I would very much like to believe that the kind of
thinking here at issue indeed does now, to use Prof.
Bates' formulations, "imbue all teaching" in LIS, is
included in "any course that addresses almost
anything that information professionals do", and
verily is "hard to miss in the students' education".

For all of that program's other considerable merits,
such was surely not the case with the LIS program
from which I graduated ( the Chicago GLS, in the
later seventies ). For quite some time now I have
alas necessarily been out of touch with the nuances
of what's going on in LIS classrooms, or otherwise
between LIS educators and their students. Maybe
things have substantially changed for the better. I
have no problem with taking that on faith, if y'all
say that it's a fact.

But what does that really matter, when it comes
right down to it ?

I would suggest that the question whether this
kind of thinking does or does not currently imbue
all teaching in LIS is pretty nearly irrelevant, if that
same thinking does not ( also ) imbue -- and isn't
( also ) "hard to miss in" -- the daily world in which
LIS people practice their profession ; in how they
do that, and in the results of what they do.

Now, it is in my opinion a good thing that the
educators remember and keep continually in mind
that, insofar as LIS is a service profession [ I prefer
to think of it as a facilitating profession, but the
point remains roughly the same ], its legitimation is
entirely derived not from what the LIS *educators*
do ( or say or think ), but from what the LIS
*educated* do ( or fail to do ). The extent of that
legitimation has nothing directly to do with the
classroom, with the curriculum, with the degree
requirements, with the research that's carried out.
It's gained or lost out here, in the field, and only
here, where the users also are to be found. Good
to keep in mind, as well, is that our discipline's
discourse, dear as it may be to us, is of no interest
or consequence to -- and mostly not even noticed
by -- those users, i.e. the ones who, along with the
funders of our activities, are the sole source of our
occupation's legitimation.

> . . . but in any typical LIS program that
> perspective should be hard to miss in the
> students' education.

The point, then, that I'd here like to make -- you
guessed it already, probably -- is that this kind of
"design thinking", this perspective, this thinking as
the user thinks, does seem very often very painfully
missing out here in the field, where we all practice.
Ubiquitously, and almost endemically missing, I am
inclined to say. And so long as that's the case, what
many of you may be, even systematically and
devotedly, doing back there in the classroom and
in other contacts with LIS students doesn't really
matter all that much at the end of the day, does it ?

I would guess that this same experience as my own
strongly informs the motivation for the remarks made
by Steven Bell and Bernie Sloan ( and, let's be honest,
similar ones frequently made by a great many others ).
And I'd in addition suggest that it isn't very constructive
or pertinent to object, as one LIS educator on this list
did on Sunday, that such remarks are vague, "sweeping
and simplistic", and unaccompanied by empirical test
results. Someone less generous than I might even term
such a reaction a _testimonium paupertatis_.

A following question might well be : How, then, can
it be the case that this kind of thinking, in spite of the
attention that the educators have been giving it in the
curriculum, be so little apparent, and so seldom
determinative or even operative, out here in the field ?

Various factors. One of these is probably to be found
in the nature of the persons attracted to the profession
in the first place ( something higher education can to
only a very limited degree influence ). Another is the
rampant tendency to aim one's efforts more toward
the constructed user than toward the ( much less
neatly graspable ) actual user. But a perhaps more
crucial one is the profession's inherent and seemingly
all but irresistible predilection, fully reinforced by the
professional socialization process, toward the
hypostatization of information. This in and of itself
renders it in most cases impossible genuinely to
comprehend, as Prof. Bates puts it, "where the user
is coming from" ( and even more so where the user
is going to ), and therefore impossible to help the user
out in more than various fairly banal ways. ( And here
I'm talking about the actual user, not the constructed
user. ) But this hypostatizing inclination lies also
behind the to my mind artificially sharp, and I think
counter-productive, distinction offered below between
"HCI people" and "LIS people", as well as the claim
that something called "information seeking at a
computer" is a natural, distinct, and relatively limited
subset of "all human-computer situations".

