Monday, August 2, 2004

DIS 2004: Day One


I'm in Boston for the Designing Interactive Systems conference, meeting people, playing with interactive displays, and looking at posters (including the interesting Friction as an Interaction Design Metaphor).

My favorite paper presented so far has been Making Tea: Iterative Design Through Analogy. The paper basically came about because a design team was trying to understand how chemists use lab books. Since the designers had very little domain expertise, they had to devise a way to ask questions and create a common language between them and their subjects.

So, when in doubt, make tea.

They basically used an analogy (or, really, to my mind, a metaphor): CHEMISTRY AS TEA. They basically used the metaphor to explore the domain of chemistry, figuring out how chemistry was or was not like making tea. It gave them a "safe, known, observable, repeatable, and interrogatable" process to compare a chemistry experiment to. They had the chemists make tea and record how they did it in lab books, asking questions about how the lab book was being used. Then they later made tea using scientific equipment instead of traditional kitchen items. It was a way, alongside other design methods, of bridging the domain knowledge gap.

Posted at 11:11 PM | comments (1) | trackback (0)

 

 
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