HCPI 2 – John Grimes

(These are my notes from John’s talk at the Intel HCPI 2 conference.)

John Grimes – IIT
Buried Assumptions and Borrowed Problems

Hands down, the best talk of the conference.

Here are my notes:
Q: If everything can do everything, then what should do what (meaning that the computer chips in every product today make it difficult to decide what functionality to include)?
A: Learn how people live their lives.

For designers to hold their own against finance, marketing and engineering, we must have our own, independent base of knowledge about the user.

“We only observe to change”

Design:
1. Surveillance
2. Behavior modification

We don’t have to be right, only useful.

John is developing a DTD for developing a compelling story.

Tangible Knowledge – an industry consortium for user research (Can anyone find a URL for this? I can’t.)

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 6th, 2001 at 10:15 pm and is filed under User Experience. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

  1. Steve Portigal says:
    November 18, 2003 at 9:34 pm

    John made similar “if everything can do everything” comments at his opening speech before About, With, and For ’03 (http://www.aboutwithandfor.com) – it was a neat example of how to think about the ridiculously creeping-featurism gizmodo-y future being foisted upon us and what we might do to intervene, as designers and product-makin’ folks.

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