Think back to your classroom experiences, especially as a young child. How many decisions were you in a position to make in a given day?
Even in the best of classrooms, decisions are severely constrained. You are assigned seats, follow a dictated schedule, work independently, talk at prescribed times, and compute known solutions. As class sizes grew, so did the level of control exercised by the teachers. The elite school in our district trains young kids to be silent (not quiet, or respectful of others), productive (through repetition), and serious (one recess and few opportunities to socialize). Even art—the cultural beacon of free expression—is about copy and precision.
Typical students lack the power to make decisions. This is not because they are not capable but because the teacher hasn’t first given up her power. Power is not the same thing as control, even though the act of exerting control has a side-effect of taking away power from others. It is possible to control an environment that empowers students to make their own decisions. Not all of those decisions are beneficial, of course, but in experiencing failure there is an opportunity to learn. Failure in a dictated activity only strips one of confidence.
Applied to interaction design, this issue of power affects both the user and the designer.
The user is more like the student than the teacher. Typical interactions involve heavy constraints on what activities can be conducted. In fact, in the name of simplification, systems are sometimes over-constrained to the point where the interaction possibilities fail to stimulate interest or benefit for the user. As the person shaping the interaction, the designer can empower users to make their own decisions by providing non-linear paths to an objective and control over the time these interactions take place. Unlike a classroom, though, this environment is inherently unsupervised. The responsibility for control (again, different from power) is ceded from the designer to the design, limiting how much free decision-making is practical. It is the perception of power, then, that will ultimately engage the user.
The designer thinks conceptually in a pragmatic world. This can lead to conflicts with business and marketing philosophies, as well as visual artists and writers. Designers get power when they are able to make their own decisions about how and when to conduct user inquiry and the effect to which that information shapes the project outcome. Designers can also give power by speaking the language of the other stakeholders, explaining the logic behind the decisions. In our form of human-computer interaction, the design is the argument, a way of acquiring, selecting and arranging that logic in a manner that brings everyone on board. In this sense, the exchange of power is essential to producing good design.
For more applications of Bev Bos’ conditions for growing wiser, see .
