7 - Toward a genre-responsive design approach for computing applications

Summary

The requirements for design conflict cannot be reconciled. All designs for devices are in some degree failures, either because they flout one or another of the requirements or because they are compromises, and compromise implies a degree of failure.

David Pye, The Nature and Aesthetics of Design (1978)

Each electronic medium has come into its own only when we recognized its newness and stopped trying to use it as a container of the old.

Tony Schwartz, Media: The Second God (1981)

In building a design approach for computing applications that is responsive to their social and ethical dimensions, Pye's remarks are certainly instructive. He counsels us that all designs are in some senses compromises, and are therefore “failures.” Schwartz's comment prods us to look for new dimensions and possibilities in design, as well as to develop new ways of seeing media – not just new ways of applying new media to old problems. We tend to view new technologies with standards and expectations formed in previous eras: it is indeed difficult to do otherwise. The upshot of Pye's and Schwartz's counseling, simply put, is that computing applications and network-based system approaches in particular are likely candidates for revision, rethinking, and revision again.

I develop the notion of “genre-responsive design” in this chapter, along with some specific considerations for designers, managers, and users. Genres reflect complex political, social, and economic interactions among the individuals and groups with which they are associated. Couplings that genres have with various cultural objects serve to shape users’ expectations of those genres, as well as affect the scope of the genres’ utilization for constructing virtual individuals and groups.