Colloquia Response
The following is a response to the lecture “Where Do Designs Come From and How Can We Get There?” presented by Gilbert Cockton.
Gilbert Cockton is researcher in HCI at University of Sunderland in England, which means among other things, he has a sweet British accent, instantly making his presentation even better. He’s been published a ton, is members in all sorts of British things that I have no idea of of the meaning, and and has some interesting, abstract ideas about HCI on the whole.
He starts out with comparing basic menu design to the Monty Python Spam skit and a menu from a high end French restaurant, written in french. His points is that in order to have a good design, you must adapt to your audience, and also present it in a way that is easy for the targeted users to understand. He continues that without a good menu, it is hard to create informed choices, making it near impossible to successfully use a system.
As the lecture continues, he speaks on how to evaluate the targeted audience, but even more so upon how to evaluate your own evaluations. If you aren’t asking yourself the right questions, you’re never going to get it right. His point is also that HCI is more complicated then other fields of designs, as the line between technology (product) and user is so much harder to define, and without a user, much of the hardware or software would be pointless (like in social networking).
During the latter part of the presentation, he makes the point over and over again that in order to truly advance technology, we need to focus on the actual people during the development, and less on the actual end product. The question should be less does the product itself work, and more does the product’s end result achieve what we set out to achieve. For example, an MP3 player (hardware) may play music, but is it easy to use in a portable setting? The questions aren’t really the same.
An interesting presentation, which makes me wish I had more of an HCI foundation to really understand the basics of the field.
