This article looks at the psychological concept of subsumption as it may be applied to the methodology of user centered design (UCD). The idea of subsumption is that you place new experiences or new entities under existing categories. Thus, if you see a creature for the first time and it looks like a cat, then you would think of it as a type of cat. In UCD, this concept expresses itself as the use of existing forms of design to represent new information. Thus, online calendars represent wall calendars, news sites look like newspapers, the computer desktop looks like, well, a desktop. But there is more to it than that, because with completely new technologies - such as the telephone, or the Sony Walkman, a completely new design scheme was developed, one that looks and feels familiar to users, but isn't a clear cut case of subsumption. This is where the art - and even the magic - of UCD comes into play.
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