Interesting articles via the Cooper Interaction design newsletter. The first, on the origination of personae in interaction design, is a quick historical backdrop to the creation of this immensely valuable tool (we use them all the time - as much to get inexperienced producers' heads round the idea of the user as much as anything).
Cooper: The Origin Of Personas
I'm not sure about the second one article though, which could be crudely summarised thus:
Q. Can programmers design?
A. No.
I'm not so sure ...
I'm not sure about the assertion that programmers generally think they're in control for a start, and also that there's a dearth of interaction designers around. It's usually the opposite in my experience: that programmers get trampled by designers (just as designers can often get trampled by 'producers') and that good programmers who have voluble and valid opinions about design are loth to voice them as a result.
Many of the pleas in the adaptive design stuff I put together last year were about the increasing importance of listening to programmers in the context of design. I understand a bit of what Kim Goodwin is trying to say, but I think that's more of a question of personality types than disciplines - and I don't buy that a discipline is characterised in terms of a global personality type that neatly.
Surely a more useful philosophy is to build multidisciplinary teams, with team members deploying a variety of tools and techniques (from interaction design through object-oriented programming) - rather than think in these reductionistic, almost protectionist notions of rigid disciplines and concomitant mindsets.
