Despite my rather weird postings and tongue-in cheek statements, this has
been an interesting discussion.

I think the main point that will emerge is that of zeitgeist. There was (and
still is) an interesting convergence of ideas and people, sometimes working
together, but mostly working in their own groups with little or no
interaction. Yet somehow, the ideas were in the air and ended up as valuable
synergies and convergences.

Some people have commented that the origins can be traced back hundreds of
years.  I always like to use craft tool development of the tools for the
craft itself as a really good example of lead-user innovation. Von Hippel
did not invent it: it existed long before. That is why craft tools are so
wonderful, whether for woodwork or gardening, mountain climbing or sports.
They are designed and made by people who do those activities (well, they
used to be before today's age of mass commercialization).

But this work was spontaneous and not part of a codified, cumulative branch
of knowledge, so it had remarkably little impact upon the formal development
of design.  It isn't enough to point out that someone did something long
ago: the real question is, did that work have any impact.  As I say later in
this note, designers often fail to have a cumulative impact because they
seldom write about their work in a scholarly way.

Why was the community I worked with independent of the design community?
Lots of reasons. We came from psychology and computer science. We didn't
know about the existence of design as a discipline. In our ignorance we
developed many marvelous things, but not nearly as marvelous had we known
about design and had designers with us. But in those days, we couldn't
have communicated with designers: our language would have been too
different.

But we did develop theory. I still believe interaction design is the one
area of design that is rich in theory, theory that really aids the design
and validation of products and services.  (The term interaction design is to
be read broadly, because the theoretical work can be applied to numerous
specialty areas, including services, traditional products, communication
design, experience design, etc. Many etcetras.)

Bill Moggridge was one of the first interaction designers from the design
community (long before IDEO existed). But that
was interestingly independent of work in the just starting HCI community
(Human Computer Interaction). (Although Bill Verplank was a part of both
traditions and probably worked with Moggridge.) I wrote "Psychology of
Everyday Things" (that was the original title) around 1986-7 without knowing
anything about design. Fortunately, Bill Verplank grabbed me, perhaps at the
first CHI conference,  and forced me to meet with  Shelley Evenson and John
Rheinfrank in time to be able to revise many of my statements before
publication in 1988. But even so, i didn't get to know real designers until
I joined Apple in 1993.

(Fortunately for me, Shelley and John were amused and tolerant at my lack of
knowledge and eventually became good friends and mentors.  I think it was
shelley who introduced me to this mailing list.  In other words, blame her
-- it is all her fault.)

Many in the HCI community still do not know anything about design.  This
appears to be assymetrical: designers know about CHI and its organization
and conference, CHI.  CHI/HCI folks mostly do not know about design (this is
slowly changing.)

Many of the best design schools in the US, Europe, and Asia
are frequent participants in CHI (HCI) conferences. But CHI itself doesn't
tolerate design papers well. On the one hand they claim to want them and
make frequent pleas for more design participation. On the other hand,
the reviewers reject the papers because they don't follow the academic norms
which were developed in the Computer science and psychology communities.
(CHI has a similar problem with practitioners.)

And there aren't any decent design conferences that would attract HCI,
mainly because designers seldom do work with scholarly depth.  IASDR, Design
and Emotion, the IIT-ID conferences, and a few others are exceptions, but
even here i find the reviewing rigor to be low and highly variable and the
quality of papers not up to the standards i am used to.  So designers have
to go to CHI (and related things like UIST, CSCW, TEI -- all part of the CHI
consortia) to get promoted. CHI people don;t have any similar design
conference to go to.

Design does have a problem because all the writings
about interaction design, participatory design, user-centered,
human-centered, and activity-centered design (three different terms for
similar or identical activities), are in the computer science and psych
literature. Because designers are mostly practitioners  they seldom write
the kind of general, scholarly treatment that would get their work and ideas
known.

This is changing as more and more designers pursue PhD degrees, but even
here  there are problems as many  designers do not understand the nature of
the PhD and the role of the dissertation.

Ken and Terry might tell you about the recent Hong Kong conference on
doctoral education in design (held in Hong Kong).

And now for an even more biased, acerbic, personal opinion: Too large
a proportion of the good writings in design are about the history of
design and about how designers think. Personally, neither of these advance
the state of the art of design. Let sociologists of science and
psychologists study how designers think: why do we call those studies
design? They aren't. As for history, yes it is important, but that does not
move the theory and practice forward in generalizable, constructive ways.

--
So, with all these disadvantages of working across disciplines, the way
knowledge seems to get transmitted is through the mysterious workings of the
zeitgeist. It is in the air.

(This means that there are a lot of informal contacts, accidental
happenings, and noticings.)

Don

Sorry for the length. I intended to wrote one sentence.