One obvious contrast between the design of physical spaces (architecture) and digital spaces (UX design?) is that the former is at least 4000 years older, which means that it is incredibly more nuanced, deeper, better researched, and more disciplined — with standards informed by careful study, experimentation, and adaption over hundreds of generations. Little wonder that UX still feels a bit like a mushroom-infused hackathon. If digital space design is to mature into some sort of analogue of physical architecture, we’re going to have to get very serious about elevating the discipline with a careful human-centric design ethos, with academic-level experimentation/research, and professional standards.
One particularly ironic observation about digital spaces (excluding perhaps consumer social media apps) is that while digital spaces have enormous advantages for flexibility, adaptability, and emergence (relative to the physical spaces), they usually fail utterly to provide a user experience that FEELS flexible, adaptive, and emergent. They may be infinitely flexible for the designers, but they are radically stiff and constraining for the user. Physical spaces, in contrast, are certainly hard/real/immovable, but the discipline of physical architecture has evolved wonderful skill at making those spaces FEEL adaptable to creative/ emergent/ unpredictable user experiences.
The fear digital designers feel about emergence is a sure tell that the discipline is immature.
There are efforts to meet your goal of a human-centric design ethos, usually expressed in systems architecture (software subsystem) as the socio-technical elements. You may be aware of these efforts, and while they don’t match the 4,000-plus year history of physical architecture, these efforts do show promise.
Ruth Malan’s courses and writings discuss these ideas, starting with the ideas of Mary Parker Follett (3 September 1868 – 18 December 1933).
Love her line (paraphrased)...// Be conservative in what you do, liberal in what you allow others to do. // That is a good starting point for design of most things.
One obvious contrast between the design of physical spaces (architecture) and digital spaces (UX design?) is that the former is at least 4000 years older, which means that it is incredibly more nuanced, deeper, better researched, and more disciplined — with standards informed by careful study, experimentation, and adaption over hundreds of generations. Little wonder that UX still feels a bit like a mushroom-infused hackathon. If digital space design is to mature into some sort of analogue of physical architecture, we’re going to have to get very serious about elevating the discipline with a careful human-centric design ethos, with academic-level experimentation/research, and professional standards.
One particularly ironic observation about digital spaces (excluding perhaps consumer social media apps) is that while digital spaces have enormous advantages for flexibility, adaptability, and emergence (relative to the physical spaces), they usually fail utterly to provide a user experience that FEELS flexible, adaptive, and emergent. They may be infinitely flexible for the designers, but they are radically stiff and constraining for the user. Physical spaces, in contrast, are certainly hard/real/immovable, but the discipline of physical architecture has evolved wonderful skill at making those spaces FEEL adaptable to creative/ emergent/ unpredictable user experiences.
The fear digital designers feel about emergence is a sure tell that the discipline is immature.
There are efforts to meet your goal of a human-centric design ethos, usually expressed in systems architecture (software subsystem) as the socio-technical elements. You may be aware of these efforts, and while they don’t match the 4,000-plus year history of physical architecture, these efforts do show promise.
Ruth Malan’s courses and writings discuss these ideas, starting with the ideas of Mary Parker Follett (3 September 1868 – 18 December 1933).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Parker_Follett
https://www.ruthmalan.com/
Love her line (paraphrased)...// Be conservative in what you do, liberal in what you allow others to do. // That is a good starting point for design of most things.