Poietic design : Heuristics and applications

Abstract:

Good design is often derived from user-centred design, and systems have to be too adapted for their users. This delimits the system and the user alike. With poietic design, the system is designed to be less limited and the user is encouraged to get a deeper, more intuitive understanding of how it works. The properties of the proposed design philosophy poietic design are based on theoretical research and examples of artefacts that excel in communicating how they work. The properties, or heuristics, are used to analyse a digital system and a display, and to propose poietic redesigns. An experiment is conducted where the performance of the poietically designed display is compared to an ecological interface design (EID) display. The EID display was optimised for one of the tasks executed while the poietic display was designed to perform approximately as good for both tasks. The results show that the poietic design performed better than the EID display in the task that the EID design was not specifically designed for. This implies that poietic design has good potential to be used as a way to design information visualisation displays.