Processes of Design First lecture: Interactive System Design 3 October 2003

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Processes of DesignFirst lectureInteractive
System Design 3 October 2003

• William Newman

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Processes of Design Overview
Goal gain an understanding all of the key steps
in the process of designing an interactive system.

• Method
• Explore principles
• Study and discuss designs
• Learn and apply methods.

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My background

• PhD (Imperial College) in Computer Science, 1968
• Six years at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center,
  1973-79
• 15 years at Xerox Research Centre Europe
  (Cambridge) 1987-2002
• Mostly focused on designing experimental
  interactive software systems
• and on design methodology research
• Now working as an independent consultant
• Plus occasional teaching

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Todays Lectures

• Design
• What is it
• Examples to discuss
• Are there underlying principles?
• Defining the design problem
• Looking ahead

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What are Interactive Systems?

• And what does it mean to design them?

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What is design?

• Herb SimonEveryone designs who devises courses
  of action aimed at changing existing situations
  into preferred ones.
• Designing material artefacts is like
• Prescribing remedies to a sick patient
• Devising a new sales plan for a company
• Finding ones way around a traffic jam

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What have we designed recently?
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Even the Greats get it wrong!

• Rashtrapati Bhavan -- Edwin Lutyens Viceroys
  Palace

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Alto forerunner of todays PC (1974)

• 1 Mhz processor
• 64Kbytes RAM
• 2 Mbyte disk yet

• 5 Mbit Ethernet
• 808-line display
• 60 ppm laser printer
• WYSIWYG text editor, graphics editors, windowed
  desktop
• See www.digibarn.com

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The Bravo Word Processor

• Alto-based
• Multi-font, almost WYSIWYG
• Piece Tables
• No menus or targets!
• Type i to insert, d to delete, e to select all,
  etc.
• The edit problem
• Exposed the Modes problem
• Direct forerunner of Word

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The Big Bushy Tree of PC software
ancestryPaths of design knowledge transfer
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Forget-Me-Not (Xerox Research Cambridge, 1993)
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Whats involved in design?

• Recalling Herb SimonEveryone designs who
  devises courses of action aimed at changing
  existing situations into preferred ones.
• Involving
• Satisficing
• Finding alternative solutions
• Hierarchic subdivision
• Simulation

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Modelling what designers do

• Creative thought involves trial-and-error and
  selection
• See D. T. Campbell on Blind Variation and
  Selective Retention (1960)

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What this means for designers of interactive
systems

• As designers, we need to know
• How to define and subdivide problems
• Existing solutions and how well they work
• Heuristics for varying existing solutions to
  solve new problems
• How to evaluate solutions empirically
• How to predict outcomes analytically
• As researchers, we need to make advances in all
  of these.

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