Jared provides a fine summary of the history of UCD. I believe the
most important point to be that UCD is fundamentally rooted in
usability, utility, goals and tasks -- most often work-related and
externally motivated.
Whether UCD concepts and the "UCD community" are capable of evolving
with the times, towards designing for discretionary and hedonistic
use of digital products and services in consumer cultures, is a point
for debate. My personal opinion is that seems to be struggling, as
witnessed for instance by the relatively small difference between CHI
conferences from the early 90s and CHI conferences today.
Institutions, including academic communities, have a way of
permanenting themselves and their foundations (which is, of course,
suitable in many ways but makes them less agile).
Jared closes his post, however, with a comment on Andrei's remark on
Dreyfuss which I would like to respond to.
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.
Seems like an excellent motivation for revisionist history. I'm all
for it! Forget everything I said above. It was all Dreyfuss! :)
It may be important to point out that the UCD field, and specifically
the CHI academic UCD community that Jared surveys, didn't pay any
systematic attention to the design field before the mid or late 90s.
There were isolated exceptions, of course, but on the whole it is
fair to say that UCD went through its formative stages largely
without input from industrial design, graphic design or architecture.
What Andrei does, if I read him correctly, is to identify a few of
the things that are considered fundamental in design practice and
scholarship within the design field -- craft skills to do with
sketching, shaping and assessing -- and translate them to our tools
and materials.
I support Andrei all the way in this move. And he also makes a valid
point about what our field could learn from design, which UCD
historically hasn't done. That is not the same as engaging in
"revisionist history", in my opinion.
Nobody is trying to take anything away from the work of the UCD
pioneers in the 70s and 80s, nor from what that work meant to the IT
business at large and to the users.
Jonas Löwgren
________________________________________________________________
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
