On Oct 6, 2008, at 3:46 PM, Peter Merholz wrote:
While you're wailing and gnashing your teeth over wounded pride...
If you'd like to get into a conversation over who can call the other snippy names or pontificate on motives in flowery language in attempt to belittle the other, I'll gladly take you up on that offer outside the confines of this list.
Yes, good designers would do such things, and have for decades (as witnessed by Henry Dreyfuss' book, DESIGNING FOR PEOPLE, which, as far as I can tell, was the first book on UCD). But, the majority of designers *did not*, and clearly many felt it was necessary to distinguish their efforts from this majority.
It's been like this for decades in the design profession, and well before Dreyfuss even wrote his book. And note that in Designing for People, Dreyfuss does a number of things well beyond what people consider UCD practice... like... building real, full scale working prototypes or doing competitive market research or finding ideas in completely unrelated solutions to other problems that have nothing to do with asking customers anything about anything.
That's the whole point. You can't grab one piece of the puzzle and ignore the others. Which is what people in this industry do for God knows what reason.
You want to point to Dreyfuss as the model for UCD? Great! I'm all for it. Maybe we'll finally get people in this industry to stop complaining when asked to learn how to draw, using products like Photoshop and Illustrator in depth, code web standards markup, script behaviors and build prototypes of their products for a change. Sign me up.
Gah. Why am I contributing to this? Is this really the crucial topic of our field?
Obviously, it appears you have your own ego invested in it as well. -- Andrei Herasimchuk Principal, Involution Studios innovating the digital world e. [EMAIL PROTECTED] c. +1 408 306 6422 ________________________________________________________________ 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
