On Feb 18, 2009, at 7:58 AM, dave malouf wrote:
... many of the "engineers" that were mentioned, I doubt they do and I would suggest that we do need to understand the difference between engineering interactive systems and designing interactions.
I recently read Mitch Kapor's "Software Design Manifesto" and was struck by his inability to bridge or describe the very gap you describe. He simply couldn't articulate it as clearly as we can today. (I blogged about it at graphpaper.com, naturally: http://tr.im/fsgt)
Twenty-five years ago, the ideas of "interaction design" and "software engineering" had not yet become distinct -- much in the same way that, say, in the year 1660 physics, chemistry, alchemy, religion, and philosophy had not yet separated into distinct disciplines, either. Newton called his profession "natural philosophy", Kapor called his "software design".
The difference you describe exists today, but it didn't exist ten or twenty years ago. We can hardly blame folks in the 1980's and earlier for blurring engineering and user experience design, as they were doing both. Thomas Edison thought a lot about user experience when he was engineering the fountain pen and the stock ticker, but obviously he was focused on the engineering. Even the people who created all those classic Atari 2600 computer games -- the gameplay, the graphics, the sounds -- were almost without exception engineers... yet it's hard to argue today that their primary contribution to the universe was in engineering.
-Cf Christopher Fahey ____________________________ Behavior biz: http://www.behaviordesign.com me: http://www.graphpaper.com ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... disc...@ixda.org Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
