Dear Ken

You were puzzled by my supporting response to Terry's post, so am I
following your repeated refusal to acknowledge of what you so disdainfully
call Jaime Henriquez's "silly rant". By the way, and this is from my own
harsh daily experience, Jaime is not the only "techie" who believes "that
everyone ought to do things as he does – and he seems to believe that if it
works for highly skilled
techies, it ought to work for the rest of us." They all believe it this
way...And that is the serious point that deserves serious attention: what?
why? and how to improve?!

In my email, I supported the view that the behavior so preliminarily
reported by Jaime, "condemning" (you said) it or not, is indeed the
generalized behavior of humans towards the unknown because, among many
other reasons, badly, poorly, or tendentiously explained by experts. To
laypersons, superstition is one of the many ways to relate to the world,
particularly towards the "exosomatic"* world as nowadays so mysteriously
devised and 'boxed' by (industrial) designers. Examples are plenty around
us. And as such, regardless of Henriquez's "silly rant", I don't understand
why you would contest the fact that this a topic that deserves research for
better understanding and, for us designers, better alleviating (frustration
and fear can easily lead to many kind of disorders and ills..). Wouldn't
Jaime's "rant" reminds us to study, among many other avenues of research in
Design,  "the inability of techies to understand the people who use the
tools they create", as you so well agree yourself? Why are they unable to?
How to improve on this lacking situation for a more 'satisficing' one?

On the other hand, I don't see the difference you may be attributing to
Henriquez's "rant" from outcomes from ordinary research method that starts
with noticing and collecting facts. We all know that these facts, never
mind how trivial they may be, are usually enlightened further either
through interviews, directed and/or spontaneous, or through participatory
and/or non intrusive observations, prior to theorizing on them. Henriquez
reports " some of the user superstitions - he has - encountered". I don't
think the author intended to present a thorough case study on human
behavior while using computers. And no matter how, when, where, at which
level, and in which format the author encountered and reported those
superstitions, you wouldn't, and you did not deny that these are the
generalized behavior of many among the human species in many life
circumstances. Facts not related only to computer use but also to many,
many other artifacts we interact with in our daily lives.

Such a preliminary report on one factual aspect of our human behavior isn't
worth pursuing at PhD level by experts (of course for whoever might be the
commissioning 'prince' )? Or else, perhaps, your own 'rant' may be a Dean's
(both in medieval and contemporary meanings) strategy to trigger more
thoughts on this fundamental topic? As you wrote, to incite us "to be more
reflective"?

And finally, as regards the "interesting issues" that, as an ordinarily lay
person I have raised so awkwardly as you say, nonetheless containing "valid
details", obviously this is neither the place nor the time to "deepen the
analysis" and bring those details "together in an explanatory account". At
the outset of my post, I had mentioned that Jame's "rant" is, for me at
least, a trigger to a few PhDs I wish I had had the opportunity to engage
in. One of these, however, not at all being on "development of myth or
superstition in a hundred other cultures" as you extrapolated. Rather, as
would a physician or a judge (my preferred metaphor) do, I would have
enjoyed dwelling on the origins, the effects, and the 'preferred' outcomes
related to artifacts use, and respectively recommending more "satisficing"
conception and production  approaches and modes to daily use artifacts. I
would have conducted such a study either in one given culture, or else it
could be a comparative view among a number of cultures, historical or
actual. And this wouldn't it have been  design research?

Yours

Francois
Montreal

* Borrowing the term from Alfred Lotka, the economist Nicholas
Georgescu-Roegen used it to convey the concept of "exosomatic instruments"
that "enable men to obtain the same amount of low entropy with less
expenditure of his own free energy than if he used his endosomatic organs"
(Georgescu-Roegen, N.: *The Entropy Law and the Economic Process*,
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971, p. 307).

And reporting on Georgescu Roegen's work, Silvana De Gleria adds: 'Further,
man is the only animal that produces tools for producing tools. The
evolution of exosomatic instruments and our addiction to them has a number
of effects, the first of which is the inequality among people and among
countries.' (De Gleria, S.: Nicholas Georgescu-roegen's approach to
economic value: a theory based on nature with man at its core. In *Bioeconomics
and sustainability.* Essays in Honor of Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen. Edited
by Koso Mayumi and John M. Gowdy, Edward Elgar Publishing, UK., USA, 1999,
Chap. 6, p. 92.)

On Wed, Jun 6, 2012 at 12:55 AM, Ken Friedman <> wrote:

> Dear Francois,
>
> Your response to Terry puzzles me.
>