Attention to Detail: Annotation of a Design Process

In this paper Jarvis et al. [2] propose a new approach to documenting the design process in research papers using an annotated description of the journey. They explain that the design of the product or artefact is often the most time-consuming phase of any project, yet it is the least documented in research papers. They chart the production of three ‘Indoor Weather Stations’ which are used to monitor the microclimate of the home with the aim of making sensor data more legible.

 

They use the majority of the paper to show images of each device created with an explanation of how decisions were made throughout the process (see Figure 1), the amount of prototypes that were developed, the reasons for the materials they chose and much more. Upon reading the paper, I realised it was the most insight I’ve had as to how products or artefacts are actually made from all the HCI papers I have read thus far and it was incredibly helpful.

 

They conclude the paper by showing that this type of method is already used in other fields of study and arguing the benefits of this process being more widely used for research papers. They do state “We acknowledge that this paper will polarise opinion”, however, for me personally, I wholly support their idea. From my small amount of experience in college of product design, the design process can tell us a lot and if it is neglected in research then we are missing a whole body of knowledge that we could be making more use of.

From other research it is clear there are different opinions on this matter but it has been shown that the CHI community has a history of being multi-disciplinary adopting practices from a variety of fields [3] so why should this be any different? Yet is clear that integrating such practices into research has proved difficult particularly with some suggesting that annotations “have weak explanatory and predictive power” [1]. However, there have been attempts to create a model for design in research to help alleviate the issues caused by not including the design process in papers [4].

I chose the paper because I was instantly intrigued and very taken with the idea of including the design process in research. I had already noticed that the design process is often neglected in research papers. In addition, not being from a technology background, the leaps that papers often make from idea to artefact with little explanation of the design was often confusing for me and I did not understand the field enough to know how the researchers got from A to B. Although I understand that the deployment and evaluation of the end product is essential, I also see much value in documenting the design process because of the methods and intricacies and from my small amount of knowledge from college and doing product design, the processes can be incredibly valuable.

Overall, I understand the solution cannot be as simple as extending the methodology section of research papers but I feel there needs to be more of a place for the design process to be documented in research and to make a contribution to the field.

[1] Bowers, J. (2012, June). The logic of annotated portfolios: communicating the value of’research through design’. In Proceedings of the Designing Interactive Systems Conference (pp. 68-77). ACM.

[2] Jarvis, N., Cameron, D., & Boucher, A. (2012, October). Attention to detail: annotations of a design process. In Proceedings of the 7th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction: Making Sense Through Design (pp. 11-20). ACM.

[3] Wolf, T. V., Rode, J. A., Sussman, J., & Kellogg, W. A. (2006, April). Dispelling design as the black art of CHI. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human Factors in computing systems (pp. 521-530). ACM.

[4] Zimmerman, J., Forlizzi, J., & Evenson, S. (2007, April). Research through design as a method for interaction design research in HCI. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems (pp. 493-502). ACM.