Why Persuasive Design Should Be Your Next Skill Set

I'm a designer and I understand what you mean. There are two different things going on here...

1. Design also has its own "architecture astronauts", people who theorize a lot but don't get things done. They are usually in academia, since there are not many companies willing to pay for design astronauting.

2. Design, despite being more closely related to engineering, is usually expressed from the perspective of art. That's why I think most programmers have problems getting a grasp of it. The reasons are mainly historical, but fortunately people are paying more attention to more rational approaches to design (Tufte, Krug).

To me it seems the author is trying to overreach the scope of UX (when it's already huge) with vague ideas of where it should head.

I think that's the spirit of the post, that building persuasive systems is moving/has moved into the real world in a principled way.

Disclaimer: I work with the author, and it's suprised me how much of a 'science' it really is (hypotheses can be tested, and the results can be measured and improved)

In my experience, the best designers bristle at the notion that they "just get on with it". They consider being learned in design a great badge of honor, as important as their innate sense of style. To them, the worst design transgression is harboring any strong artistic opinion without being well-read, theory included.

Loosely related thought: My favorite magic vs. method treatise is Poe's "The Philosophy of Composition". How seriously he hoped to be taken and how ingenuous his motivations are fun to debate, but I love the piece.

Grand theorizing isn't unique to design. I can name probably 20 variants of "x driven development".

It's important to design, but also important to explain and defend your designs.

The sort of ideas expressed in this article help set the stage for subtle design decisions.

I find in almost every field, there are those that enjoy theorizing and those that enjoy doing. The HCI & UX fields are no different.

HCI has both theoretical and scientific models that are often driven by cognitive science, psychology and neuroscience.

this team at Caltech is doing interesting research along these lines: http://www.rnl.caltech.edu/research/index.html

there's a field called "neuromarketing" which is based exactly on that kind of research. I think it's bizarre.

In the last hybrid I got a ride in, if you were drawing too heavily on the gas engine, the console backlighting would go from a soothing bluish-green to an angry red. Rather dramatic feedback, but I could feel myself responding to it - and I was a passenger.

There's a particular hybrid car out there that actually does have that if you drive outside of "environmentally sound" parameters... i.e. too hard of accelerations or high speeds. The idea is to encourage driving in such a way that maximizes your mileage, thus making the trees happy.

The first image that would come to my mind is the leaves swirling in my wake as I press the pedal to the floor around a fun corner (observing all proper speed limits and common sense, of course).

It seems that some designs are justified by people seeing a design they like, rationalizing it after the fact, and applying their rationalization in a way that is too general, without considering other ways the design could be interpreted.

I think it plays a scene of Bambi watching his Mom develop emphysema...=)