The Conceptual Levels and Theory Languages of Interaction Design

Interactions, 2001

… and Design in Harmony: Proceedings of the …, 1991

Design Research Society International Conference, K. …, 2006

Design for Business, Volume 2

For the average reader of this publication, the question ‘Why design matters?’ is an unnecessary one. Yet, for most people, design remains an exotic profession focused on making beautiful things. Aesthetics is a part of design, but design is much more than that. Design is about solving everyday problems by overcoming limitations, challenges and constraints in a creative way. In a society that plans for its future in a world of limited resources, design certainly matters.

Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human Factors in computing systems - CHI '06, 2006

Although ethnography has become a common approach in HCI research and design, considerable confusion still attends both ethnographic practice and the criteria by which it should be evaluated in HCI. Often, ethnography is seen as an approach to field investigation that can generate requirements for systems development; by that token, the major evaluative criterion for an ethnographic study is the implications it can provide for design. Exploring the nature of ethnographic inquiry, this paper suggests that "implications for design" may not be the best metric for evaluation and may, indeed, fail to capture the value of ethnographic investigations.

dkds.dk

Ai & Society, 2007

Design work and design knowledge in Information Systems (IS) is important for both research and practice. Yet there has been comparatively little critical attention paid to the problem of specifying design theory so that it can be communicated, justified, and developed cumulatively. In this essay we focus on the structural components or anatomy of design theories in IS as a special class of theory. In doing so, we aim to extend the work of Walls, Widemeyer and El Sawy (1992) on the specification of information systems design theories (ISDT), drawing on other streams of thought on design research and theory to provide a basis for a more systematic and useable formulation of these theories. We identify eight separate components of design theories: (1) purpose and scope, (2) constructs, (3) principles of form and function, (4) artifact mutability, (5) testable propositions, (6) justificatory knowledge (kernel theories), (7) principles of implementation, and (8) an expository instantiation. This specification includes components missing in the Walls et al. adaptation of and Simon (1969) and also addresses explicitly problems associated with the role of instantiations and the specification of design theories for methodologies and interventions as well as for products and applications. The essay is significant as the unambiguous establishment of design knowledge as theory gives a sounder base for arguments for the rigor and legitimacy of IS as an applied discipline and for its continuing progress. A craft can proceed with the copying of one example of a design artifact by one artisan after another. A discipline cannot.