I think I'd have to respectfully disagree, Jaanus. Your position appears to be a variation of what is usually referred to as the "neutral tool" argument, a position that pops up in many different contexts and situations, from the U.S. NRA slogan, "Guns don't kill people, people kill people," to the extrapolation that language or an interface can be "neutral window pane" of communication in service of whatever task its masters put it to.
In academic circles, this idea is widely considered completely disproven, that there are no neutral tools, no such thing as "objectivity" in journalism, no clear window pane of language that communicates unbiased ideas, that objects themselves cannot exist outside of their socially-constructed context and use, contexts and uses that must always be considered saturated with the values and social mores of the culture that created them. In other words, there are no neutral tools. A hammer or a screwdriver may appear to be objects that can't act with value judgments in and of themselves without a values-saturated agent to execute them, but it is the seemingly invisible or culturally-unconscious values that are most deeply embedded within tools, that in one culture, a handle is obviously where you put your hand, how could anyone put it anywhere else? But another culture can from the outside see deeper signifiers and embedded class assumptions about the tool and its use. That's how they talk about it, in the abstract land of academics. The argument passes muster in common conversation, around NRA people, or just general parliance. Even US journalists who talk about "objectivity" pay lip service to it in public, even though every course they ever took on the subject opened with it being exposed as an impossibility, that perspective and POV and cultural conditioning leads to even a seemingly invisible "tint" of cultural assumptions to even the most neutral-tool sounding language. (European journalists rid themselves of the illogic trap a long time ago). So we might ask, can usability exist outside of the business objectives? I don't believe they can. Unspoken assumptions of those business objectives saturate every aspect of the artifact being tested and the usability testing framework itself. Nothing is a neutral conveyor of something else. Or, as Marshal McLuhan pointed out, the kinds of conversations you have by candlelight are necessarily different than the kinds of conversations you have under electric light. The medium is the message. Chris On Sat, Jan 9, 2010 at 4:43 AM, Jaanus Kase <jaa...@gmail.com> wrote: > There%u2019s a difference between usability, and the business > objectives for which usability and design is being used. You are > talking about business objectives. Usability is a method to achieve > those business objectives, and is a general societal concept next to > things like Internet, electricity etc. It just is; it does not carry > values on its own. Values and meanings are attached to products and > their usability through business objectives, agendas and politics. > > What you are really talking about is oversight so that companies > would not abuse their power. That is good and necessary, but is > orthogonal from usability. > > > . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . > Posted from the new ixda.org > http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=48267 > > > ________________________________________________________________ > 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 > ________________________________________________________________ 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
