Notes: The Future: User-Centered Design Goes Mainstream

These are a day late and a little short but I thought I should put them up anyway.

Parrish: Strong claims: power, justice, and change. Aim to strengthen and not quash these principles. Limiting concerns to blogs. Many questions regarding accessibility. Blog tool developers have made many efforts to keep their tools flexible. Celebrate those efforts and use it as a starting point. Other barriers to access: technical, socio-economic, political. If all barriers were gone, would anyone publish anything.

Champ: Introductions, site, how I got involved in the conversation.

Nolan: Two types of curriculum, every choice you make precludes other choices. When designing technologies be aware of the ‘null’ attributes of everything you do. The tools we create to communicate limit what is said as well as offer new oppurtunities. The language we use control how we think. Blogs are tools for silencing and uttering. Friend says, Community: the walls we build around ourselves to keep other people out. How can there be democracy without representation? Are blogs reproducing dominant cultural norms. Explicit, hidden, and null aspects of all technology. Blogs don’t always expand cultural horizons. Who has visited blogs in other languages? Most projects start in english and add the other thing later. Technology based enviroments that do not prefer english first. I want there to be a quality of access. I don’t want to participate in designing tools that limit any one group. Japanese can’t reperesent their own language digitally without falling back to ASCII.

Sisnett: Cathrine has touched off a big change in my life, I only visited previously. Online communities around health issues. Reality check, are blogs the big tool they’re hyped up to be. Last year when I was at a session on blogging, the thing that interested my was that it was on online communities. So much time invested, do these people have jobs? Unfortunately in the past three weeks I have been blogging like crazy. What has been an adversarial position has now become a love affair. I am an example of someone on the other side of the firewall. People who don’t know how to use a computer, type, read, write. Is this a useful tool for people like those? Political implications of putting ones information out there. Gathering my thoughts I ran into a friend, asked a friend "do you blog?" range of concerns with her family having concerns about what is private. Concept of privacy is frowned upon in certain families. Why do people do it? For whom? Access to the technology becomes an issue. Tools like weblogs, wikis, etc. Access to technology and training in the use of those tools, is an issue to people with aforementioned barriers. Imagine being in college and not having access to a computer.

[I’m going to surf to the Indy panel now.]

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Notes: The Future: User-Centered Design Goes Mainstream

These are the notes I took, it’s a cross between transcription, commentary, summary, and BS. Hope they’re helpful if you were in another panel or would just like to review what you heard. Leave comments if you got a different impression of the talk or disagree with something I wrote.

Molly Steenson – Professor, GirlWonder.com
Marc Rettig – Professor
Jesse James Garrett – adaptive path; Elements of User Experience

Definition: Throwing away the assumption that you know your users and starting by using techniques of observation, interviewing, and co-designing to create better interfaces.

Marc: Design a vase. Design a way for people to enjoy flowers. A shift from the desginer focusing on the object, and more towards the effects. Understand, then make something that fits.

Jesse: Not existence but rather that it has taken so long for the idea to catch on, new yet obvious thing. Design culture has been so focused on the properties of the object rather than how it actually works. Companies are so turned in on themselves is an amazing revelation.

Marc: Design for the Real World. Industrial designers from 50s and 60s.

Molly: Why has it taken so long to take hold?

Jesse: Increasing complexity of consumer products. As a result, more products that have been brought to Marcet and have failed for reasons the producer couldn’t comprehend.

Marc: It’s stayed in the design camps, just in the last 4-5 years has it been talked about in business circles.

Molly: Will it have an effect? Continue reading Notes: The Future: User-Centered Design Goes Mainstream

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