Thoughtless Acts?
Jane Fulton Suri, writing out of the design firm IDEO, offers Thoughtless Acts? as a primer in the observation method that keeps the firm's practice human-centred. Her argument is that people constantly perform small, unconscious adaptations as they move through the built world, and that these are worth looking at closely. The examples are domestic and familiar: a jacket thrown over the back of a chair to claim the seat, an object held in the teeth when both hands are full. Such acts, the book holds, reveal subtle but crucial ways in which people behave in a world that is not always perfectly tailored to their needs. The body of the book is a collection of dozens of snapshots, often humorous, each catching a fleeting adaptation or a minor exploitation of whatever happened to be at hand. Taken together they make the case for a common-sense discipline of noticing, one the publisher presents as capable of inspiring designers and anyone else engaged in creative work, and as a privileged view of how the firm arrives at people-friendly products, services and spaces.
Written from the library catalogue record for the Chronicle Books edition at Open Library.
What this vault takes from it
Reliability
Not audited here. 1 note in this vault draws on it.
People
- Jane Fulton Suri