A Critique of Kuuti and Bannon’s review of the ‘Practice’ HCI Paradigm

Kuuti et al. have described the need for methodological tools and guidelines to move towards a more practice-based HCI research in their paper titled ‘The turn to practice in HCI: towards a research agenda’. The authors argue that “a new paradigm for HCI research” has been emerging in recent years, which they labelled as the ‘practice’ paradigm. This paradigm is differentiated against the ‘interaction’ paradigm, which they posit had ‘held sway for many years’ in mainstream HCI research, but is slowly being replaced by the newer paradigm, influenced by the ‘practice turn’ in the social sciences.

While the authors do state that ‘this does not mean that Interaction paradigm is somehow wrong, or must disappear’, it is clear that they are unequivocal in their praise and support for the Practice paradigm. However, the authors do offer a number of well substantiated reasons why they favour one over the other. For one, the Interaction paradigm puts the interaction between human and computer in ‘a privileged position while everything else is considered as a context to this interaction’. This is in contrast with the Practice paradigm which ‘decenters’ this ‘privileged position of interaction’ and considers it ‘only one factor among several that are interesting and important’.

Nevertheless, the authors make a claim that the Practice paradigm includes the cultural and political aspects in the origins and development of the practice, as opposed to the Interaction paradigm which ‘eschews any need for politics in its analysis’. The authors do not explain why that is important, or the implications of this difference.

They draw from a wide survey of research in the social sciences, arguing with force that the practice perspective sheds especially in light of the varying (but not necessarily contradictory) schools of practice theories. The authors do this well, by succinctly covering the differing viewpoints both contemporary and historic.

The authors support their argument for Practice, by citing work done in HCI-related fields like Information Systems (IS), Participatory Design (PD) and computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW). However, it could be argued that they are over-reaching with their conclusion that support for ‘Practice-oriented theorizing’ is widespread in IS, as they themselves highlight much IS research occurring recently as being antithetical. They fail to address where such research’s ‘over-elaborate articulation of theoretical frames’ fits into the Interaction and Practice paradigms.

Finally, the authors offer steps to move further towards Practice oriented research in HCI. They posit effectively that the Practice paradigm has been the undercurrent for much research since the 1980s, despite it being ‘rather unsystematic, partial and tacit’. They put forward the claim that studying isolated aspects of practices will not lead to the benefits that a holistic approach is capable of offering.

However, in the final analysis, one can still legitimately conclude that since the Practice paradigm does have a number of drawbacks (mentioned, but not addressed in the paper), and therefore, should not be seen as the HCI practitioner’s panacea.

The paper that embodies HCI for me is:
When second wave HCI meets third wave challenges (S Bødker, 2006)
http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1182476