Hi Dave, On 28 Jan 2008, at 05:13, dave malouf wrote:
> Adrian, if all you do is the work, then who is setting up the criteria > and standards by which to evaluate it? Critique based on a shared > understanding of foundational criteria is at the core of what makes > for a successful design discipline. One that not only produces, but > can be shared amongst peers, evaluated, and described. Can't people do both? > As I said in this message, a design discipline that is ONLY about > financial success is not much of a discipline if it is not moral and > aesthetic. It takes pause to come up with these standards of > evaluation. I'm not sure how you got the idea that financial success was the only way I was judging things :-) <aside> That said, I'm not sure how do you apply moral criteria to define IxD. For example, personally I would not work on developing products for the gambling industry. However I certainly wouldn't argue that the _very_ talented folk who create the user experience of the Vegas cash-removal machines weren't doing damn fine interaction design / usability / ia / whatever. The APA ethics code don't define what psychology is, just what ethical standards members of the APA need to have. These are community and organisational issues. They're very important, but I didn't think this was what we were talking about here? </aside> > What would an interaction designer be/do if they were part of X > school of design theory? How does IxD play into that? Should it? Can > it? I don't know. How would it help me make better things? We could talk more about that :-) Having come into the user experience area from a development/cog-sci background I'm not really familiar with different design schools. Your description of studio work was really interesting - and matched up with the way I've seen really productive groups work. I'd love to so more discussion about the knowledge, skills and practices that we can use from these areas. > What makes up the clay that we form into interactions? Pixels & waves > (sound)? Plastic & metal? I don't think so. That is the form, not the > interaction. We mold time, metaphor, and physicality instead of line, > color, volume, texture and space. But without the pixels and waves, plastic and metal you don't have an interaction. A form-free interaction is a nonsense - like a marble free sculpture. > Give a group of specialty print designers a layout to look at. They > may disagree on good vs. bad, but they will most likely be able to > use a language of aesthetics to communicate that reason. The best > I've seen our community do is to talk about usability. Usability at > best has a limited understanding of aesthetics and usually but not > always in practice puts function ahead of form or feel in their focus > of their evaluations. Seems like we talk about more than usability - mental models, scenarios, use cases, user stories, persona, hierachical task analysis, ethnography, structured vs unstructured interviews, cognitive walkthroughs, Fits' Law, etc. etc. But I'm all for talking about more ways to practice the art. That seems to be a more productive conversation than trying to define what the art is :-) Cheers, Adrian ________________________________________________________________ *Come to IxDA Interaction08 | Savannah* February 8-10, 2008 in Savannah, GA, USA Register today: http://interaction08.ixda.org/ ________________________________________________________________ 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
