Stefanie said: "I am currently stuck at trying to decipher whether these
methods changed focus/perspective/context in a linear fashion due to
social/economical trends, etc, or if some methods evolved independent of
others from various streams of research."
Gee, neither of those two paths of development match my perverted memory of
the history of these methods.
She also said: "My naive impression so far is that participatory design has
evolved in a loose linear fashion out of techno-centric discourse
(engineering, product and systems), into wider social contexts which created
later trends in more holistic service/human centered design/design thinking
methods."
Well, my work started before I had heard of participatory design, but later
there were lots of interactions with all the groups. I don't see how my
work fits that description though.
I always thought i was taking a human-centric approach from the beginning,
not a techno-centric approach. That's the whole point -- to get away from a
techno-centric approach. My first paper was 1981 --"The trouble with
Unix"). And my book, which I like to think introduced the term User
centered, appeared 1986 (Norman and Draper, "User Centered System Design"
(UCSD, the name of our university))
[Searching for user Centered System Design on Google (wrapped in quote
marks) produced the most amazing set of responses, including one paper
arguing about the difference between user-centered and human-centered. Gee,
I thought all i did was change the one word to better reflect a humanistic
approach (getting rid of the horrors of "users"). In the book we had to use
"user" in order to map the book title to the University's name
(University of California, San Diego). (Where does that constraint fit
into the history of design?).]
have fun tracing history. There is no coherent history: it is all made up
after the fact. There are no facts: there are only the things we remember,
many of which never occurred. And important things that did occur will
never make it to fact if the historian who writes it all down later on
doesn't write it down. Things not written down get forgotten, which means
they might well never have occurred.
Imagination and memory are far superior to reality. Each participant sees
only a tiny bit of the action and tried to make coherent sense out of the
whole. But there is no law of nature that says that the whole has to make
coherent sense.
Don
.
Don Norman
*Nielsen Norman Group
*[log in to unmask] www.jnd.org
http://www.core77.com/blog/columns/
Latest book: "Living with Complexity <http://www.jnd.org/books.html#608>"
KAIST (Daejeon, S. Korea). IDEO Fellow.
On Wed, Jun 8, 2011 at 8:14 PM, Stefanie Di Russo <[log in to unmask]
> wrote:
.... etc.
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