Adaptive Path Blog

I realized something recently, spurred by a mailing list discussion of David Weinberger’s new book, Everything is Miscellaneous, which is about how the digitization of information is breaking down our old orders.

Here’s a paraphrase of what I wrote to the mailing list (edited so you don’t need the context):

We have to recognize that the practice of experience design is miscellaneous.

Unfortunately, standard thought around design work is rooted in a typical, and, I would argue, retrograde, notion of what a practice and/or discipline is. Most organizations are stuck in classic mid-19th to 20th century thinking, borne of a manufacturing economy, where optimization arose when people were as interchangeable as the parts of the machines they built.

21st century work is going to have to be much more synthetic, mixed-up, and uncertain, largely because of the forces that Weinberger points to in his book.

I think it’s a key reason why experience designers have had such a hard time defining their work. It escapes definition.

And you know what, that’s a good sign.

As Bruce Sterling said on his blog (in response to an conversation I had with (gasp!) GK VanPatter): “this is the enterprise of the future: if you can explain what you are doing with any conventional terminology, you’ve already been outsourced to India.”

(I find this also follows on Todd’s earlier post on job titles.)

(Oh, and Andrew Hinton’s talk at the IA Summit, which, happily, he’ll be sharing [in some form] at our UX Week in August.)

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 6th, 2007 at 1:19 pm and is filed under Experience design, Management, Quotable quotes, The Big Picture, Trends. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

This post is licensed under a Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.