Via Whump , an article by Peter Morville in Webreview asks:
Imagine you've won the lottery and can finally afford to build your dream house. Who do you want to design it? A usability engineer? Probably not. Chances are, you'd like an architect who specializes in the design of architectures for physical buildings.
I think that this is exactly the problem with web design today: People are hiring architects. How many houses have you been in recently with the lights in all the wrong places; where, when you open the pantry door you block out all possible illumination of the shelves you'll soon be searching. Offices which can only be laid out so the computer faces the window (resulting in horrible glare) and are lit by flourescents, so if you close the window and use only the lights you get flicker and eyestrain? We've all known the joys of having to deal with some avant-garde lightswitch which challenges all our experiences about how light switches work. Carpeted bathrooms and kitchens? Yep, seen 'em all.
When I can afford to build my dream house I want someone who's trained in usability first. Later I'll find an engineer somewhere, who may have architecture training, to figure out how to build the thing, but I'll be damned if I'll pass off design decisions to the people in the tradition of those who've designed most of the places I've lived and worked.
He then goes on to quote Christopher Alexander's book The Timeless Way of Building. I haven't read that one, but I've read the second book in that series, A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction . That book fell prey to all of my complaints, it doesn't present patterns for evolving spaces, it presents a fixed way of looking at housing which ties living into some artistic ideal envisioned by the architect.
I realize I'm in the minority, but I want spaces, both real and virtual, which adapt. Initial beauty is fine, but quickly falls by the wayside when I'm trying to live and work in a space.
If you prima-donnas with a vision of the way the world wants to work want to create art, that's great, but don't go inflicting your ill-considered aesthetics-over-use philosophies on us.
Please?
Friday, March 12nd, 1999 danlyke@flutterby.com