Reading "Sketching User Experiences: Getting the Design Right and the Right Design" by Bill Buxton, I ran across this part that I found relevant:

"in order to design a tool, we must make our best efforts to understand the larger social and physical context within which it is intended to function. Hutchins refers to such situated activities as "in the wild" in order to distinguish their real-world embodiment from some abstract laboratory manifestation that is as idealized as it is un-realistic. I call this process that expressly takes these types of considerations into account "design for the wild". (...) The only way to engineer the future tomorrow is to have lived in it yesterday

To adequately take the social and physical context into account in pursuing a design, we must experience some manifestation of it in those contexts (the wild) while still in the design cycle"

Why do I blog this? preparing some proposal I found this point very nicely expressed and may quote it. Buxton's phrasing interestingly exemplifies this important point. Besides, I quite like the Gibsonesque "The future is already here but it's just not evenly distributed" approach situated in time and mostly in the past.