Design Framework - Just the Essentials
Gary Klein, naturalistic decision making expert and author of Intuition at Work and Sources of Power, suggests a three-step process to analyze cognitive tasks. The steps are,
Knowledge Elicitation. Here the intent is to gather first-hand information (observation, interviews, etc.), and not second-hand information (training manuals, PPT slides, etc.).
Analysis. This phase is still a hunt for clarity (inspecting, selecting, simplifying, abstracting, and transforming information, developing explanations, and extracting meaning).
Knowledge Representation. This is interesting. It is the transformation of the findings from step-2 into a more usable representation (process of displaying data and depicting relationships, explanations, and the meaning).
These steps seem to offer a simple design framework, especially for knowledge oriented work. Not because the steps follow the ubiquitous Rule of Three, but because they include just the essentials and thus are easier to communicate to team members and to clients.
Perhaps this oversimplifies but, and its a big but, simple rules lead to complex behaviours (at least complexity theory suggest this e.g. flocking birds). I think this works for me... I'm still cogitating...
Posted by Paul Goodison at July 30, 2003 02:48 PM | TrackBack