On Feb 18, 2009, at 8:53 AM, Christopher Fahey wrote:
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.
You nailed it here. The same thing happened in the early 1990s with
the web as well. Web designers were often (and still remain) their own
coders. We can see the same thing happening now with interactive
gestures.
In fact, I think we can extrapolate a maxim that while a platform or
medium is unstable or emerging, the more mixed the disciplines will
have to be to deal with it and design for it.
Dan
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