Reprioritizing the relationship between HCI research and practice

There has been an ongoing conversation about the role and relationship of theory and practice in the HCI community. This paper explores this relationship privileging a practice perspective through a tentative model, which describes a “bubble-up” of ideas from practice to inform research and theory development, and an accompanying “trickle-down” of theory into practice. Interviews were conducted with interaction designers, which included a description of their use of design methods in practice, and their knowledge and use of two common design methods—affinity diagramming and the concept of affordance. Based on these interviews, potential relationships between theory and practice are explored through this model. Disseminating agents already common in HCI practice are addressed as possible mechanisms for the research community to understand practice more completely. Opportunities for future research, based on the use of the tentative model in a generative way, are considered.

There is an undesirable gap between HCI research aimed at influencing interaction design practice and the practitioners in question. To close this gap, we advocate a theoretical and methodological focus on the day-to-day, lived experience of designers. To date, this type of theory-generative, experientially oriented research has focused on the users of technologies, not the designers. In contrast, we propose that HCI researchers turn their attention to producing theories of interaction design practice that resonate with practitioners themselves. In part one of this paper, we describe the mismatch between HCI research and interaction design practices. Then we present vignettes from an observational study of commercial design practice to illustrate the issues at hand. In part two, we discuss methodological and theoretical changes in research practice that might support the goal of integrating HCI research with interaction design practices. We then discuss current research methods and theories to identify changes that might enlarge our view on practice. In part three, we elaborate on our theoretically minded agenda and a kind of ideal-type theory.

Proceedings of the SIGCHI …, 2007

For years the HCI community has struggled to integrate design in research and practice. While design has gained a strong foothold in practice, it has had much less impact on the HCI research community. In this paper we propose a new model for interaction design research within HCI. Following a research through design approach, designers produce novel integrations of HCI research in an attempt to make the right thing: a product that transforms the world from its current state to a preferred state. This model allows interaction designers to make research contributions based on their strength in addressing under-constrained problems. To formalize this model, we provide a set of four lenses for evaluating the research contribution and a set of three examples to illustrate the benefits of this type of research. Author Keywords design, interaction design, interaction design research, HCI research, research through design, wicked problems, design theory, design method ACM Classification Keywords H5.2. User Interfaces: Theory and methods.

2008

In recent years, a number of academic institutions around the world have worked to integrate design practice and thinking with engineering and behavioral science in support of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) education and research. While the HCI community generally has been enthusiastic about the benefits that design can bring to this developing interdisciplinary field, tension exists around the role of design in research, because no agreed upon model for a design research contribution exists.

People and Computers IX, 1994

The human-computer interaction (HCI) community is generating a large number of analytic approaches such as models of user cognition and user-centred design representations. However, their successful uptake by practitioners depends on how easily they can be understood, and how usable and useful they are. We present a framework which identifies four different 'gulfs' between HCI modelling and design techniques and their intended users. These gulfs are potential opportunities to support designers if techniques can be encapsulated in appropriate forms. Use of the gulfs framework is illustrated in relation to three very different strands of work: (i) representing HCI design spaces and design rationale, (ii) modelling user cognition and (iii) modelling interactive system behaviour. We summarise what is currently known about these gulfs, report empirical investigations showing how these gulfs can be 'bridged,' and describe plans for further investigations. We conclude that it is desirable for practitioners' requirements to shape analytic approaches much earlier in their development than has been the case to date. The work reported in this paper illustrates some of the techniques which can be recruited to this end.

This special interest group probes potential problems between HCI researchers and the practitioners who are consumers of research, to explore the extent of the problems and propose possible solutions. It will start with the results of the CHI 2010 workshop on the same topic, articulating factors that may render some of the research literature inaccessible or irrelevant to practitioners. When should HCI researchers be concerned about the relevance of their work to practitioners? How should practitioners communicate their needs for research? Participants will discuss these topics and others that both groups can use to help bridge the gap between research and practice in HCI.

CHI'08 extended abstracts on Human …, 2008

Though interaction designers critique interfaces as a regular part of their research and practice, the field of HCI lacks a proper discipline of interaction criticism. By interaction criticism we mean rigorous, evidence-based interpretive analysis that explicates relationships among elements of an interface and the meanings, affects, moods, and intuitions they produce in the people that interact with them; the immediate goal of this analysis is the generation of innovative design insights. We summarize existing work offering promising directions in interaction criticism to build a case for a proper discipline. We then propose a framework for the discipline, relating each of its parts to recent HCI research.

Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2015

Research in HCI involves a wide variety of knowledge production-bringing forth theories, guidelines, methods, practices, design case studies / exemplars, frameworks, concepts, qualities and so on. This workshop is about mapping out the spaces, forms and potentials of such knowledge production in interaction design research.

This juried alt.chi paper argues that philosophy can seed HCI innovations. Recent developments in ontology open up novel methodological opportunities. Alain Badiou’s situational ontology breaks an apparent impasse between essentialism and relationalism. For Badiou, the essence of any entity is a multiplicity formed from what is counted-as-one, but its parts bring potentials for change. These can exploited through the concept of design situations that contain opportunities for designing as connecting. Far from being a barren abstraction, this opens up new spaces for demonstrable practical methodological innovation in Interaction Design.