in the 1980's and earlier for blurring engineering and user experience design, as they were doing both. Thomas Edison thought a lot about user experience when he was engineering the fountain pen and the stock ticker, but obviously he was focused on the engineering. Even the people who created all those classic Atari 2600 computer games -- the gameplay, the graphics, the sounds -- were almost without exception engineers... yet it's hard to argue today that their primary contribution to the universe was in engineering.
To be clear, I wasn't looking for blame in this sense. Further, I think you're taking it a bit too far and making the same mistake that plagued the "user experience" crowd in the late 90s and early 00s. The "it's all user experience, even if they didn't know it!" Not really. You're treaded a slippery slope with this line of thinking imho.
However, I just wanted to note that if people are looking for examples of people in the past, I wanted to make sure they were looking in the right spots. Guys like Paul Brainerd and his team have done far more in this regard than many of the people on Dan's list, and in my opinion, can be credited for being the first to truly modernize the concept of interacting with computers through a graphical interface, taking what the original Macintosh team did at the OS and simple software level and evolving it to the next stage. I just wanted to make sure folks were looking for the right people, which in the past context means they are almost always looking for engineers.
And as for documenting many of the core concepts in software and interface design that are still 100% relevant to day as they were in 1982, Paul Heckel is still your guy.
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