Core77

Steve Portigal's latest piece for interactions magazine is a wonderful trek through language, meaning, and yes, interaction. It begins with my all-time favorite story of Steve's:

A few years ago, I took a client into the field to study how families were using home entertainment technology. We met one family in which the father was visibly proud of his provider role, especially regarding technology. On multiple occasions he mispronounced TiVo, the up-and-coming digital video recorder brand, as "tie-vo." Without looking, I could feel my client (an engineer) wince every time the father did this. But being a good interviewer, I reflected back the language our respondent was using, and in my follow-up questions, I also referred to "tie-vo." When my client asked the family a question later in the session, he was physically unable to use the "wrong" pronunciation, and referred to TiVo as "tee-vo." At that moment, the dynamic in the room shifted critically. The family leader had been shown up by some visitors, and suddenly we were the experts, not him. The interview wasn't ruined, but we were sorely limited in how far we could go. Even the mere pronunciation of a word affected the interaction.

And then later hits a bit closer to home:

As professionals with titles on business cards, departments we deliver to, and professional organizations to which we seek legitimizing memberships, we're probably quite familiar with the death spiral of naming just what it is we do. Maybe you're fat and sassy as a "senior interaction designer," but pretty soon you're going to need to become a "senior user experience designer," and not that long ago you may have been a "junior human factors engineer" a "junior interface designer" or a "usability specialist." One firm I worked for insisted on branding the practice as HID (for Human-Interface Design), which really was a pretty useless (confusing, nonstandard) branding, especially if we had to say it out loud. Struggle to respin discipline/department/professional organization nomenclature does very little beyond giving administrators something they can sink their teeth into amidst so much of the ambiguity that is necessary given the nature of our work.

Take a nice break right now and read the whole thing here.