Developing IT Design Ability Through Repertoires and Contextual Product Semantics

Abstract

A rich repertoire of templates and a developed language for design qualities are two essential components of professional design ability. We discuss ‘tools’ for the individual designers development of a repertoire and a use—quality language. Three examples are presented of how IT artifacts can be described and analysed in a way that is conducive to repertoire development. In our sample analyses, we identify a number of genre‐bound, contextual use qualities that represent steps toward a use‐quality language for IT design. These qualities are social action space, tight coupling, dynamic Gestalt, autonomy, intrinsic motivation and playability. We discuss how these tentative steps relate to product semantics in more mature design fields, and provide examples of exercises in repertoire and use‐quality language development for classroom and individual use.