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/