Norman's new gulf: between academic training and the real world of design

A few weeks ago, Usability News began a discussion of training for HCI professionals, with the article: IBM?s ?T? shaped people captures trainers? imagination . Don Norman?s essay ?Applying the Behavioral, Cognitive, and Social Sciences to Products? raises many of the same issues that were aired recently by academia and industry. It captures the dilemma of educators and the frustration of practitioners in the field.

In the piece, Norman compares the academic culture that creates analysts who then become ?resources? in the production system, with the needs of business for innovative ?leaders? with a strong sense of how to interpret the desires of users into new design. Resources can be jettisoned when times are lean, whereas leaders are too precious to be lost this way.

He offers a sample curriculum for training students that covers a broad range of scientific methods, as well as a grasp of business goals and an understanding of marketing. This would enable individuals ?to transform scientific knowledge and the observational and experimental paradigms into an applied, engineering discipline. Thus, the practical implications of the findings are stressed, including approximate methods for making use of them?.

Contrasting the two worlds of academia and business, he concludes that neither is superior; they just have different values. But, he contends, to see behavioural, cognitive, and social science taken seriously in design terms, it must become an applied discipline and we are still some way from realising this.

?An applied discipline needs applied content, much of which does not exist. We have lots of analytical techniques, but few for synthesis, for design. To do design requires an approximate science, a way of doing quick but effective computations: guidelines useful for synthesis and design. The field of BCSS applications is different from that of BCSS science. This does not mean low-quality work, it means different work, with different skills and different goals.?

(Thanks to David Jarvis for drawing attention to this interesting article).

Associated Link: Applying the Behavioral, Cognitive, and Social Sciences to Products

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