[Air-l] Beyond Usability: Web Design, Digital Theory and the Humanities (CFP, 10/1)

[craig stroupe]

Dear AIR-L colleagues: Please consider this call for essays, with the usual 
apologies for any cross postings....  - Craig

* * * * *

Beyond Usability: Web Design, Digital Theory and the Humanities

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 in Word format or RTF by October 1, 
2002 either by e-mail to <cstroupe at 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.  Read the latest on the _Beyond 
Usability_ project at <http://www.d.umn.edu/~cstroupe/beyond.html>.

CONTEXT:

Since usability guru Jacob Nielsen declared the "end of web design" in a 
July 2000 column--see <http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20000723.html>--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--see <http://www.shorewalker.com/pages/siegel_turns-1.html>--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.

* * * * Craig Stroupe / Assistant Professor / University of Minnesota 
Duluth / Department of Composition / 1201 Ordean Court # 420/ Duluth, MN 
55812 / 218-726-6249 / fax 218-726-8228 / 
<http://www.d.umn.edu/~cstroupe>  * * * * 
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