DESIGN TEAM STATEMENT
February 27, 2002
Our Team:
The members of the Design Team include: Jackson Fox, Serina Croll, and John DeRiggi.
Our Topic:
Our topic, as may seem obvious, is DESIGN!
Our Focus Area within Our Topic:
Within the topic of design, we hope to focus on the idea that for too long humans have been asked to conform to design, rather than design conforming to humans. This idea was extracted from Things That Make Us Smart, by Norman, D.A.
Donald Norman's main focus in his book is that humans have been expected to conform to technology, and that as a result our interaction with designed artifacts has suffered greatly. He is a proponent of the idea that tasks should fit the person rather than person being made to conform to the task, or as he states it "People Propose, Science Studies, Technology Conforms."
As we have discussed in class (see the Feb. 20 lecture notes) design must move beyond the interface to interaction and tasks. Putting a pretty face on a bad program will not help the user in any meningful way. A user wants to focus on the task at hand, and designed artifacts should facilitate that desire.
We hope to explore this theory further and find other views that support it. We hope to find examples of products that have succesfully embraced Norman's goal of technology conforming to people. At the end of our research we intend to hold a discussion with the class on this topic.
Design Independent Research Project