Keeping It Simple Brown and Duguid Presented by Hoang Bao CSC 509 – Winter 2005 Cal Poly - SLO

Authors John Seely Brown Chief Scientist of the Xerox Corporation Director of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) One of the founders of the Institute for Research on Learning Paul Duguid Consultant at Xerox PARC and at UC Berkeley Written numerous paper jointly with Brown

Introduction Context and content work together efficiently as an ensemble, sharing the burden of communication. The relationship between the two is the essence of keeping things simple.

Introduction (cont.) Information system design often overlook the interplay between the designed object and its periphery. Two important reasons for software designers to pay attention to the interaction between content and context: 1. It helps to achieve clarity and simplicity 2. The continually new ways that technology finds to recombine messages and medium creatively.

Detecting Resources People read and interconnect artifacts, taking into account not just the established text or functionality, but also the clues provided by context (peripheral resources). Peripheral resources are not necessarily designed themselves. More often, they evolve as people use the periphery of a technology to keep thing simple.

Inescapable Evidence People need to know more than what a piece of information means. They also need to know how the information matters. Abandoning peripheral resources is not only a difficulty task but also a step that is unlikely to make things simpler.

Picking Up Clues People seek interpretive clues in the periphery of all sorts of communicative interactions. In learning to recognize and distinguish information, people behave like good detectives extrapolating from partial evidence to the whole story. Good designers, by contrast, need to be more like bad criminals than good ones, always leaving behind a traceable array of clues.

Picking Up Clues (cont.) Some designer take advantages of this behavior by scattering misleading clues, such as: junk mails that imitates personal mails.

Material Witnesses Attempts to separate the material form from an informational content are highly problematic. Example: the conventional newspaper survives, despite the arrival of radio, television, and news databases. Newspaper does not just report news, it makes news (and the underlying paper has a significant role in that making).

Material Witnesses (cont.) The size of the paper is limited, hence what gets in is news. The circulation of unchanging newsprint through a society turns those news items into social facts. Broadcasts and online sources tends to defer to what major papers are carrying.

Material Witness (cont.) If designers fail to understand how to encode and warrant information within new technologies, their works will remain unnecessarily dependent on the old technologies.

Border Guards The extend of which the peripheral objects are shared depends on the type of social interaction and the technology involved. With face to face communication or with fixed objects, participants have access to a broader set of clues. When objects travel through time and space, only certain aspects of the original context travel with them – we can call these unchanging features the border.

Admissible Evidence Genres can help people constrain the interpretation of the message. Genre is an important concept in software design for three reasons: 1. Genres engage socially shared knowledge, which means a level of shared expectation can be assumed. Thus less explanation is needed, making it simple. 2. Information is always formed with regard to one genre or another, so understanding different genres is crucial. 3. To fulfill their potential, new technologies require new genres.

Breaking the Law If we fail to pay attention to established convention, we may fail to engage any coherent interpretation at all. However, design evolves and innovates to significant extent by crossing boundaries. Designer need to keep an eye not just on emerging technologies, but on the emerging interpretive genres as well.

New Forms of Escape The distinction between software design and other forms of design is becoming harder to maintain. As technology shifts, software designers will need to acquire many of the skills and intuitions of other designers (vice versa) The future of design in IT lies not in making things more explicit, but by leaving as much as possible implicit, and in the process keeping things simple.

Profile - Microsoft® Bob™ Released by Microsoft ® in 1995 Bob is an example of a conscious attempt to design the periphery of a product. Software that has word processor, calendar, electronic mail, etc. Promoted as a new class of software for a new population of computer users (those who are seen as computer-phobic).

Profile - Microsoft® Bob™ (cont.) The interface trying to convey a sense of simplicity and absence of difficulty. Bob’s interface: cartoon picture of a room in a home Bob employs cartoon characters as primary representation of interactions with users. Press releases and extensive advertising campaign for Bob reinforced the message that Bob is an “easy-going software everyone will use”.

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