Interaction to Practice in HCI

Kuutti & Bannon (2014) put forward their interpretation of the changing landscape of research in HCI in the paper ‘The Turn to Practice in HCI: Towards a Research Agenda’. The paper describes a split from what they call the traditional ‘interaction’ paradigm of research towards a ‘practice’ paradigm. They describe ‘interaction’ as the mainstream HCI research that focuses on novel systems and interactions between humans and computers as opposed to the growing trend towards a focus on practice, methods of research and design for new systems and interactions.

The authors go on to outline the different methodologies used by each paradigm. The interaction paradigm is said to use lab based studies, where participants follow a predefined set of tasks. These lab based studies are said to view all factors aside from the interaction as context, and as such fail to take politics and culture into consideration. Whereas, practice paradigm is said to be more observational, where studies often include observing people in workplaces and their daily routines to outline their interactions with machines. The authors argue that practice based design gives the ultimate context as they study the use of technology in everyday settings.

Kuutti & Bannon (2014) place a great deal of emphasis on practice based research over interaction, drawing on the view that research in the interaction paradigm falls under second wave HCI rather than third wave (Bødker 2006) but does highlight the fact that there are still many avenues of research where an interaction based approach would be more applicable.

The paper likens, in great detail, practice based research in HCI to practice based research in the social sciences but does not give many examples on practice based research in HCI. The authors give examples such as Scandinavian participatory design in IS and ECSCW that have generally employed a practice based approach to their research (Bødker 2006). The authors state that there are issues with ‘practice’ based research, highlighting that there is limited experience of this area of HCI. They state that those who implement user-centred design processes do not always address research in a practical manner and instead point to participatory design researches to lead the way in a practice based paradigm as they are the most experienced.

While the authors have gone to great lengths to outlines what a practice based research is in terms of the social sciences they note that an identical copy of such an approach would be inappropriate for HCI. The authors define practice in terms of HCI much more loosely, however, loosely defined as it may be, a practice based paradigm sets the stage for exciting and more exploratory research than seen in the traditional interaction areas.

The paper I have chosen in response to what exemplifies HCI for me is Grimes & Harper (2008)’s – Celebratory Technology: New Directions for Food Research in HCI.