Here’s some interest (not required) reads from Adaptive Path for UCD students (with extracts):

Design Schools: Please Start Teaching Design Again
by Dan Saffer
…I was taught that design has three components: thinking, making, and doing. (Doing is the synthesis, presentation, and evaluation of a design; the bridge between thinking and making.) If all design schools are teaching is the thinking, well, they are missing the other two thirds of the equation. They have abandoned craft for craze. Thinking without the making and doing is almost useless in the job market, unless you want to work at Accenture or some other big consulting firm. It probably won’t help you get a job as a designer in a studio environment. You’d be better off getting a degree in Humanities; at least you would be well-rounded… [read...]

Why usability is a path to failure
by Todd Wilkens
…So, why oh why do people in this day age still hold up “usability” as something laudable in product and service design? Praising usability is like giving me a gold star for remembering that I have to put each leg in a *different* place in my pants to put them on. (Admittedly, I *do* give my 2 year old daughter a gold star for this but then she’s 2.) Usability is not a strategy for design success. The efficiency you create in your interface will be copied almost instantaneously by your competitors. Recently, I’m even coming to believe that focusing on usability is actually a path to failure. Usability is too low level, too focused on minutia. It can’t compel people to be interested in interacting with your product or service. It can’t make you compelling or really differentiate you from other organizations. Or put another way, there’s only so far you can get by streamlining the shopping cart on your website…  [read...]

Experience design is not about brands
by Peter Merholz
…The unfortunate company-centeredness of the Design Council’s discussion of brand is in evidence in their 13 examples — most of these are explicit branding ploys, attempts by various companies to impress their brand upon customers through environmental design that suffocates any attempt by customers to express themselves, their desires, what they as people want to accomplish. This isn’t to say that these various examples are “bad” — they might be tons of fun, totally worth the time and money. But if “customer-centric relationship models” are a key element of experience design, what does that have to do with the Guinness Storehouse, “the ultimate experience of the character of Guinness.”… [read...]

And if you’re looking for some good books on the topic of UCD…

Usability and Interface Design Books
posted on Smashing Magazine