Hi Everyone: I find myself deeply troubled by the trend to dismiss UCD as irrelevant or (worse) harmful and to suggest that design is a wholly new field.
Of course every field must advance in its thinking and its practices. But there is a risk of design, divorced from usability, becoming effete and irrelevant. I have seen chairs in museums that are beautiful but not comfortable and thought that they were better off there and not in my kitchen. Most interactive products are tools of some sort. At the end of the day, tools must be both useful and usable. They need to do something and do it well. Efficacy is an inseparable part of the user experience when it comes to tools. If we can improve on UCD techniques and find better and more efficient ways to make products useful and usable that is a wonderful thing. The great computer scientist Richard Hamming (with whom briefly I studied when I was an undergraduate) used to remark "Sir Isaac Newton said, 'If I have seen further than others, it is because I've stood on the shoulders of giants.' Today we stand on each other's feet!" In the effort to define IxD as a "new" field rather than the next generation of an existing one, there is a real risk of discarding the baby with the bathwater. It seems to me that the better focus is how can we take interactive design to the next level, building on what came before and improving it. Charlie ============================ Charles B. Kreitzberg, Ph.D. CEO, Cognetics Corporation ============================ ________________________________________________________________ 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
