Not to be cute Fil, but what you have to operationally define is "better,"
and "design" and "intervention" as well as the product or outcome context.
It also depends on the context in which you're presenting the research
paper.
There should be plenty of research in the product innovation and project
management literature on the increasing magnitude of costs and
recoding/rework to discover a bug or flaw of ANY kind in requirements (or
early design) phases rather than development or testing phases. As a working
designer, our intention in product innovation work has always been to
influence the final design sooner, with sufficient field evidence and a
sufficiently rich prototype, so that all project team members can understand
the options and make the best decisions sooner. I would not ever call a
design problem a human factors flaw, because human factors are the human
constraints we have to understand and design for. The flaws are always in
our limited ability to perceive, represent and evaluate the interaction and
opportunity.
What we try to avoid are late discoveries (say in usability testing) that
end up changing significant features and interactions when they are already
specified or worse, coded.
Sorry I can't give you a cite right now, but I just thought you might look
in different literatures than design for this. And to define the research
question and operational context so that the cite makes the most impact.
Best, Peter
Peter Jones, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, Faculty of Design
OCAD University
http://designdialogues.com
Hi all,
I'm helping a colleague put some finishing touches on a paper.
The hypothesis in question is:
Early intervention in design is better than later adjustments to correct for
e.g. Human Factors Flaws.
Oddly (or perhaps not), I've always assumed this to be true, but when
confronted with citing theoretical work providing evidence for this, I come
up short, except for Reinertsen's book on the 'design factory.'
So the question is: can anyone direct me to a couple of good papers that
discuss and hopefully demonstrate the hypothesis, to bootstrap my further
background research?
Much obliged.
Cheers.
Fil
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Filippo A. Salustri, Ph.D., P.Eng.
Mechanical and Industrial Engineering
Ryerson University
350 Victoria St, Toronto, ON
M5B 2K3, Canada
Tel: 416/979-5000 ext 7749
Fax: 416/979-5265
Email: [log in to unmask]
http://deseng.ryerson.ca/~fil/
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