​Histories are tricky things as different participants living through the
same events will have very different memories of what transpired (moreover,
all of the different, contradictory remembrances might all be correct,
given the appropriate perspective).

David writes from the perspective of exhibition design and typography.  My
memory is quite different, but i come from a different background. I come
from HCI, product design, and I believe that what we produced was what is
today called interactive design (note: not ID, as in industrial design but
ID as in Interactive Design).

Note that at the same time, Industrial designers were also inventing
interactive design, somewhat differently.

Here is a highly oversimplified overview: The HCI community focussed upon
understanding. The ID community focussed upon pleasure and enjoyment.

Today, these two approaches are merging. HCI folks realize
that designers play an important role and that pleasure and enjoyment is
essential. The industrial design community now realizes that HCI has
unearthed important principles such as discoverability, conceptual models,
feedback, reversibility and understandability.

The principles of affordance, constraints, conceptual models, mapping,
personas, etc all come from psychology.

Other people probably have a different memory of the events.
Probably correct memories

Not only do each of us come from different backgrounds and perspectives,
but any individual can only see a small part of the whole.

For example, David says ID emerged after World War II.  I thought it
emerged in the 1930s or so.  Human factors/ergonomics came about during
world war ii (although the origins are the early 1900s).

When David said that designers had already worked out critical modes for
dealing "with this kind of work," i disagree, although this may be because
I don't know what he means by "this kind of work."  It took the human
factors and psychology community to develop means of eliminating and
reducing human error caused by thoughtless design.  David may want to claim
credit for this, but all the evidence I know of says it came from human
factors and ergonomics.

I think when David says ergonomics, he only knows about physical
ergonomics. I am referring to what is today called cognitive x ---
cognitive ergonomics, cognitive engineering, cognitive psychology, and
cognitive science.  Not the same thing as physical ergonomics, and these
new areas incorporate issues not heretofore considered.


He says "small bits of HCI have been useful," but he might be referring to
typography.  In product design and interactive design, huge amounts of HCI
are highly relevant. Every large computer company and software
company hires lots of these people and makes good use of them in design.

I read David's blog and i find it amusingly silly.   He really does not
address what is happening with physical products. He rails against website
design (I agree with these critiques) but why does he think this is what
HCI is about?  it isn't.  Most of the bad websites are done by bad amateurs
or even uninformed graphic designers.

He has this weird sentence:

"I was amused to read the other day that Donald Norman—one of the
‘gurus’—has just discovered people; and that how one describes people
actually matters! http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/words_matter_talk_ab.html This
is, of course, an important insight, but hardly new."


He is referring to an article where i said we should stop using terms like
"user" and "consumer" and "customer"and instead call those people "people."
  I didn't say this was a new insight. i said it was the proper and decent
thing to do and that, moreover the terms we use also color how we think.
Consumers consume. Customers purchase. users us.  I prefer people, thank
you.  (I also dislike the word "guru" although i have to admit it is useful
in getting consulting jobs. But most of my consulting is about management
and strategic issues. The term guru implies some sort of god-like
pronouncement from above.  I prefer to make statements based upon
verifiable knowledge -- evidence based or where solid theoretical work has
been done, driven by solid, established theory. (I can compute how large
the type on signs ought to be if you tell me the distance the readers will
be, what the light level will be, the contrast, and the amount of time
available for reading. This coes from theory, but is readily
tested empirically.  But among the important contributions of science to
design, I rank this rather low. Useful, but not earth shattering)

David and I have a different views of the world.

Don


Don
​

On Tue, Nov 11, 2014 at 6:51 PM, David Sless <[log in to unmask]>
wrote:

> Actually HCI is much later than ID, although some of our origins are
> similar. ID emerges in the decades after WWI through exhibition design and
> typography so that when, in the 1960s we begin to see human
> factors/ergonomics research, and later cognitive science moving into ID
> work through HCI, those working in ID had already developed critical modes
> for dealing with this type of work and incorporated what was relevant.
> Needless to say, there was a great deal of work coming from this empirical
> psychological tradition that was not relevant, some of it was a
> 'rediscovery/reinvention' of already established practical know-how of the
> type found in many guides to good typographic and printing practice. Small
> bits of HCI have been useful, but the effort of wading through the
> literature to find these bits often outweighs the small benefit. In one of
> my grumpier moments I wrote a blog about this:
> http://communication.org.au/the-reinvention-of-information-design/ <
> http://communication.org.au/the-reinvention-of-information-design/>
>



Don Norman
Director, DesignLab, UC San Diego: Think Observe Make
Prof. Emeritus Cognitive Science & Psychology, UCSD
[log in to unmask]  www.jnd.org  <http://www.jnd.org/>
http://designlab.ucsd.edu/


-----------------------------------------------------------------
PhD-Design mailing list  <[log in to unmask]>
Discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design
Subscribe or Unsubscribe at https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/phd-design
-----------------------------------------------------------------