Re: UCD and Innovation

Great post Anthony

> My point is specifically about deriving inspiration for product 
> development from explorative techniques such as ethnography. This 
> kind of detailed examination of user behavior can 'corral' one 
> into thinking about certain solutions to a problem. You set a 
> trajectory of thought in a manner of speaking.

OK, if UCD is associated with a single technique, then it will corral you in and restrict or
even stifle innovation.

Ethnographic and activity based approaches are a case in point,  They come from descripitive
intellectual traditions where any thought of the normative or the predictive sends the faithful 
into apoplexy.  However, the ethnography camp and their allies do not 'own' field observation.
Within anthropology and sociology there is a very broad range of methodological approaches.
It's just in HCI that we've been force fed Malinowski (OK, his descendants) with a vengence.
If we keep it up we'll be the foie gras of descriptive sociology.

See http://www.mnsu.edu/emuseum/information/biography/klmno/malinowski_bronislaw.html
if you want a quick intro to Malinowski (but not at hi-res, it doesn't scale - better to paste into Word
and read).  I was surprised to see the association with functionalism, as most of my understanding
was limited to his hands-off immersion approach to anthropology.  The functionalism fits with this,
and brings with it an immensely conservative view of societies, that has great difficulty explaining
social dynamics and change (a gent called Karl had a better handle on this).

Now, all this scholarly cleverness apart, so what?  In 1995 I co-authored a paper on the practical
consequences (it's on an LCII - Mac Word 5, so I'm trying to track the pdf down, fingers crossed):

Cockton, G., Clarke, S., and Gray, P.D., "Theories of Context Influence the System Abstractions Used to Design Interactive Systems," in People and Computers X, eds. M.A.R. Kirby, A.J. Dix and J.E. Finlay, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 387-405, 1995

It does what it says in the title, ie, show how different approaches to contextual analysis take you into
different parts of the design space.  We contrast Suzanne Bødker's Activity Theory analysis of Word
footnotes with a domain based one.  Suzanne gets to swap parameter order (text before marker, avoiding
awkward breakdowns in the flow of Interaction Being) and a maybe on defaults.  The domain modeling
approach (based on analysis of documents) gets you to never having to enter a marker again once
appropriate document styles (as opposed to itty bitty paragraph styles) are set up.  And there's the
rub of course, would you ever get to write a document or would you spend your life configuring styles?
Word's low level styles are accessible, inscrutable and intermittently unpleasant, whereas a document level style could easily be inaccessible, tedious and intensely unpleasant.  Note that Word has 
stuck with paragraph styles and clunky sections, leaving serious document style configuration to
tools like Framemaker.

Anthony's almost right - UCD methods constrain innovation, but only if you use the wrong ones 
in the wrong place ;-)  Oh, and words like "ought" and "will" will clear the room of ethnographers in
no time ...

Cheers
Gilbert

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