Designing as the world turns

Abstract

Designers of interactive systems often work in environments that am continuously changing. External, uncontrollable change is rapidly becoming a daily impedim~t in many designers' lives. In this age of rapid technologml progression and heightened competition, systems designers must be able to prepare for, cope with, and even pdbrm better because of inevitable change. 13ecauM the nature of user interbce design is to make complicated technology usable, user intedltce designers tve especially afkcted by design changes.This paper is a chronicle of the adventures of time user interl%ce designers while working on the design of an interactive system within a changing domain.We describe the kinds d changes that atlkc$ desi~the impact of change on the design process, how a designer can prepare fw change, and finally, how to respond to change.By sharing our experiences on a project fkught with change, we hope to help other &signers learn to work well within a changing design environment.

HCI as an engineering discipline: to be or not to be!?

“…Rozanski and Haake [96] conclude that there may be too many facets of HCI that make a unified framework hard or even impossible to achieve. Floyd [89] and Santos, Kiris and Coyle [97] stress the fact that system design takes place in a changing environment; it changes often rapidly because of a very fast technology push. Given all these constraints we have to conclude that a unifying framework is very difficult to establish, if at all.…”