HCI Research as Problem-Solving, Oulasvirta & Hornbæk, 2016

Facing growing controversy about the work in HCI being lacking from a science philosophy perspective, and a wide discord in the views of the different researchers in this field, Oulasvirta and Hornbæk’s CHI’16 paper, “HCI Research as Problem-Solving” sets to redefine the scientific outlines along which we approach HCI. This redefinition, based on Larry Laudan’s work, is indeed quite necessary to fold design, engineering, and implementation work into our definition of what research is, giving some room to the constructive and practical in addition to the more conceptual traditional approach.

HCI research, as proposed by the authors, is problem and solution centric, clearly stating problems and validating the solutions based on their contribution to the problem-solving capacity. Research problems are categorized into clearly defined groups; empirical – relating to real-world phenomena, conceptual – attempting to explain unconnected phenomena, and constructive – offering novel solutions or building on existing ones. Solutions are also validated against set criteria: significance of the problem the solution solves to stakeholders, effectiveness of the solution in fulfilling the main problem aspects, efficiency of applying the solution, transferability of the solution to other related problems, and confidence in the robustness of the solution.

A most interesting part of this paper is its survey of CHI contributions. While not rigorous, it is quite enlightening, and interesting. The authors read the best papers of CHI 2015 proceedings, and attempt to classify them according to problem type. The result was a striking absence of conceptual work, about which the authors raise alarms and recommend that more effort should be put to research the concepts that “glue” the empirical and constructive research done in the field. Another resulting observation is that while all problem-solving capacity criteria are mentioned in the papers, there’s no clear consensus on how they’re applied or measured.

This approach, in my view, is a well-structured one, it is inclusive of all research efforts, while still setting conditions for good research. Attempts to appeal to the standards of classic science philosophy far too often lead to awkwardly written papers, and manufactured explanations and scenarios used to give excuses to constructive work that would otherwise stand fine on its own.

However, the same can be said about the problem-solving approach, for attempts to frame every research effort as a problem-solving effort can be limiting to the more explorative-oriented research and lead to the same kind of awkwardness in presentation. The authors address several objections to this effect in the closing section of the paper by saying that this is either intentional, in order to guide research in the right direction, or not necessarily a problem, where this framing is, in their view, correct.

Another point worth mentioning is that while the paper notes that HCI is very lacking in conceptual work, a problem-solving approach is likely to lean towards the more constructive problems, despite the definition being intended differently, contributing even more to the “hole” in HCI research.

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Literature

Oulasvirta, A. and Hornbæk, K., 2016, May. HCI Research as Problem-Solving. In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 4956-4967). ACM. 

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A paper that exemplifies HCI to me

Lopes, P., Jonell, P. and Baudisch, P., 2015, April. Affordance++: allowing objects to communicate dynamic use. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 2515-2524). ACM. (Link)