On 12/02/2012, at 5:05 PM, Terence Love wrote:
>
> As I understand your work, mostly, you are not dealing with multi-feedback
> loop situations and when you are dealing with them you address them by
> modelling and empirical testing?
Terry,
As I understand my work, I have lots of conversations with people with interests in what we are doing in a project. I make notes from those conversations and, taking account of their position (using the logic of positions), and report back to them and others on what they have said.
I try to take account of what they have said in the designing I do, and I often check back with them to find out whether or not I have satisfied some of their concerns.
I regard this as a polite and civil way to engage with the people who may have to put up with the designs I create and the consequences that might flow from them.
Sometimes, some of these conversations are called 'testing', but that is really more a sales issue. If I said to some clients that I was going to have lots of conversations with people before and after I designed something, they wouldn't want to pay the high fees I charge them. Calling it 'testing' is more impressive.
'Multi-feedback loops'? 'empirical testing'? I don't know. Feedback loops are things I associate with toilet cisterns, steam engines, and lots of the electronic gismos in the home and at work. Is that type of terminology extendable to what I do, possibly. As I said, I have conversations and report on these. Nothing is really gained by calling this 'empirical testing' and something important is lost. No, (apart from the obvious sales benefit) you would have to persuade me that there is some benefit to be had from using quasi scientific terms in a non-scientific setting.
David
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