Everyday adaptive design

communications. User-oriented design has brought many different perspectives to the technology throughout this This is a rather confusing picture for design. I'd like to step back and reflect on some basic questions: What is 'user-oriented' design? What is it trying to accomplish? What is its role in interactive system development? Why are there no 'usefulness designers'? Who are the designers, anyway? The term 'design' has different meanings, and these are useful to consider. I take the position that design is a complex concept that is not limited to a particular role in the development process. Rather it is a set of distributed activities of different kinds by different people at different points in the life cycle of interactive systems. Understanding design in this multifaceted way can help us better evolve interactive systems that can become suitably and intimately enmeshed with people's lives, which is the ultimate purpose of 'interaction design'. This talk explores three ever-broadening notions of design. The first is Professional Design, as practised by various specialized professions. Next is Generic Design, as practised in many different fields and considered as a cognitive and social activity. Finally, I'll consider Everyday Adaptive Design, which is a pervasive activity engaged in by people as they adapt resources at hand in their everyday lives. Professional design brings particular skills, processes, and representations to the 'design phase' of interactive system development. The increasing involvement of design professionals has tremendously increased the quality of interactive systems. On the other hand, there are inherent limitations in the professional role, such as the difficulty of effectively representing the user and in achieving authentic usefulness. From a cognitive science point of view, design is a generic activity with characteristic properties, such as being ill-defined. Simon's definition – " everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones " – suggests that many people not labeled as Designers are actually involved in designing interactive systems. For example, the design of service plans for service-based artifacts, such as cellphones, is as consequential for end users as the devices themselves. The field of participatory design explores practices that involve end users themselves as participating designers. The multitude of designers in this sense points to the nature of design as a negotiated social process. This negotiation confronts the single most difficult aspect of design – integration across all the facets of complex systems that are …