- Origins of the User
Design has been an active participant in the formulation of the User as a privileged and practical subject position. It has refined the construct over at least a century into order to engineer the things that we all use every day — cars, globally unique identifiers (GUIs), hand tools, furniture, cities — by reflecting this shadowy hypothetical identity back onto real people. As part of a design research process, the formal postu lated ideal users for intended products, messages, or services are known as “ personas. ” In 1955, for example, Industrial designer Henry Dreyfuss published his Designing for People, which featured “ Joe and Josephine, ” two extraordinarily typical people, one man and one woman, both described in minute detail. They would be used as the literal ergonomic standards against which things might be made to measure. They were, in this way, an Adam and Eve of use case personas. The premise of a scientific measurement of people and their movements as a way of designing systems to accommodate or to train them goes back at least to the proportional guidelines of Vitruvius ’ s Ten Books of Architecture (around 15 B.C.E.) and da Vinci ’ s Vitruvian Man (1490); many other genealogical threads are not hard to identify. Foucault ’ s genealogies of modernity painstakingly recount how typical and normative human bodies were served and served up by the design of disciplinary institutions of knowledge. By observing machine shops and workers and replanning how their bodily movements could be abstracted and optimized so as to be better incorporated with their laboring habitats, Frederick Winslow Taylor pioneered scientific management theory and the efficiency movement as the nineteenth century became the twentieth. Concurrently, Max Weber would identify a tendency toward depersonalized rationalization through the formulation of people into interchangeable bureaucratic components as a key sociological feature of industrial capitalism. Paul Lazarsfeld ’ s audience studies for the Princeton Radio Project (which momentarily included Theodor Adorno on the team) was among many midcentury attempts to apply the scientific method to the deduction of typical patterns in consumer thought and behavior used as templates for the formulation of products and propagandas. Information about audiences and Users would be used to inspire and validate the authorship of representative fictional personas that stand for those people by typifying them as ad hoc archetypes. <sup>9</sup> Later, the requirements of software and interaction design came to rely on the specification of diverse groups of multiple hypothetical Users, each with different needs, all put into overlapping fictional worlds where optimum click paths could be modeled, categorized, and used to perfect possible GUI solutions. <sup>10</sup> Whereas Joe and Josephine were absolutely generic, extranormal people, the complexities of designing dynamic interfacial systems means that any thing must be usable for people with heterogeneous aptitudes and intentions. If you could make software just by measuring people ’ s fingers and eyeballs, things would be easy. But the design of interfaces that have to link together various machines, forms of human cognition, and totalizing images of logistical networks demands more nuanced abstractions and optimizations than ergonomic verification of the angle at which “ Joe ’ s ” elbow bends can tell us.
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User Layer