Don,
What you are embarking on is impressive both in its vision and substance.
By contrast, I have a prosaic rather than visionary sense of design. I deal with the ordinary things in life which throw up mundane and frustrating experiences that people are forced to deal with on a daily basis: forms, letters, agreements, instructions, websites etc—public documents.
Our greatest ambition is to lend a quiet dignity to ordinary life by making the mundane manageable.
One of the things we do, that many on this list will know about, is we test our designs with the people who may have to use them. We test before (and there usually is a before), during and after implementation. We know how bad the designs were before we did our work; we use testing to repair the error in design we make in developing new designs; and we test after implementation in the monitoring phase of our projects. All very ordinary stuff, though sadly not very common. I often think that our best work is invisible. The phones in call centres stop ringing and complaints go to zero.
But, here is the thing. During monitoring we always observe a decline in a document's performance over time. Sometimes it happens quickly within a few months of implementation. At other times it takes a few years, but decline they do. The reasons for the decline are many and most are beyond our control nor could they have been anticipated during the design phase.
Now I try to imagine the advanced design vision you propose: redesigning whole organisations, communities, cities, countries, perhaps the planets, and even the universe! To boldly go where no man (and women) have gone before.
I’m uneasy with imperialist projects, even those with good intentions….something about the path to hell…
In most of the advanced work I see in this area, there is little or no before, during, or after measurement. Even architects, who are but one level above us in complexity, rarely do post occupancy evaluations. And as you yourself comment:
> prototyping and testing is extremely difficult and requires special consideration.
If Muddling Through is the best we can do, should we not scale our ambitions accordingly.
David
David
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