"So, to a lot of people I think your article feels a lot like a
strawman argument, against a boogieman we simply don't recognize"
Amen.
There were two fundamental problems I had with the article. When Adam
claims that he 1. reads no ux/ixd material; 2. doesn't consume the
books; 3. attends no conferences & no ux/ixd related events; I for one
wonder where are the assumptions and formulations he has derived
coming from -- guessing? clairvoyance?
"My own guilty secret is that I don’t follow those names, pay any
attention to the various sites and journals people like me are
supposed to read, or attend the community’s events, and (to some
reasonably approximate value of “never”) never really have."
http://speedbird.wordpress.com/2009/12/11/dimensions-of-design/
My Second problem is that of metaphor. Spatial metaphors are
pervasive, perhaps owing to some coupling of the original xerox star
and William Gibson's Neuromancer - but it is by no means the only
metaphor best suited for engaging with content or sociality in
networked publics (again with the spatial metaphor - but it's no
better than mediated spaces). There are some the have used other
metaphors to describe the way we engage with content objects or social
behavior through interfaces - for instance Vander Wal's personal and
social info clouds - where users - us - don't "go out into places" but
actually subscribe and pull objects and conversations to us - best
exhibited by things like the amount of content we consume using RSS
readers - or subscribing to people's public streams on twitter. I
wonder if the article itself is limited by spatial/architectural
metaphors - when you have a hammer, everything looks like urban
planning.
So while I think reading from more than just the UX Canon - which is,
by the way, far richer than just Maeda (at last count over 110 books
and thousands of published articles both inside ACM CHI and outside
it); there are also fields as rich as architecture to look to. From
linguistics to sociology and psychology to theater and film - many of
which are represented in the Canon. I am not advising that people feel
a necessity to go out and read Korbzynski or Walter Benjamin, but for
that point - I agree with Greenfield.
Just my 2 cents.
~ will
"Where you innovate, how you innovate,
and what you innovate are design problems"
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Will Evans | Director, Experience Design
tel: +1.617.281.1281 | [email protected]
http://blog.semanticfoundry.com
http://www.linkedin.com/in/semanticwill
aim: semanticwill
gtalk: semanticwill
twitter: semanticwill
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
On Dec 14, 2009, at 5:15 PM, Christopher Fahey wrote:
So, to a lot of people I think your article feels a lot like a
strawman argument, against a boogieman we simply don't recognize
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