2009/08/26

Why users aren't designers

I am reading Bill Buxton's Sketching User Experiences. The chapter "The Question of Design" begins with a polemic on viewing users as designers and Norman's statement "We are all designers". A good comparison that Bill uses to illustrate the absurdity of the argument is the notion that we all would be mathematicians because we (hopefully) can add up the prices of a bill.

I would advise anyone who believes that participatory design should be equal to letting the users design to ponder what happens when Homer Simpson get to be a designer for his brother's car company due to the same logic.

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