Date: February 2, 2011
Speaker: Larry Constantine — University of Madeira, Madeira Interactive Technologies Institute
Drawing on his experience as an award-winning interaction designer and his work as a design methodologist in developing usage-centered design and its successor, activity-based interaction design, Larry will question whether the core philosophy of user-centered and human-centered design—the focus on users and on humans—may itself be a problem. This presentation will examine and challenge some of the usually unquestioned assumptions of modern user experience and interaction design. It will look at ways in which orthodoxy of thinking and practice may be impeding progress, increasing costs, and leading to poorer, less useful and less usable software solutions. Among the issues to be reconsidered from a critical perspective are the roles of user testing, ethnographic field study, sketching and prototyping, and personas and user profiles in interaction design.
To see Larry’s presentation slides, click here.
About the Speaker
Larry Constantine, IDSA, is a Professor at the University of Madeira and Institute Fellow at the Madeira Interactive Technologies Institute. He teaches in the dual-degree program in human-computer interaction that he helped organize with Carnegie-Mellon University. One of the pioneers of modern software design theory and practice, he is an award-winning interaction designer specializing in enhancing user performance in safety-critical applications. He is also an award-winning author, the recipient of the 2009 Stevens Award for his contributions to design and design methods, and a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery. Under his pen name, Lior Samson, he writes tales of action and intrigue with a strong technology focus.