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To encourage and help others seemlessly enter the conversation
we compiled a list of points where it appears to us, the theories are at odds.
In the next section we offer our thoughts on how these theories can be used together in a constructive manner.
Johnson's User-centered Technology |
Spinuzzi's Genre Tracing |
System vs. user-centered design
Johnson argues that a user-centered approach to design is superior to a system-centered approach. System-centered design focuses on designing an interface so that it is easy to understand, but isn’t always designed in the best interest of the user. User-centered design, on the other hand, includes users throughout the whole process of designing the technology, and considers the user’s situation or context as an added dimension. |
Genre tracing vs. all
Spinuzzi believes that neither side of the dichotomy is a sufficient framework for designing. He offers an alternative view—a decentralized approach called genre tracing. Genre tracing provides researchers with a critical tool set to identify these destabilizations, review their causes, and most importantly, follow their effects across multiple levels. This multilevel view and integrated scope offers the researcher a view of how workers are engaging genres, the problems that occur and how solutions can be found. |
User-as-victim
Johnson views the user as a “victim” who is in need of saving. The user is empowered when included throughout the design process, giving his or her input to help make the design of the technology adequate for efficient use within the user’s context. |
User-as-hero
Applying the dramatic pentad in the fieldwork-to-formalization, the author explicitly discusses the power ratio with the user positioned as the victim, even when included throughout the designing process. Borrowing language from articulation theory, the power ratio empowers the designer as the hero, and dis-empowers the user. |
Call to arms
In User-Centered Technology: A Rhetorical Theory for Computers and Other Mundane Artifacts, Johnson offers a course of action to confront the issues presented in HCI. He insists that user-centered design must be taught and applied in both the academic and nonacademic spheres. Particularly in the academic sphere, he suggests educating students to become technical rhetoricians, well-versed “in the theory and practice of the arts of discourse” who apply this knowledge as “responsible member[s] of a greater social order” (Johnson, 158). |
System to open
Spinuzzi does not offer a ‘call to arms’ along the same vein of Johnson, but instead argues that open systems will, and to some extent already do, play a growing role in relationships of power between designer and user. He offers examples of open systems that allow the user to manipulate their environment and innovate solutions. In one such example, the author argues that in a spreadsheet that allows user-end programming, the designer has created an environment that facilitates work, but the user has freedom to create functions, macros and automated tasks that allows her to innovate solutions to destabilizations, which are indiscernible to the designer, without relying on the designer. |
Classical foundations
Johnson begins his book with a quote from Aristotle (thus places heavy emphasis on classical rhetorical theory):
“…the user, or in other words, the master, of the house will be a better judge than the builder, just as the pilot will judge better of the rudder than the carpenter, and the guest will judge better of the feast than the cook.” (Johnson, 3)
In other words, the one who uses the product will always be a better judge of that product than the one who makes it. Johnson believes that user-centered design is the best method to empower the user as “judge” as they will decide whether the product is most an effective work environment for their work. |
Steeped in activity theory
Genre tracing utilizes a multilevel and integrated- scope analysis that is able to trace genres and identify destabilizations that occur across multiple levels of activity: macroscopic (activity), mesoscopic (actions) and microscopic (operation). Spinuzzi examines the how the worker interacts with genres and their innovations “in which workers routinely engage as they use information systems to accomplish their activities” (4). Despite genre tracing being steeped in activity theory, Spinuzzi offers very little explanation of activity theory its limitations in HCI.
This is one point where some scholars have questioned the use of activity theory’s application of genre in genre tracing. |
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