Discussion Archive: July 2008

quite good introduction on activity theory

Hi Guys,

There's a good introduction of activity theory,
http://mcs.open.ac.uk/yr258/act_theory/

texts from this article
"
As an alternative theory, the conceptual framework of Activity theory
is a good way of providing the means of analyzing the actions and
interactions with artifacts within a historical and cultural context –
an approach which was lacking in the existing cognitive theories.

[EVENT] IxDA Toronto Meeting: Thursday July 17, 7pm

Announcing the next IxDA Toronto event!

Nick Farnell, a recent grad from Humber's Industrial Design program, has
kindly offered to present at our upcoming July meeting.

Details:

Centre for Social Innovation
215 Spadina Ave, Suite 120
Thursday July 17th, 7pm

Topic: The Industrial Design Process, Plus Introductory Sketching
Techniques

Nick will be talking about the typical industrial design process and
(bonus!) will also give us some introductory sketching tips.

Compared to What?

Feeling free to blatantly point to my own take on "Compared to What?,"
<http://meiert.com/en/blog/20080703/compared-to-what/>. I understand
this concept's root in information design, but worry about the
supposed fact that not only many "designs", but rather news sources
fail in answering that question.

IxDA Discussion Is UCD Really Broken?

Id say yes UCD is broken and have always been.

Personally I close to hate everything about that approach.

The reason why it's broken is manifold, but primarily the problem is
that most people who are proponents of it is either managers who are
trying to find a way to secure their position against upper management
(well we did ask the users) and that very few have any idea of how to
translate the findings from a bunch of people into something useful.

I always found it laughable when so called usability experts did
usability studies.