As designers, we view our work not merely as the production of products, but also as the creation of evocative and evolutionary artifacts that play important roles in shaping people’s lives. Well-designed artifacts tell people what functions they perform and how they perform them—this is why they have been designed, not merely produced or created. More important, through their design, well-designed artifacts also participate in the construction of human experience. In particular, carefully crafted artifacts can participate in the construction of human experiences surrounding how they (the artifacts themselves) can be used. Thus, we arrive at “Design for Usability,” a phrase we use to refer to the design of an artifact’s use through the design of its physical presence in the world. This chapter, then, is about a shift in perspective from “design as the post hoc application of form and appearance elements to functionality, with the intent of communicating that functionality” to “design as the conscious crafting of usability, through the skillful development of form and appearance elements, with the intent of providing people with the resources to perceive and construct usability themselves.” Expressed another way, we are talking about turning innovative concepts into everyday and universal operations through the design of things. As we said to ourselves while working on the “Design for Usability” project we are about to describe: “If we could make the experience of using a Xerox photocopier as simple and straightforward as the experience of walking through a door, then we will have made a truly usable copier.” We will demonstrate the process of designing according to this shift in perspective through a case study of a successful photocopier-design collaboration between Xerox Corporation (Xerox) and Fitch RichardsonSmith (FRS). Historically, Xerox has always pursued the goal of creating products and services intended to improve how people work and the overall quality of people’s work lives. More recently, Xerox copiers have not been designed as objects, but as artifacts that galvanize the work culture at Xerox to produce them and the widely distributed work culture of Xerox’s customers to make them part of their everyday activities.
The development of secular education: problems and prospects