I really enjoy connection between design and other sciences. I like your writing style. I find it clear and concise.

The only thing I wanted more of was what started to come out of the last paragraph. I wanted more experience design examples, how clearly similar methodology is being used by designers as part of research and practice. And I think it is funny (while true) that we are comparing users to children. It is smart that we make no assumptions of a user’s skills when designing (and critical) but funny potentially to a layperson not undertsanding that the discipline is designed to honor and not denigrate the user.

In art, the concept of play has pervaded much of current interactive practice. In many ways, artists making work for general audiences are also often useability experts. To develop a compelling interaction, an artist must engage an audience. Since engagement with art is most often voluntary, one trick is to introduce play into any activity, performance, or event. Play and humor are able to take an audience down to a base to facilitate dialogue about tougher issues.

In your example of kindergarten, it seems clear that play is a learning tool. Now what is more obvious to me is that although I work usually on technology systems for generally and “elite” class of user, I struggle to think of them as anything more than their base – a child. I do this when developing art works as well as client “stuff.” So the technology does not matter. If we reduce our device down to a set of primitives, all a user is ever doing is playing with a cube, a cylinder, and a sphere, represented as information.

In experience design we are developing a critical design practice – one that questions the systems as we design for them. We question the compelling nature of the experience. We in fact make technology invisible if all goes well.

Does this make sense? Only partly for me. I think the metaphor, or maybe more precisely the great-grandparent, for experience design he finds in kindergarten is appropriate. I would like to see a more thorough investigation of precise aspects of practice. My hope is that we might start to see even more corollary behavior between the two world/sciences. The rest of what I wrote is perhaps a mess of head spew post burrito lunch.

Take this in stride, I work with Bill (for the past 4 weeks) at MAYA Design.