Bill Irwin’s Unknowing Insight on Context
November 4th, 2005
At last night’s DUX opening presentation, the classic actor/clown, Bill Irwin gave an extremely entertaining presentation, talking about his experience with creating experiences (in his case, shows).
One point that jumped out at me was a statement he made about stories. He said, “There are those people who would tell me a single note, say an A, is always the same. No matter when you play it, it’s still 440 hz. However, I contend differently. If I play that A with a chord, that A is not the same note. It’s something different. If I play a different chord, it changes again.”
What Bill didn’t realize he was talking about was context. Context is an important part of the design space. If designers believe their designs are always the same, independent of the user’s current context, their designs will probably fail at critical points.
Understanding context is a huge priority in the research we need to do as we start the information gathering process for the basis of our designs. Field studies are one technique, but there are many others.
Of course, this isn’t new. However, it was a neat reminder that context is important in any type of design, not just digital experiences.
