It was a strange week for me. Even though I was heads-down working on a project for most of it, I somehow ended up in BusinessWeek. Twice. (And no, not because I'm married to a BW reporter.) And I had a podcast by Read/Write Talk released too. Fun!

The first BW article, Designing for Diabetics, features the project I worked on for most of the summer: Charmr, a system for managing diabetes. The second BW article is a flattering review of my How to Lie with Design Research talk I gave at the Design Research 2007 conference last week.

The Read/Write Talk podcast is simply me rambling on about interactive gestures and the interactive gestures wiki. There is a transcript if you prefer that to hearing my voice babbling into your ear.

Originally posted on Saturday, September 29, 2007 | Link | Comments (0) | Trackback (0)

I've been circling around Donald Schön's The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action for years now and finally got around to reading it. As it turns out, I should have read it a long time ago, since it has so much to say (indirectly) about design and what it means to be a designer today, especially designers in the experience design realm. As it turns out, there is a reason for the fact we're constantly fighting about things like role/discipline boundaries and titles. The book also offers and analyzes a way of working that is very very much how I work and, I suspect, how many people in my field do as well.

The Reflective Practitioner was written in the early 1980s and took as its premise that the world of work was changing rapidly, that there was a group of people (Richard Florida's Creative Class mostly) who, unlike doctors, engineers, and scientists, didn't rely on technical knowledge for their expertise. Schön calls these people "practitioners" and their ranks include everything from social workers to city planners to architects and designers. People who, in the words of Charles Reich, "can be counted on to do their job, but not necessarily to define it."

Practitioners, Schön says, have "an awareness of complexity that resists the skills and techniques of traditional expertise" and are "frequently embroiled in conflicts of values, goals, purposes, and interests." (Much like ever project I've ever worked on!) Being a practitioner means that the traditional methods and techniques of analytical thinking and scientific process simply don't work. Problems in the messy world of practitioners "are interconnected, environments are turbulent, and the future is indeterminate." What is called for under these conditions, Schön argues, are professionals who can, as Russell Ackoff says, "design a desirable future and invent ways of bringing it about."

All isn't roses for practitioners, however. We're struggling against 400 years of Technical Rationality, which is "problem-solving made rigorous by the application of scientific theory and technique." Technical Rationality is ingrained in our workplaces and in our universities, and the professions that practice it (doctors, lawyers, engineers) are emphasized and revered over those that don't. Professions that practice Technical Rationality apply general principles (medicine, law, physics) to specific problems to achieve unambiguous results (health, justice, bridges, etc.).

However, Schön points out, "Increasingly we have become aware of the importance to professional practice of phenomena--complexity, uncertainty, instability, uniqueness, and value conflict--which do not fit the model of Technical Rationality." Instead of simply problem solving, practitioners instead need to problem set. That is, "to determine the decision to be made, the ends to be achieved, the means which may be chosen."

Schön says,

In real-world practice, problems do not present themselves to practitioners as givens. They must be constructed from the materials of problematic situations that are puzzling, troubling, and uncertain. In order to convert a problematic situation to a problem, a practitioner must do a certain kind of work. He must make sense of an uncertain situation that initially makes no sense.

Problem setting is where we "name the things to which we will attend and frame the context to which we will attend to them." This cannot be achieved by Technical Rationality, because Technical Rationality depends on understanding what the end is. Only through naming and framing, which do not depend on applying general scientific principles, can these complex problems eventually be solved.

This, however, doesn't stop practitioners from looking for tried-and-true methods and techniques that will solve all their problems in a neat way. You see this all the time with designers at conferences and on mailing lists, searching for the next great method. Schön says that for practitioners, replying on methods and techniques will leave them solving problems of relatively little importance, for both clients and society at large. It is only by "descending into the swamp" where the practitioners must forsake technical rigor that the really important and challenging problems will be found.

How practitioners should do this is in Part II of this review.

Originally posted on Wednesday, September 26, 2007 | Link | Comments (3) | Trackback (0)

I just gave this talk at the 2007 Design Research conference. Since I can't imagine a better combination of audience, conference subject, presentation topic, and program placement (I was the last speaker of the day), it's unlikely I'll ever give it again although it certainly is a lot of fun and the crowd seemed to enjoy it.

David Armano filmed the opening couple of minutes of the performance, so you can get a flavor of the presentation. Watch the video before looking at the slides, otherwise, you might have no idea what is going on.

Supposedly a podcast will eventually be released as well.

Here are the presentation slides with my notes (9.5mb pdf). Realize that half of this presentation is in the performance. It might be like reading a transcript of The Colbert Report and wondering what was so funny about it.

Originally posted on Sunday, September 23, 2007 | Link | Comments (3) | Trackback (0)

Through the CMU grapevine, I heard that Randy Pausch, one of the professors there, has only several months left to live due to pancreatic cancer. Randy is married with three young children and I believe we both attended the same church when I lived in Pittsburgh. His final lecture on Achieving Your Childhood Dreams will be this Tuesday, September 18, 2007 at 4:30 pm (EDT) at CMU. It will also be webcast live at that time.

I wish the Pausch family comfort and strength.

Originally posted on Sunday, September 16, 2007 | Link | Comments (2) | Trackback (0)

As if I didn't have enough to do, I started a new wiki for the collection of information, patterns, and documentation about interactive gestures used in devices, kiosks, gaming, and environments. It's called, appropriately enough, Interactive Gestures. It's already started to fill up with some patterns, which is great. Please contribute!

Originally posted on Sunday, September 2, 2007 | Link | Comments (1) | Trackback (0)

« August 2007 | Main | October 2007 »