fordes

There are some things that you don't do in an occupation. This might be using lots of glue instead of dowels for a carpenter or nesting several windows into each other if you are an interface designer. These things might be rationally explained: The carpenter might say they want to …

This is an edited text based on a talk Lisa Conrad, PhD and me gave at the EASST 2020 in the panel on classic Science and Technology Studies (STS) papers. I think the text is also interesting for computer scientists, design researchers and privacy researchers, so I post it here …

Whether in books or Wikipedia: A lot of knowledge is presented and edited as text. There is the assumption that this text reflects something about the world (if it is true and not wrong because of deceived senses, bad research, or lying). Such text can be written by a person …

As UX Designers and UX Researchers, we often talk about problems and user needs as “found”, “uncovered” and “arrived at”.

I was going through a guide on Design Thinking⁶ and the language used suggested that the process of design research is like going through a landscape¹:

• The Method …

Repeatedly, me and my colleagues complain about the lack of documentation: Why is the software constructed in this particular way, how are users supposed to know how to set this up etc. We say there should be “more” documentation but, alas, there is just not enough time to write it …

E. Raymonds Essay “The Cathedral and the Bazaar” is an essay on Open Source development. It is not about open source as a legal construct but about a possible development style of bottom-up activities in a community of creators. This bottom-up style Raymond calls “bazaar” and contrasts it with the …

I came across participatory design when I was wondering how software like Mediawiki, Firefox or LibreOffice could be produced: The software is understood as being created by by different groups of people: employees, hired by the software’s supporting organizations, volunteer programmers, and user communities with various degrees of involvement …

This post started as a presentation I gave to a group of computer science students in a HCI class as an invited practitioner. My first intention was to “talk about work”, show some currently worked-on projects and introduce to the order and mess of roles, projects and tasks in software …

"The view, that purposeful action is determined by plans, is deeply rooted in the Western human sciences as the correct model of the rational actor."

– Lucy Suchman in Human-machine reconfigurations: plans and situated actions, p. 27

Plans are deemed to be important. But what do plans do? And what do …

TL;DR: Design methods are often based on in ideas that were popular in the early 20th century: scientific positivism and industrial production. This hides essential, but messy aspects of design.

In his book The Reflective Practitioner, Donald Schön uses a concept named “Technical Rationality”. It is the idea, that …