Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
climbed up, and got the banana. Countless coat hangers have been bent to reach
something under a bed; countless paperclips have been bent to hold a torn garment
together, countless objects into doorstops. Adrian Tomine's comics cover of the
New Yorker February 25, 2008 is a poignant story of redesign. The 9 panels depict a
writer writing a book, an editor okaying it, manufacturing the book, purchasing the
book, reading the book, putting it in the trash, where it is retrieved by a homeless
person, the redesigner, who burns it to stay warm.
But this view of design and redesign is short-sighted. Just as designers call their
interactions with their sketches “conversations,” design and redesign can be viewed
as conversations between designers and users. Design is iterative, products
are constantly being redesigned to accommodate users and their inventions. In
the era of rapid apps, redesigners become designers; the flash for the camera on a
smartphone becomes a flashlight, the gravity sensor becomes a level, the speaker a
white-noise generator to put babies to sleep. When those unanticipated uses flour-
ish, they affect the next design. Design starts with a disembodied idea, a goal,
redesign starts with a concrete situation embodied in a person at a time in a space.
The human imagination is remarkable but not omniscient. At its core, the human
mind is associationistic, and the associations that arise from disembodied ideas and
goals are necessarily different from the associations that arise from embodied
problems encountered in multifaceted times and places. That conversation between
designers and redesigners is necessary: designers cannot imagine all the situations
and uses of their creations and redesigners cannot imagine all the creations that
could solve their problems.
Acknowledgements Gratitude to the following grants for partial support of some of the research:
ONR NOOO14-PP-1-O649, N00014011071, and N000140210534, NSF REC-0440103, NSF
IIS-0725223, NSF IIS-0855995, and NSF IIS-0905417 and the Stanford Visual Analytics Center.
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