|
” Well, but so what? A bunch of spoiled kids are having trouble finding jobs—so is everybody else. Here’s so what. First of all, they’re not spoiled. They’re doing exactly what we always complain our brightest students don’t do: eschewing the easy bucks of Wall Street, consulting or corporate law to pursue their ideals and be of service to society. Academia may once have been a cushy gig, but now we’re talking about highly talented young people who are willing to spend their 20s living on subsistence wages when they could be getting rich (and their friends are getting rich), simply because they believe in knowledge, ideas, inquiry; in teaching, in following their passion. To leave more than half of them holding the bag at the end of it all, over 30 and having to scrounge for a new career, is a human tragedy. Sure, lots of people have it worse. But here’s another reason to care: it’s also a social tragedy, and not just because it represents a colossal waste of human capital. If we don’t make things better for the people entering academia, no one’s going to want to do it anymore. And then it won’t just be the students who are suffering. Scholarship will suffer, which means the whole country will. Knowledge, as we’re constantly told, is a nation’s most important resource, and the great majority of knowledge is created in the academy—now more than ever, in fact, since industry is increasingly outsourcing research to universities where, precisely because graduate students cost less than someone who gets a real salary, it can be conducted on the cheap.” “There is a great gulf between the research community and practice. Moreover, there is often a great gull between what designers do and what industry needs. We believe we know how to do design, but this belief is based more on faith than on data, and this belief reinforces the gulf between the research community and practice. I find that the things we take most for granted are seldom examined or questioned. As a result, it is often our most fundamental beliefs that are apt to be wrong. In this talk, deliberately intended to be controversial.” The consumerism baked into the talk is troubling (“who cares if you need it - you’re going to buy it”) but the hill climbing analogy is an interesting one. Norman claims that in an innovation landscape we can use human centered design and design research methods to move incrementally up to peaks that are local maxima. To try other peaks using a version of random restarts we need radical innovation either from technological insight or “meaning change” (ex: wii makes gaming about family). Don Norman at IIT Design Research Conference 2010 (by IIT Institute of Design)
"Wrong! The errors that underestimate the effects don’t get published. They’re probably also more apt to get debugged — if your code is producing results you don’t like, you’re going to make absolutely sure it’s right, but you’re much less likely to scrutinize code that seems to be working (from your perspective) fine."
|
