W8 User X – Understanding Design

Mandatory Materials

The mandatory materials for this week need to be watched, listened to and read in preparation for the seminar.

Participatory Design History

A chapter of the Routledge International Handbook of Participatory Design on the Heritage (aka history) of participatory design.

Don Norman started complaining about doors over 25 years ago. Doors shouldn’t need instructions – the shape of them can guide you through just fine. So why do so many doors need instruction manuals right on the side of them?

How the Dumb Design of a WWII Plane Led to the Macintosh

User-mandatory article

Wired Magazine provides an excerpt from the book User Friendly by Cliff Kuang with Robert Fabricant. It tells the tale of how experimental psychologist Paul Fitts was brought into the Air Force to research recurring crashes in the B-17 Flying Fortress. Instead of “pilot error,” he saw what he called, for the first time, “designer error.”

DDG on Users and Design

User-mandatory delft design guide

4 spreads from DDG – we suggest you read Anthropometric Design and User-Centered Design first, and then zoom out to Co-Design & Co-Creation.

Enriching Materials

Besides the mandatory materials, we would like to show you some other items that are a great source of inspiration. These are not mandatory for the course, but still worth checking out!

The Design of Everyday Things

User-enrich book

Donald Norman’s design classic – the bible on the cognitive aspects of design, containing examples of both good and bad design and simple rules that designers can use to improve the usability of objects.

The Woman Who Invented the Modern Kitchen

User-enrich article

Article about Lillian Gilbreth, who used her expertise in motion studies to reinvent the kitchen in 1929.

User Friendly

User-enrich book

Cliff Kuang and Robert Fabricant reveal the untold story of a paradigm that quietly rules our modern lives: the assumption that machines should anticipate what we need.

A (very) brief history of interaction design

User-enrich book, excerpt

An excerpt from Chapter 1 of Dan Saffer’s Designing for Interaction. It describes the history of interaction design from the perspective of the products that resulted from user-centered design.

Don’t worry about all the details and chronology, read this as a history of interaction design from the perspective of an interaction designer.

Sources

sources list

Tips ?

If you have an interesting article, podcast, video, or another material that fits this topic, let us know below! We’ll check it out and maybe add it to the page.

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