Dear Martin, Lubomir, Ken, Don, Esra, Terry, and all,
I keep missing the opportunity to jump in. But I want to take an angle on this product-centered to people-centered thread. I’m talking beyond my headlights, so correct as needed, point to the work that’s likely already been completed on the topic, and forgive me if I’m repeating something someone else said that I missed. Caveats. Caveats.
Last of all, I’m trying to tie this thread together a bit, so that what I noticed doesn’t seem beside the new point.
Using the iPhone for grounding. I was interested in the "total aesthetic experience” that Esra noted and how that ties to the designer/non-designer who helps to create the design.
Within the grouping of product and person, I think that Apple had a “genius" design insight when they introduced the iPhone that takes into account both Don’s point about the negative aspects of the phone that designers mentioned early on, and the elegance of the design that Ken noted, That crystallizes the move that Apple seemed to have made counteract the problems while placing more of the focus on a sense elegance, which we now seem to characterize as intuitive, even though that might not have been the case then as much as it is now—for me at any rate.
It seems that users, especially those who were not early adopters, would have had frequent problems when first using the iPhone (difficulties the first time that they used the device), but those problems would not be persistent (once you know how to do a task, you could do many similar tasks).
To combat the problem of frequency, Apple didn’t just sell iPhones, their salesforce worked with the users to get them past problem frequency (customers were lined up around the block in Pittsburgh). In that way, the salesforce became part of the design. But those folks were of course not designers.
Similarly, with their printed materials, the printer (person not product) would have been part of the design process, but not a designer.
And what about those members of the team whose interest in product elegance did not focus on user experience (or made it a distant second?)
The question for me is, when it comes to who is a designer, does the definition (in the disciplinary sense) have to include someone interested in the user (or user/environment) as part of the design? When we are more interested in product elegance and less focused on user experience, do we have a wonderful creative individual, but not a designer? I don’t know the answer, but Lubomir’s comment made me curious about the question.
Susan
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