Hello, I'm writing this from my hotel room at Interaction 08, where we're about to start the final day of the conference. Kudos to everyone involved. I imagine you've caused hundreds of thousands of good conversations. I'm well into the double-digits already, so far as my part in those conversations is concerned.
But I've noticed a topic missing from these conversations, and I thought I would bring it up here before the conference ends. THE MISSING TOPIC It's this: we are a community supposedly driven by understanding of the people who are affected by our work (that's PC for "our users"), but we aren't talking about them very much. Now, this isn't some kind of attempt to induce guilt. This isn't a shame email. I just want to point it out as a characteristic of our community, and suggest something that might enrich some of these hundreds of thousands of conversations. We're geeks/craftspeople (Hi Alan). We might be more sociable and stylish than the geeks in the movies, but when we get together we talk shop: methods, gear, office stories. Both fun and useful. Good for us. I think most of us would agree that one of the principles that underlies our practice is that we want to turn outward from ourselves and work from an understanding of, and genuine concern for, the people whose lives are change when our work ships. SUGGESTION Here's my suggestion: let's tell each other stories about those people. I believe those stories would a) turn our conversation to some very interesting design challenges, b) bring up lots of interesting and valuable stories about techniques, and c) over time, contribute to the overall sense of empathy that characterizes our community. I'LL START Here are a couple of stories about my users. One group of them has been diagnosed with a medical condition, prescribed with a treatment, then more or less left on their own. They don't know how to upgrade their equipment, find out if they're using it correctly, or learn how to handle some of the family issues that arise through its use. The web won't necessarily help, because they aren't active on the web. I love them, and would like to help them. We've also spent days and days with "typical" American households as they communicate with one another, do household chores, entertain themselves, and get from place to place. I love them too, but I can tell you that most of the topics we're discussing at this conference are of no concern to them at all, and aren't on the path to making things better for them. In most of those houses, the computer is turned off most of the time. In many of them, there's one email account for the whole household, and they check it maybe once a day. They are overwhelmed by the complexity of the technology in their house, knowing how to use maybe 10% of the functionality, and relying on the household "expert" to do things like switch the entertainment system from cable to DVD. They stay in touch with people by talking on the phone, and that works just fine for most. But if they are responsible for someone's care (and a LOT of them are -- gramma, neighbor,...) it's very difficult for them to have the kind of connection they'd like. These are pretty general, I know. But they are the people that have been coming to mind as we swap twitters and discuss industry trends. That's it. Thank you all again for all those great conversations. I look forward to more. Marc Rettig Fit Associates, LLC ________________________________________________________________ *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
