Dear Don, thanks you got me thinking.

Don said, "People are people. We need to accept them the way they are, not
try to make them into what they aren't. Yes, we should understand real
human behavior, but let us not call them biases. Call them human behavior.
And we can design to take advantage of our understanding, thereby making
our designs more easily understood and used by the people we are designing
for."

  I can understand respecting people for the way they are and not to
interpret them incorrectly from experiments by Kahneman and Tversky.
Context matters.
  I don't think we are trying to make people something they are not. In an
economy people exchange for the goods they want or need and often they
exchange for things they desire or have preference. People even buy stuff
they don't want. People have the freedom to choose. I don't think we are
trying to make them into something they are not--the choice is theirs
alone. Entrepreneurs are biased and they have preferences. Entrepreneurs
segment the market to sell to a specific consumer and create a favorable
return on their risk, investment, time, resources, labor, and total costs.
I think entrepreneurs take advantage of their understanding of human
behavior and knowledge of the industry and use it to pull together the
resources (that had alternative uses) to fashion something for the "people
they are designing for". Of course the entrepreneur has forecasted his or
her success to be over and above their possible losses, and proceeds with
their action. When the designs enters the market it may not matter to the
consumer nor the entrepreneur whether the design is more easily understood
and used by the people it was intended.

 On another note about understanding the people you design for, or making
your designs more easily understood:
  A new design, and for simplicity let's call it a new fielding of
equipment. This equipment has an intended purpose. To create a more easily
understood design, you should have training on that equipment to
demonstrate the usefulness, features, and proper use. It probably isn't a
bad idea to discuss safety and safety features. I feel a bunch of designs
are supposed to tell me what they do without any demonstration. Some pop
out of the box with no instructions or demo, and I find that unfortunate. I
think understanding the client or the people we are designing for needs
some more thought regarding customer service and a client relationship
before and after opening the box.

Don said, "The real question is, why do we allow technologists to design
things that transform the very behavior we are good at (curiosity and
attentiveness to change) into something bad and dangerous
(distractibility)."

(I like this question because it's a call to action for better alternatives
in design that harness the best of our human behaviors.)

 Short response: I am not sure we "allow" technologist to do anything. We
can make it hard for them by competing against them with better designs at
a cost preferred by the consumer. I think technologists have the freedom of
action, like an entrepreneur to throw something out there. If the feedback
is that the market will pay and will pay over and above the costs borne to
the entrepreneur, that's success. Production or design will stop when the
entrepreneur goes bankrupt or the product is no longer preferred over other
alternatives. I think there is always an outcome of buyer's remorse or we
got a design that didn't do all we thought it would do, or worse the
product is dangerous and bad for us. The way to stop bad design, is to
design better!


*Stephen Matthew. WISNIEW*
*Entrepreneur*
www.stephenmatthewdesign.com  <http://www.stephenmatthewdesign.com/>
www.linkedin.com/in/stephenmatthewwisniew
business email: [log in to unmask]
Cell Phone: (561) 866-9468


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