Essays & Articles
Designing the Infrastructure
EssaysIt is time to work on infrastructure. It threatens to dominate our lives with ugliness, frustration, and work. We need to spend more time on the designs for infrastructure. We need to make it more attractive, more accessible, and easier to maintain. Infrastructure is intended to be hidden, to pro...
August 1, 2009
10 minutes read
Memory is more important than actuality
EssaysAn experience exists only for that brief moment of time we call "the present." The memory of the experience can last an entire lifetime. It is the memory that matters, and as much experimental evidence demonstrates, memory is a highly distorted view of actuality. So what does this mean to the des...
August 1, 2009
10 minutes read
Three Challenges for Design
EssaysThe invisible, ubiquitous computer has arrived, ensnaring almost any conceivable activity within its grasp. This raises wonderful opportunities and challenges to the field of human-computer interaction, for if the computer is everywhere, then everything is within our domain o...
November 17, 2008
6 minutes read
HCD harmful? A Clarification
EssaysMany have had difficulty with my article "Human-Centered Design Considered Harmful" In particular, I failed to make clear what I meant by "Activity-Centered Design," (ACD) and how it differs from "Human-Centered Design"(HCD). Some people think I have renounced everything I have said before. No, ...
November 17, 2008
5 minutes read
Words Matter. Talk About People: Not Customers, Not Consumers, Not Users
EssaysWords matter. Psychologists depersonalize the people they study by calling them "subjects." We depersonalize the people we study by calling them "users." Both terms are derogatory. They take us away from our primary mission: to help people. Power to the people, I say, to repurpose an old phrase. ...
November 17, 2008
5 minutes read
Human-Centered Design Considered Harmful
EssaysHuman-Centered Design has become such a dominant theme in design that it is now accepted by interface and application designers automatically, without thought, let alone criticism. That’s a dangerous state — when things are treated as accepted wisdom. The purpose of this essay is to p...
November 17, 2008
17 minutes read
Why doing user observations first is wrong
Emotion & DesignHow many times have you had to fight hard for the ability to do field studies and other observations at the very start of the project? How many times have you patiently explained that taking time now would be rewarded by faster time to market overall? And how many times were you successful? The H...
November 17, 2008
6 minutes read
Automobile in HCI’s Future-2
DesignThe automobile industry is badly in need of guidance on human factors. Excellent people already work in the companies, but they suffer the problems faced within the consumer electronics and computer industries over the past few decades. This is an important arena, one where human-centered d...
November 17, 2008
6 minutes read
Interaction Design is still an art form: Ergonomics is real engineering
EssaysThe practice of HCI is mainly still an art form. The practice of Ergonomics is a rigorous engineering field. OK, so I oversimplified in order to get your attention, but listen up: there is a lot of truth in that simplification....
November 17, 2008
5 minutes read
There’s an Automobile in HCI’s Future
AutomobilesConsider the modern automobile. It is a wonder of computation. multiple CPUs, hundreds of miles of cabling. Automatic this and automatic that. Lots of automatic stuff. How do we automate sensibly, controlling some parts of the driving experience, but ensuring that drivers are kept alert and infor...
November 17, 2008
6 minutes read