Re: UCD and Innovation

Thanks Gilbert, for your consistently clear, thoughtful, and
well-informed and comments to this list. 

Now, to your question about techniques for innovation/creation.

You write:

> Innovation and evaluation are very closely intertwined.  They 
> are however separable and very very distinct intellectual 
> activities with very distinct intellectual traditions and values.

I've always been partial to the use of personas as a design tool
precisely because they support so well the transition between these two
modes of thought. On one hand, personas support investigation,
observation, and evaluation by providing a structure practitioners can
use to model our findings. On the other hand, personas are natural
vehicles for storytelling, an activity that forces us to switch from
observation to creation. 

So, good personas both capture the results of observation, and are
filled with enough potential (storytelling) energy to force us to tell
stories that bridge the gap from requirements to solution.

There are other storytelling and scenario-based methods, of course, but
without well-defined user models at their heart, I find them too open
ended. Similarly, there are other user modeling techniques out there,
but I find them either uninspiring from a storytelling perspective, or
too open-ended to be of any use. 

JS

> -----Original Message-----
> From: User-centred design, user interface design, web design, 
> HCI and usability [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf 
> Of Gilbert Cockton
> Sent: Thursday, September 25, 2003 4:45 AM
> To: [email protected]
> Subject: Re: UCD and Innovation
> 
[snip]

 
> Observation is an indispensible part of the method tool box.  

[snip]

> What observation does not do is drive innovation,  It rightly 
> constrains it.  We have to live with this tension.  Design is 
> about the new.  Fit is about the old.  Observational methods, 
> properly triangulated, let us understand what will and what 
> will not fit (hence Louise's comments on mail order in Spain 
> -  no arguing with the facts here).  What observational 
> methods do not do at all is actually deliver the real value 
> of good innovation into existing contexts of use through design.
> 
> Innovation and evaluation are very closely intertwined.  They 
> are however separable and very very distinct intellectual 
> activities with very distinct intellectual traditions and values.
> 
> We've all had our lectures on contextual research, so how 
> about focussing on innovation. De Bono's been mentioned.  
> What other approaches exist to bring out creativity in the 
> design process, and how well do these interface with the 
> evaluation methods that tell us whether we are desiging 
> anything of value?
> 
> Discuss
> Gilbert


 

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