[Sigia-l] Eat yer veggies!

[Ziya Oz]

An excellent overview of the complete mess our American diet is in, the
cover story in today's New York Times Magazine:

<http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/28/magazine/28nutritionism.t.html>

Something to chew on, but what's this got to do with what we do?

The way "best practices" are created, promoted, rescinded and remarketed in
the diet universe maps closely with how "best practices" are
decontextualized in the design world. Nuggets of preferences are shaped into
best practices/methods/rules, then broadly misapplied in sufficiently
different problem spaces. I see this all the time, and point them out
frequently here.

One way to excuse this is to declare (the digital flavor of) design to be a
young profession, not yet fully cooked. The food biz has been around much
longer, of course, and yet suffers from the same decontextualization
problem. So it's really a mode of thinking and purpose that's at fault here.

As I was reading the article above, I kept thinking of how a holistic
process like design is broken into disjointed processes tied to deliverables
(Food Culture -> Food Science) and "sold" in bits and pieces as if context
wasn't primary, as if a bunch of "best practices" can be combined and
user-tested to produce a "great meal."

If I were in academia I'd make this article a non-optional part of the
design syllabus.

----
Ziya

"If I had asked my customers what they wanted,
they would have asked for a faster horse." -- Henry Ford