Dispelling Design as the ‘Black Art’ of CHI

This paper focuses on the use of creative design within Human Computer Interaction. The authors Wolf et al. argue that creative design is distinct from, but complementary to the more frequently utilised user-centred design. The authors argue that user-centred design is favoured because it uses a process of ‘formal iterations’ which makes it possible to justify and evidence that each iteration is refining the design towards a ‘correct’ result. In contrast creative design has been viewed by some as being ‘arbitrary or illusive’ and thus lacking the rigour to make it suitable for academic enquiry within HCI. In this paper the authors seek to demonstrate that creative designers use their own distinct form of rigour and more broadly that creative design could be of significant benefit to the CHI community, specifically for its ability to address ‘wicked’ problems.

The author’s argument says that in creative design, instead of the formalised iterations, the designs evolve through judgements applied by the designers, and sketching serves as a substitute for iterative prototyping. The general design problem is defined during discussions with clients, and design briefs are analogous to system requirements. The critiquing of designs serves to evaluate the quality of the design judgements that have been taken during the process. This critique can be presented in writing to the community at large which serves to make the whole creative design process rigorous.

One issue I had with the paper is that the term ‘repeatability’ here means that there is consistency in terms of each designer’s output (i.e. if they took on the same design challenge again they will produce similar results). However this is different from the positivist definition I have come to understand which says that different researchers should be able to repeat an experiment and get the same results. It would not be possible for repeatability to exist like this in creative design with designers being able to achieve the same results as each other, as in creative design the designer is seen as being an integral part of the design process.