Usability Views Article Details  home | timeline | recent | popular | e-reports | userati | books | about  Book Review: Design Research: Methods and Perspectives by Brenda Laurel (22 Dec 2004) Now that the Internet has expanded our awareness such that, like Pat Cadigan's Visual Mark, we can no longer stuff it back into our named and numbered crania, it is hard to fit a single name to the Zeitgeist. We might speak instead of Zeitskarnivale, or Sign Explosion: what we have here is precisely the opposite of a failure to communicate. Still, in this rapturous ocean ecology of noise, a few recurrent patterns begin to look very like a whale, or the crown of a major semiotic food chain. For instance, the idea of design. The wired-and-wireless world has design much on its mind these days. To begin in the shallowest soundings, Anglo-American television offers an endless stream of style-consultant shows, lately prompting George Bush's handlers to add "extreme makeover" to the political vernacular. Moving into bluer waters, we find firms like Apple Computer performing their own corporate makeovers by emphasizing visual aesthetics and ergonomics, creating product lines that excel in both desirability and usability. Which brings us to the abyss itself: the art (and increasingly science) of user-centered design in cybernetic systems, where we may appreciate what a whale of an idea we have on the line. Taken in this sense, design applies not to brushed titanium surfaces and high-luminance colors, but to those unseen architectures that increasingly shape our everyday lives: TCP/IP, HTTP, VOIP, SOAP, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and other spirits from the vasty deep. Here the name to drop is less Jobs than Berners-Lee, or Kay, or Cerf, or Stallman, or any of the other Great Standardizers who have silently forged the shared protocols that inform our republic of signs. At these depths, two things become clear. First, that the work of software architecture, or invisible design, is very momentous indeed. As Pierre Levy observes: "The emergence of cyberspace will most likely have — already has had — as radical an effect on the pragmatics of communication as the discovery of writing" [2]. If one remembers that anything called cyber always implies both communication and control, then Levy's grand comparison seems entirely free of hyperbole: the design of software increasingly determines the infrastructure of civilization, the "extensions of man" (in McLuhan's now dubious phrase) that lead beyond literacy. Article URL: http://tekka.net/07/?Designs Read 64 more articles from Tekka sorted by date, popularity, or title. Next Article: How Many Endings Does a Game Need?     This site is a labour of love built by Chris McEvoy