The Farmer & Farmer Review . Mastery and Mimicry . The Heart of the Builder

Essays about humans and technology

Over the past few years, there has been a meaningful trend in the design community towards user-centered design. As with any methodology, it’s valuable to a point. User-centered design is great for designing a new toaster. But it’s not so useful in designing, say, the World Wide Web. If you asked people in 1989 what they needed to make their life better, it was unlikely that they would have said that a decentralized network of information nodes that are linked using hypertext. The danger in user-centered design is that it releases the designer of the responsibility for having a vision for…

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• Tom Duan
• Eli Qian

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