It is in any case, for what it's worth, my own impression
that -- whatever we may prefer to think -- by far most
of the really effective innovations for real live users of
documentary systems and services have in the recent
past come forth precisely out the more general HCI
( and, e.g., AI ) circles. And for what exactly, let me
disingenuously ask, do those users have to be grateful
in this respect specifically to the LIS people ? I am for
my part quite convinced, from what I have seen, that
the HCI people often in fact have understood our users
better than we have. ( They are not impeded by the
same kind of presumptive sanguinity and quasi-
dogmatism, for one thing. )

So -- if our LIS educators are indeed fully up to speed
with "design thinking", and have for some time been
using it to imbue their teaching, have been helping
"students think about where the user is coming from"
and "to understand the other's perspective", while we
here in the world of practice can nonetheless still
detect all too little of this kind of thinking at work --
what is then the conclusion which one ought to
draw ??

I'll leave it to someone else to answer that question.

I *do*, though, want to underscore my agreement with
the observation below that LIS people much too often
appear unaware of the literature of their own discipline
( especially of the literature more than several years old,
to say nothing of the literature not in their own language ).
But, to be fair and honest, much of it * was* pretty
forgettable -- not least many of those writings which
pretended to the status of fundamental contributions
toward an understanding of "how people's minds work
when searching" but have long since proven to have
been fairly naive and superficial discussions based on
anything but thorough investigation, valid research
findings, epistemological sophistication, or even good
old common sense.


- Laval Hunsucker
   Breukelen, Nederland




----- Original Message ----
From: Marcia J. Bates <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Sent: Mon, April 12, 2010 2:13:17 AM
Subject: Design thinking

Folks,

Two big points about this issue:

1. Re Scott Barker's comments: Yes, HCI people know much about design, but so do people in LIS! I'm getting increasingly frustrated at the systematic ignoring of the vast literature developed in LIS about information system design. There are many design factors specific to information seeking and retrieval that we know and that HCI people have usually had no reason to have learned.

In my observation, HCI's objective is to develop general principles about HCI that are operative across all human-computer situations. To many HCI people, information system design is just a trivial application of those general principles. Not so!!! (And because they think of themselves as knowing the general principles, they expect us to listen to them, and they don't listen to us.) For heavens' sake, LIS people should not buy into that erroneous assumption! Yes, we've been ignored by the disciplines with more money, but that doesn't mean we have nothing to contribute.

Many things have to be designed right in order to genuinely and fully support information seeking at a computer. And they have to be designed in relation to each other. See my 2002 article "The Cascade of Interactions in the Digital Library Interface" in the journal Information Processing and Management (article also on my website). I show 13 layers of design that have to work together--there could easily be 15 or 20 such layers, depending on the system. Design any one layer wrong in relation to the others, and the whole information system massively sub-optimizes. Only ONE of those layers is interface design. Have we forgotten that much of the literature of LIS from the 1970's forward has been about information system design, including how people's minds work when searching?? Just because we went from online database searching and online catalog design to the Web does not mean that the many things we learned about human thinking and behavior around
needing and seeking information has changed in the fundamentals.


2. The original person cited in Bernie's email was talking about design thinking in a very general way--basically, to help students think about where the user is coming from. That's not just design thinking. IN A PROFESSION THAT INVOLVES HELPING PEOPLE, such as ours, that approach should imbue all teaching in the field. Students may not always "get" it, and faculty may not always "get" it, but in any typical LIS program that perspective should be hard to miss in the students' education. Any course that addresses almost anything that information professionals do has to include "design thinking" in that very vague and general sense.

I have a cartoon on my door that it useful for such a discussion about understanding the user. It shows a couple of vultures sitting on a tree branch. One vulture is saying to the other: "That was a good rotting carcass, but not a great rotting carcass." The point being that vultures see road kill very differently from the way human beings do. It is not always easy to understand the other's perspective. ;-) (Again, see point no. 1.)

Marcia
-- Marcia J. Bates, Ph.D.
Professor Emerita
Fellow, American Association for the Advancement of Science
Editor, Encyclopedia of Library and Information Sciences
Department of Information Studies
Graduate School of Education and Information Studies
University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1520 USA
Tel: 310-206-9353
Fax: 310-206-4460
Web: http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/bates/