a little summery

In the last quater, I took a course called "social analysis of computing". Activity theory for computing system design was emphasized in this course(To me, activity and interaction almost mean the same thing). When we talk about interactions, we usually refer to the interaction between users and systems, but to me, the interactions between designers and systems sounds more interesting.

Firstly, I'd like to question how "design" works. Usually we complain about the bad designs of different systems, saying that the designers don't know the users or don't know the environment where the system will be used. Is it true that to know more about the users is the only answer to improve the human computer interaction?Who are these designers? Are they software engineers? Are they usability experts? Are they graphic designers? Are they interaction designers? Or all of them (it seems to be a very natural answer in such a society with a high level of labor division)? Then how should them work together? What are required for an individual part of the whole design network? More importantly, according to actor network theory, the players in the design network should include nonhuman as well as human. That means to study design, we should be concerned about technologies, media, knowledge and skills, besides all different kinds of human designers and their interactions.

Then what exactly does design means? For some fields, design is too obvious an concept to explain, such as architecture design, graphic design, or car design. But if I say to plan a trip, to work out a market strategy, or to find a way to solve an everyday problem, you may be a little hesitant to take these activities as design. Furthermore, if I say I install a variety of softwares on my computer, and it becomes different from the original one and the others' , is that design? Maybe not. Here we should distinguish between design and development. Design has some purposes involved. We have certain goals in mind and design things to achieve them. According to this definition, we can certainly take the trip plan, market strategy or problem solution as designs, although they may not mean a physical object at the end. But we can only call installation of softwares as development. Because although we install different softwares to satisfy different purposes, but very possibly they are all independent, and we don't have a general goal about how to install and why. This process, as well as our adding furnitures or house appliances, if there is no general goal involved and these furnitures and appliances are irrelevant, their arrangement shouldn't be called design. Using Herbert A. Simon's words(he used the idea called artifact), the designers are concerned with how things ought to be to attain goals.

Herbert A. Simon is pretty much focused on engineering design or problem solving. There, the goals are relatively easy to define. However, when we enter the fields that are directly connected to end users, like buildings, HCI, or ubiquitous computing, the goals become complex and fragile to define, because humans are complex, flexible, diverse, developing and with emotions. When we focus on human computer interaction, it makes the design even harder. Not like architecture, it is static after it is built, HCI is dynamic, with time dimension involved.

Since HCI has its special quatlities, such as with end users and time dimension involved, then what special methods should be employed for HCI design? What knowledge or skills are required for HCI designers? How should these knowledge or skills be distributed among a variety of designers? What processes are appropriate for this variety of HCI designers to work together?I don't have answers to these questions right now, but I will be trying to answer them during the next quater...