Unlike the previous readings, I don’t have much to say about this reading, as I found that it was almost exclusively new and comprehensible ideas to me. While my experiences with a number of designs differ from the authors, especially concerning the sink, his identification of the problem and proposed solution both seem feasible to me. However, that does bring me to the one questionable moment I found in his analysis. In his introduction of human centered design he mentions that part of the process is “to avoid specifying the problem as long as possible but instead to
iterate upon repeated approximations.” While this clearly works as a stopgap, throughout the rest of the chapter he is able to clearly identify what is wrong and what the solution could be for a number of bad designs. These solutions also all fit together in a consistent framework, and so it seems to me that with some development it should be possible to remove the iterations and allow the minimum requirements for a good design in any situation to be known before the object is ever made, much less used. There would almost certainly be multiple “correct” solutions, but this seems to me to be the point at which the engineers would get on board and the difficulty in communication between departments, as he identifies at the end, would lessen.
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