User-centered (a cognitive/perceptual term) and usage-centered (a behavioral/functional term) are post-modern design descriptors often arbitrarily or ambiguously defined and interchangeably used and mis-used. In the context of 21st century communication product design theory and practice, user-centered design focuses on constructing a user experience and environment with physical and virtual affordances that are manipulable, controllable, customizable, and adaptable from the essential perspective of the conceptual model of the user. This means both (a) the user’s own internal metamodel of their own goal-directed processes, activities and contextual (i.e., socio-psychological and physical) environment, and (b) the designer’s representational model of the user-activity-environmental experience, with the former driving and superceding the latter in the design solution. Thus the conceptual model of the learner becomes the superordinate principle guiding the design process and learning outcomes (i.e., the highest level of the prescriptive taxonomy).
Published in Chapter:
Human Factors for Networked and Virtual Organizations
Vincent E. Lasnik (Independent Knowledge Architect, USA)
Copyright: © 2008
|Pages: 10
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-59904-885-7.ch088
Abstract
One of the central problems and corresponding challenges facing the multi-disciplinary field of networked and virtual organizations has been in the construction of theory-grounded, research-based taxonomies for prescribing what particular strategies and approaches should be employed when, how, and in what combination to be most effective and efficient for specific business domains, organizational structures, and enterprise- wide performance objectives.