Thanks, Dan, for sharing that. I think what will stick with me is...
"A bookshelf that runs no deeper than XXXX" will not get us very far. This is a great takeaway. Top-notch Interaction Design is necessarily inclusive of disciplines that themselves have evolved from other traditions. That's why we have such heated discussion about what "it" exactly is. (That's why it's not completely crazy that you can get an MFA in Interaction Design or an MS in HCI, and still be employed in the same field.) * * * In addition to working in product development at my company, I teach a new media and online publishing class in the master's journalism program at USC Annenberg. One of my goals is to introduce them to IA, ID and usability as the salvation of Journalism in an online world. Along with HTML, CSS, SEO, metrics, etc., I teach wireframes, site maps and other basics. In every class, I try to keep ID best practices and usability top-of-mind. I also include companion readings to get them to think further afield. For example, I pair several chapters in the Moggridge (the mouse, the desktop, etc.) with Thomas Kuhn's "Structure of Scientific Revolutions to get them thinking about "Paradigm Shift" -- what is and what isn't, and what's going on in journalism right now. Along with readings from the Polar Bear book -- and before my lecture on directory structure, site hierarchy and categorization -- I have them read the first chapter of Deleuze & Guattari's "Thousand Plateaus" called the "Rhizome" to challenge not only their patience, but also their organizational thinking. When we talk about micro-blogging and social networking, I bring examples of 18th century epistolary literature and I show them the Crunch Gear video "Twitter is down again, Mein Führer". We talk Jeremy Bentham (and Foucault) when we talk about online privacy. In other words, every practical lesson and reading has a non-vocational companion piece. At IxDA in Vancouver, Jon Kolko paraphrased Robert Buchanan saying (more or less) that ID, UED and IA are the new liberal arts of technological culture. I think it's worthwhile to embrace this expansive "liberal arts" thinking in what we do, who we read and how we outwardly communicate our discipline. Sincerely, Steven Johnson -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Dan Saffer Sent: Sunday, December 13, 2009 12:51 AM To: [email protected] Subject: [IxDA Discuss] The Ahistoricity of Interaction Design What do we think about Adam Greenfield's challenge to us? "The ahistoricity of interaction design the notion, implicitly held or otherwise, that rich interactivity is an entirely new topic in design for human experience, perhaps with the Doug Engelbart demo as Year Zero has always driven me nuts. When even an old-school HCI stalwart like Don Norman fails to deliver useful insight, perhaps it s time to start looking further afield for inspiration. Let s face it: brighter and more sensitive people than us have been thinking about issues like public versus private realms, or which elements of a system are hard to reconfigure and which more open to user specification, for many hundreds of years. Medieval Islamic urbanism, for example, had some notions about how to demarcate transitional spaces between public and fully private that might still usefully inform the design of digital applications and services. By contrast, the level of sophistication with which those of us engaged in such design generally handle these issues is risible (and here I m pointing a finger at just about the entire UX community and the technology industry that supports it). A bookshelf that runs no deeper than John Maeda, in other words, isn t going to get you very far, or help you in the true crunch, and nothing makes me sadder than coming across someone engaged in the design of user experiences whose blogroll or Twitter follow list extends no further than the usual UX names...my feeling is that there are better and deeper sources of insight available if you dig a little in the history of adjacent design disciplines. You can learn to do a decent card sort (excuse me: content affinity analysis ) in ten minutes, and work competently with Arduino in a good solid month of effort, but if you re genuinely concerned with improving the quality of interactive experience, I believe you owe it both to yourself and to the people downstream from you who ll be using the things you make to gain a richer acquaintance with the thought of other, older design traditions." Read the whole article: <http://speedbird.wordpress.com/2009/12/11/dimensions-of-design/> Dan Saffer Principal, Kicker Studio http://www.kickerstudio.com http://www.odannyboy.com ________________________________________________________________ Reply to this thread at ixda.org http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=47932 ________________________________________________________________ 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
