2003-04-16
... ? Connecting my own dots - Adam Greenfield - v-2.orgAll of my work is designed to return as much authority, agency, and power as possible to the human being using these products and services. Anything I've ever designed has started from the fundamental assumption that "users" are real people with real pressures, constraints, hopes and desires, and that considering these prerogatives is not optional. I understand the entire user-experience field as being the information technology's long, slow rediscovery of humanity and compassion: a long-term project, a deep and important one, and one that I am terrifically proud to be associated with. In talking to other people engaged in this work over the last several years, it's become clear that while these values are by no means shared by everybody in technology, they are common (if latent) in the user-experience realm. Not to get all we-are-the-world on you, but by and large we believe that as a user, you deserve to be dealt with honestly, be offered meaningful choices and allowed the agency to make them. This stands in particularly clear relief when defined against other voices in technology, notably those coming from a marketing perspective. And guess what? These values have political implications. Once you assume that these things are true in the comparatively trivial context of a Web site, it begins to dawn on you that they're probably also valid in the wider world, the world of politics and economics in which the decisions that contain our lives are made.
