Hi Chris: You mentioned the word failure so my ears perked up. I'm kind of the local failure guy.
> Are there examples of a design solution that were once thought to be > sound, catastrophically failing after performing as expected for > length of time? There are several assumptions lurking in your post that should be called out. First, all things fail eventually. That's what makes them good. You design something for specific people and specific uses, and when your design meets something you did not plan for, it will typically fail. For example, give your e-commerce site to my Rottweiler. It will fail spectacularly. And had you tried to design for both human beings and Rottweilers I suspect you'd fail them both. The more specific you design something, the more failure cases you create. But this is ok since there's no way around it. Design is, in a way, choosing how to fail, or who to fail, or what use cases to fail. Or put another way, there is no optimal design: http://www.scottberkun.com/essays/17-the-myth-of-optimal-web-design/ Better designs, elegant designs, fail smarter or fail less, but they all still fail. Consider that the folks who built the Twin Towers in NYC were criticized for not building a building that could have handled a fully fueled 767 crashing into the top floors. Reasonable criticism? You decide. Case in point - for us in the electronic age, most of our designs entirely fail when either: A) The power goes out Or B) The entire internet goes down Show me a website that doesn't fail in those two cases and I'll give the designer a gold star. > Design thinking is about creating a narrative of activity, or > of modeling a behavior and designing solutions that will > ensure the expected or anticipated behavior. This is a very dramatic way to describe what designers do. Is there something wrong with saying designers solve problems? I don't think anyone who *uses* a parking meter would call their experience with it a narrative, they really don't want a beginning, middle and end, they want not to think about the parking meter at all. Do you think the guy who invented Velcro talked about "modeling the narrative of footwear bindings?" I doubt it. > If so, what role did the designer play in those failures > (and the narrative > that was created in the process of design) ? First, most disasters involve more than one kind of failure. The Titanic likely had bad rivets, rivets below what the specs called for. Even with human error, often there are causes for it or unexpected consequences of that error that deserve investigation. Events like 9/11 or the Challenger Shuttle disaster are, in part, organizational failures - where the problem is about who has decision making authority and how knowledge moves through an org - which is a design problem, but organizational design. For many designers the organizational issues are more difficult than the interaction/aesthetic design issues. Which is why I believe designers should study organizational behavior, or least brush up on their Machiavelli. -Scott Scott Berkun www.scottberkun.com -----Original Message----- From: discuss-boun...@lists.interactiondesigners.com [mailto:discuss-boun...@lists.interactiondesigners.com] On Behalf Of Christopher Rivard Sent: Friday, April 17, 2009 8:35 AM To: disc...@ixda.org Subject: [IxDA Discuss] Design Thinking and The Black Swan Design thinking is about creating a narrative of activity, or of modeling a behavior and designing solutions that will ensure the expected or anticipated behavior. We typically find ourselves telling a story of how someone experiences or interacts with a physical device or service. Much of what design encompasses is narrative. I have recently been reading The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb and the implications this has on design thinking is striking. The Black Swan theory tells us that we create narrative to try to explain an unexplainable world; we reduce reality to a narrative of comprehensible portions and tailor the narrative to fit our limited model of the explainable. Our natural inclination is empirical. Create a story from our experiences. ________________________________________________________________ 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
