No, surely not, no…

More hilarity and hijinks in my Software Engineering Class as we begin our Contextual Design unit. For the non-HCIers in the audience, Contextual Design essentially involves going to a user’s context and modelling his/her work in order to thoroughly understand it. It’s the formative method that I feel is most emphasized in our program.

The assignment for today in Software Engineering involved creating work models. Part of the instructions were to “pretend that you have just done a contextual interview with one potential user (you) of a problem frames modeling tool, and you want to use this information to construct work models.”

Now, I’m a pretty talkative guy in most conversations; but when the instructions tell me to pretend that I interviewed myself… man, they have no idea what they’re getting into. I happen to consider myself a pretty interesting person… so in the process of constructing work models, I can pretend that I said all sorts of stuff to myself during the work (I probably was thinking half of these things during the meeting in question anyway).

In no model are my desultory musings more relevant than in the Culture Model. This is where you model the more intangible influences on a person’s work. And let me tell you - I told myself all about these intangible influences that were distracting me from the meeting. I felt sympathy for my professors (read: I was lazy) so my culture model is pretty basic…

(click image to enlarge)

…but not without one random influence (hey, it was the day of my birthday celebration) and a cheap shot at the professors for how long the project took. Hey, it’s their fault for telling me to pretend that I talked to myself.