A Role for Academic Designers
I like the following passage from Design Noir, which I think serves as an ideal description of what academics focusing on HCI or user-centered design should be doing:
Rather than writing papers and seeking conventional academic approval, they could exploit their privileged position to explore a subversive role for design as social critique. Free from commercial restrictions and based in an educational environment, they could develop provocative design proposals to challenge the simplistic Hollywood vision of the consumer electronics industry. Design proposals could be used as a medium to stimulate debate and discussion amongst the public, designers, and industry.
Add “software industry” to “consumer electronics industry,” and there you have it. I would go farther, though: computer scientists, information scientists, and designers in academia shouldn’t just be proposing provocative designs, they should be building provocative systems. Too many academic projects look just like corporate projects, and are only being done in academia because they’re too far removed from actual human concerns to interest corporate research labs. Forget about founding your startup and shake things up a little bit…
