As students, in many ways the newest to the field of design, I am curious to hear your take on the subject.

Human Centered Design Considered Harmful?

“The problem, however, is that HCD has developed as a limited view of design. Instead of looking at a person’s entire activity, it has primarily focused upon page-by-page analysis, screen-by-screen. As a result, sequences, interruptions, ill-defined goals — all the aspects of real activities, have been ignored. And error messages — there should not be any error messages. All messages should contain explanations and offer alternative ways of proceeding from the message itself.” —Donald Norman

I truly believe in the value of critique, and I think Norman has a few good points for us to consider, especially in the follow up to this article (http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/hcd_harmful_a_clari.html).

Though this is an older post, I think it still has a place in this discussion. If nothing else, it is an example of how important critique is to Design. We continue to research, test, produce in one way, because that is the way we were taught is best. If no one is there questions our practices (or if we don’t question them ourselves) our growth, thinking and development becomes stagnate.