Setting the Stage for Design as Action
Susanne Bødker, Joan Greenbaum, Morten Kyng · 2020
Around the sixteenth century, there emerged in most of the European languages the term "design" or its equivalent. The emergence of the word coincided with the need to describe the occupation of designing. The term indicated that designing was to be separated from doing. The story illustrates that if the kind of insight the operators have is not brought to bear on the design, the result will be systems that don&s;t fit the situations for which they are intended; systems which may even run contrary to competent performance. In this case the designers realized the importance of some kind of user involvement in the design process, but they still only considered users as sources of explicit knowledge which could be communicated and then formalized into rules.