A Role for Academic Designers
I like the following passage from Design Noir, which I think serves as an ideal description of what academics focusing on HCI or user-centered design should be doing:
Rather than writing papers and seeking conventional academic approval, they could exploit their privileged position to explore a subversive role for design as social critique. Free from commercial restrictions and based in an educational environment, they could develop provocative design proposals to challenge the simplistic Hollywood vision of the consumer electronics industry. Design proposals could be used as a medium to stimulate debate and discussion amongst the public, designers, and industry.
Add “software industry” to “consumer electronics industry,” and there you have it. I would go farther, though: computer scientists, information scientists, and designers in academia shouldn’t just be proposing provocative designs, they should be building provocative systems. Too many academic projects look just like corporate projects, and are only being done in academia because they’re too far removed from actual human concerns to interest corporate research labs. Forget about founding your startup and shake things up a little bit…
July 26th, 2004 at 12:52 pm
With my limited number of years in corporate user-centred design, I already feel like a subversive in a functionality dominated design environment; forcing people to accept my methodology of design. Changing the thoughts of industry designers to create products that centre around the goals of the users is anathema to some people. Part of the success of traditional marketing driven product design is that they are trained to sex up products that will sell well in the market.
In usability, we can highlight some of the bad designs that have occurred in the years, outline accidents, frustration, or even show statistics on poor performance. But these facts do little but to give people a slight pause, maybe a chuckle. Like listening to Chris Tucker, you’ll get a laugh out of his jokes then move on with the rest of your day. I know of few usability engineers that don’t have to struggle with being ignored.
A few usability gurus in the industry like Jakob Nielsen and Edward Tufte have received media attention, but they haven’t really rocked society.
Should people in HCI be using more of a media-attractive method of promoting new paradigms in design or should this be more of a grassroots movements changing engineering, architecture, and computer science students to a new way of approaching design?
Or maybe both?
July 26th, 2004 at 2:18 pm
Arthur, I agree that usability designers are often ignored in industry (although my experience at Yahoo! has been that they are revered). But my point was more that designers in academia should focus less on incrementally improving corporate products and more on provoking discussion about the values designers in industry take for granted. For example, currently academics focusing on HCI generally take it for granted that increased efficiency in completing tasks is a desirable goal, as do their corporate counterparts. Given that they are somewhat more free of market constraints, I’d rather that academics build systems that force us to question whether increased efficiency (as opposed to, say, creativity) is even a desirable goal at all.
July 27th, 2004 at 11:19 am
I see the distinction, I would like to see every profession, every once in a while, challenging society’s perception of how we view ourselves. Particularly in academic HCI with performance studies and Fitt’s Law ad nauseum we could probably use a shake-up.