[Sigia-l] what are best practices (was OT: Library Thing)

[Karl Fast]

> Your formulation ("What people ignore when they think they're
> smarter than everybody else") exposes the fallacy of the "best
> practices" rhetoric better than most, namely that some other
> "smarter" people know my problems, in my context, for my users, to
> be solved with my resources, better than me.

That is not what I meant. Quite the opposite. I was playfully
criticizing a particular attitude towards best practices, not best
practices themselves.

More specifically, I was criticizing the idea that best practices have
no value and should be ignored. I pointing out, in a humorous way,
that ignoring best practices is tantamount to saying that the
knowledge and experience of the individual outweighs the collective
knowledge and experience of the group. 

I am not, however, overlooking the observation that best practices do
not address the contextual aspects of a particular problem. In fact,
they cannot. Best practices are deliberately de-contextualized.

Best practices are a distillation of what has been learned by many
people, over many years, in many different but related situations. To
develop best practices the contextual details have to be stripped
away. So *by definition*, best practices are not contextual. To say
that best practices do not address contextual details is an
observation, not a criticism.

Critically, the lack of rich contextual details in best practices does
not mean that best practices are useless. To make such a claim is to
misunderstand what best practices are.

Best practices are guidelines. Heuristics. Rules of thumb. They are
not absolutes. They are not rules to be blindly followed. Best
practices offer guidance and advice, not answers. It is up to the
designer to mesh the general knowledge of a best practice with the
specific contextual details of a particular design problem.

The designer who takes best practices as absolutes is lazy. They use
best practices to avoid thinking. As Ziya said earlier, such people
turn to best practices when they have "run out of ideas and context."
I think this is an excellent criticism of designers, but a weak
criticism of best practices (at a meta level, it suggests poor
practice when using best practices).

But the designer who dismisses best practices as useless is also lazy.
They are unwilling to extract the hard-won knowledge, experience, and
advice captured by the best practice and combine it with their own
skills, expertise, and contextual knowledge. At best, the designer has
misunderstood the value, purpose, and nature of best practices. At
worst, the designer has assumed that nobody else has anything valuable
to teach them.

That is what I meant when I said that best practices are "what people
ignore when they think they're smarter than everybody else."

And that is all I have to say about that.


-- 
Karl Fast
http://www.livingskies.com/