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Call for Papers

Beyond Usability:

Web Design, Digital Theory and the Humanities

Introduction

This book collection will consider the contributions that the humanities disciplines can make to understanding and improving the emerging practices of Web design and use. The editor calls for essays that describe or theorize ways that the humanities disciplines might enlarge, enrich or provide an alternative to the scientistic standard of "usability," which has achieved a critical hegemony in current discussions of Web-site creation. These essays should begin and sustain a dialogue across the art/science dichotomy, which the emergence of usability has polarized. More than a common-sense focus on writing or designing for an intended user, usability is founded on a narrowly instrumentalist view of language and design. That is, the form of a site, from a usability perspective, is merely a neutral container for the content, which always carries the same meaning regardless of the presentation, expression or performance. In usability terms, writing or design that calls attention to itself is bad writing/design because it fails to convey the message transparently. In contrast, this collection will use the theories and practices of the humanities to explore how Web design can be reimagined and refigured if language and form are understood as constituting meaning, and if verbal or visual expression is recognized not just as a delivery mechanism of "information," but also a medium of consciousness and thought. Disciplinary perspectives might include, but are not limited to, rhetoric and composition, cultural studies, creative writing, literary studies, history, critical theory, communication, art history, media studies, women's/gender studies, etc. The collection will speak to an audience of scholars and advanced students, and include critical pieces that reflect on institutional and cultural practices, as well as practical pieces that describe and recommend specific techniques of humanities-based digital design, online use, and electronic pedagogies.

Send a 500-word abstract and short vita (cv) in Word format or RTF by October 1, 2002 either by e-mail to <cstroupe@d.umn.edu> or by mail to

Craig Stroupe
Department of Composition
1201 Ordean Court # 420
University of Minnesota Duluth
Duluth, MN 55812-2496

E-mail inquiries and questions welcomed.

Context

Since usability guru Jacob Nielsen declared the "end of web design" in a July 2000 column, common wisdom has held that the age of experimentation and exploration in Web design is over, and that the practices of digital communication now require a very high degree of standardization, conventionalization, and predictability based on the scientistic principles of usability. In Nielsen's words, sites must "tone down their individual appearance and distinct design.... Users spend most of their time at other sites. This means that users prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know."

Commenting on the apparent triumph of the usability approach, David Walker reports that designer David Siegel, whose 1996 book Creating Killer Web Sites was among the first to define an aesthetic of "third-generation" Web design, essentially "joined the Nielsen camp" in 1998 by abandoning his efforts at cutting-edge design and turning to providing strategic consulting for businesses developing presences on the Web. Walker asserts that Siegel's legacy is a dwindling tradition of Web design that ignores the needs of users, who "need science" but too often "receive only art." This collection seeks to extend the dialogue between humanities-based writing/design and scientistic usability into new territory beyond the promotion of usability as the final word in Web design.

Resources

The following items were suggested by Danny Butt as part of an online dialogue about the nature and value of usability studies