Susan
You have, from a different but well-founded perspective, described
Actor-network Theory and its importance to design.
>
>
> "... the designer/non-designer who helps to create the design."
>
ANT deals with both human actors as well as non-human actors - both can be
regraded as "actants" that can have an influence not only on the initial
design, but most importantly on how the product is used.
>
> "To combat the problem of frequency, Apple didn’t just sell iPhones, their
> salesforce worked with the users to get them past problem frequency
> (customers were lined up around the block in Pittsburgh). In that way, the
> salesforce became part of the design. But those folks were of course not
> designers." ... no, but they were actants, very often as equally important
> as the "real" designers. In this case a group of people acted as if they
> were one actant.
>
> "Similarly, with their printed materials, the printer (person not product)
> would have been part of the design process, but not a designer." Again, an
> actant, this time a non-human one. At one time I worked with a lecturer
> who, as a side-line, rewrote (redesigned) the instructions for well-known
> computer programmes, and who does not remember the quite awful visual &
> written instructions for many products in the recent past? A well-thought
> out instruction booklet is the human actor (designer) who communicates with
> the users via proxy (the non-human actant whose voice is accessed via the
> instructions).
>
>
> "The question for me is, when it comes to who is a designer, does the
> definition (in the disciplinary sense) have to include someone interested
> in the user (or user/environment) as part of the design? When we are more
> interested in product elegance and less focused on user experience, do we
> have a wonderful creative individual, but not a designer? I don’t know the
> answer, but Lubomir’s comment made me curious about the question."
>
I would tell my students, if you want to design for rich people, then
simply copy what they buy now, but I cannot teach you anything about
design. In our HCI / IT section of the faculty we had too many lecturers
who believed in the so-called creative individual who "designed" wonderful
programmes and websites that no user could fathom ... when I complained at
one research meeting about this point, citing myself as a user, one of them
wagged his finger in my face and said "we don't need you" (i.e., users).
No, these people are not designers in any sense of the word, they are
manufacturers.
Johann
--
Dr. Johann van der Merwe
Independent Design Researcher
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