Dear David, [Ricardo, Ali, ... ]
David Sless wrote:
> it’s a bit like clinical practice in medicine where you look for symptoms of pathology and then apply a treatment. You then look to see if the symptoms disappear.
This analogy seems correct for information designers, but pathology is a
fairly serious study of diseases and their causes. Yes, we can recognize
symptoms fairly easily (that is where people can't do what they need to
do = 'faults in design'). We change the design - usually fairly obvious
at first and more surprising later - and check if the symptoms
disappear. That's fine.
This approach really 'changes situations into preferred ones' and we can
even provide proof of this because we described the existing situation,
we described the changes, and can show that the changed situation is
preferred by some specific groups of people. Our arguments show that we
can relieve many symptoms, but we very rarely tackle the underlying disease.
We rarely study the pathology: the experience or suffering related to
poor information. What are the fundamental causes of this experience?
What is really happening when people have to deal with unusable
documents. Info-pathology is a largely unexplored area of study.
It might be interesting to investigate the arguments that are based on
the actual diseases too. [Of course, clinical practice will continue as
usual by relieving all sorts of symptoms. Info-pathologists need to
operate simultaneously.]
Somehow, I really would like to know more about a few of following
diseases, if only because it would save a lot of time in my clinical
practice.
- Picto-philes: the believe that pictograms (or icons, or symbols, or
graphic signs) are always very effective in conveying all sorts of
information in all sorts of circumstances, especially for lowly educated
non-natives.
- Juridical myopia: People who are interested in the legal details do
have exceptionally good eyesight to read the small type.
- App-noea: A disorder characterized by a neurotic need to present all
available information as an app on a smart phone.
- Repetitive question injury: Organizational trauma causing the
continuous asking of similar questions over and over again.
- Clari-phobia: a common difficulty related to organizational learning
that prevents the acceptance of plain language words. The worst cases
could lead to coprolalia.
- Test-deficiency syndrom: The idea that 'asking five people once' is
sufficient in a design process. This is commonly exacerbated by
ignoring any surprises and focussing on a 'we knew that already anyway'
result.
Yes, we can deal with the symptoms of these diseases. But it would be
handy to have some sort of validated and reliable descriptions for the
possible treatments of these diseases. Together with some
risk-assesments of the different treatment options, and related life
expectancies. And that requires a few high quality comparative studies,
based on all sorts of evidence.
Now back to my clinic explaining the Dutch Government that a pictogram
to 'warn patients not to combine St. John's Wort with their medicines'
might not really be the most suitable option.
Kind regards,
Karel.
[log in to unmask]
>>>>
-----------------------------------------------------------------
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
-----------------------------------------------------------------
|