Dispelling the notion of design as a black art in interaction design research

This week, for the Research Design series of papers, I chose Research Through Design as a Method for Interaction Design Research in HCI by Zimmerman et al [1]. They look at the HCI Community’s desire to reconcile the sometimes disparate aspects of design in research and design in practice. Zimmerman et al. propose a model of interaction design research for both the HCI research and practice communities. They also propose a set of criteria for evaluating the quality of contributions made by those who practice interaction design research.

As part of their methodology, they conducted semi-structured interviews with leading HCI research academics and interaction designers. They particularly put their focus on addressing “Wicked Problems”, a concept put forward by Melvin Webber[2] that describes a problem that cannot be accurately modeled because of the conflicting perspectives of the stakeholders involved.

While the authors proposed to formalize the many ideas present in HCI community into a single method, I feel that wasn’t accomplished in this paper. While they offer a model that coalesces the HCI research and HCI practice communities, this model is not comprehensive, and only acknowledges the differences present and how an academic in either camp can work with the disparate elements in HCI research as a whole. To present a comprehensive model would take a paper of its own.

However, where they have succeeded is in presenting the four critical lenses through which to evaluate interaction design research within HCI: Process, Invention, Relevance and Extensibility. Using examples such as the successful Xerox copier, they demonstrate how the design research community doesn’t have to view it as a ‘black art’ (as Wolf et al. put forward in their 2006 CHI paper [3]). These lenses are a good step forward, in dispelling the lack of cohesion due to no agreed upon standard being present in the critical evaluation of interaction design research.

The contributions of this paper make this a must read for anyone undertaking HCI design research. I will be referring to this paper again, at least to gain an understating of how my proposed contributions stack up against the four critical lenses. That is as good a place to start as any.

References

[1] J. Zimmerman, J. Forlizzi, and S. Evenson, “Research through design as a method for interaction design research in HCI,” Proc. SIGCHI Conf. Hum. factors Comput. Syst. – CHI ’07, pp. 493 – 502, 2007.
[2] Rittel, H.W.J., Webber, M.M. Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning. Policy Sciences 4, 2 (1973), 155- 66.
[3] Wolf, T.V., Rode, J.A., Sussman, J., Kellogg, W.A. Dispelling Design as the ‘Black Art’ of Chi. Proc. of CHI 2006, ACM Press (2006), 521-530.