Wednesday, March 24, 2010

Interaction Design Meets Expertise: Representation, Understanding, and Problem-solving

Axel Roestar, University of Washington

How do we support people in awhat they do best?

Design plays a role, Designers initiate change in the future, identify means to bring the change about. Lies at the root of innovation. Innovation challenges people, confronts them with things they haven't seen before.

Design is not art.

Connecting research and design

Cyclical design model. Thnk about design as an activity that never ends and never begins. Start with observing something in the world (something doesn't work). Come up with need for design. Develop concept, shift from observing to exploring. Look at the world and abstract observations. A concept is a hypothesis. Build prototypes, validate it with prospective users. Iteratively improve design based on testing feedback.

Even when product shipped, design isn't finished. Products are too complex to have them completely fleshed out before they go out in the world.

Pools of expertise in the cycle include innovator, practitioner, technologist.  Requires ability to move both forward and backward in the design process. If you were not part of the observation process, a designer starts from a very bad position because you're working with someone else's data. Ethnographic studies are difficult, but important that designers are following ethnographers.

3 U's of design: usefulness, understandability, usability.

Information is not a scarce resource, but attention is.

No comments:

Post a Comment