Literate Development: Weaving Human Context into Design Specifications

HCI approaches have distinguished themselves by their user focus, considering users’ needs, analysing their tasks, investigating their preferences and differences, and understanding physical, social, organisational and even technological facets of their environment. When much HCI writing was polemic, it was enough to stress the need for understanding the context of human usage and to describe some system failures brought about by incompatibilities with context. Almost everyone accepts the polemic now and it has been overlain by commercial lip service to participative, stakeholder-consulting, user-driven, activity-based validated system development. Much of HCI is seen as common sense, and it would appear that this sense is (at long last) becoming more common.