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Improvising Design: a blog about design emergence

  • Human-Centered Design

    In the last few years, the terms human-centered and user-centered have become synonymous in HCI and IT design, with a focus on disciplines such as “user experience” and “interaction design.” Here I will argue that neither discipline really deals with the core issues of human-centered design. Human-centeredness in design involves designing technology artifacts, applications, and…

  • Why is design improvisational?  

    Why is design improvisational?  We talk about design as if it were fixed: as if there were one best way to design everything. We celebrate designers who produce especially elegant or usable artifacts as if they were possessed of supernatural powers. Yet design should be easy. It is the application of “best practice” principles to a…

  • Coordination, Cooperation, and Collaboration

    I was musing about the differences between these three concepts. They are not explained clearly in any resource I could find (although many people take a stab at this), so I thought I’d try bending my brain around the problem. The three types of collectivity appear goal-oriented (as in, sharing a common purpose), but there…

  • Improvising Design

    Why is design improvisational?  We talk about design as if it were fixed: as if there were one best way to design everything. We celebrate designers who produce especially elegant or usable artifacts as if they were possessed of supernatural powers. Yet design should be easy. It is the application of “best practice” principles to a…

  • The Co-Design of Business & IT Systems

    Business analysts, change managers, and IT systems analysts are in a no-win situation. They are expected to understand myriad interpretations of the business strategy, reconcile conflicting viewpoints on how business processes work, and – somehow – define a coherent set of change objectives that pleases everyone. While the stakeholders of change each understand only a…

  • Design Methods as Performative Objects

    Brown and Duguid’s (2001) concept of a “network of practice” has been niggling away at my consciousness. The idea is that a collection of people are enabled to understand each others’ work because of commonalities in practice, but not to the extent that a Community of Practice creates shared ways of framing and performing work:…

  • Responsive Web Design

    I manage the website for an Animal Rescue shelter. I have been struggling with the design of the site for some time now, as I have some users who are still using IE6 under windows XP (on an SVGA screen), some who want to view the site on their mobile phones, and some who have…

  • On Realizing The Relevance of Actor-Network Theory

    A recent emphasis on sociomateriality appears to have entered the IS literature because of discussions by Orlikowski (2010) and the excellent empirical study of Volkoff et al. (2007). Now that people have been sensitized to the literature on material practice, actor-network theory is classified as “tired and uninformative” [1]. Which leads me to wonder just…

  • Designing Social Media Platforms For Online Learning

    Recently, I have been using a new social media platform to run one of my classes. The idea was, that as we are studying social informatics, we could study the effect of using social media on our own workflows first hand. I also thought that – in these days of daily Facebook and Twitter use…

  • Organizational Forms Of Coordination

    I have been working for a while on comparing the results from some very complex research studies of collaborative design in groups that span disciplines or knowledge domains. I was stunned to realize that I had different types of group activity depending on the sort of organization. By “organization,” I mean the way in which…