7 - How to Work with Theory

Abstract

This chapter discusses the theoretical background of constructive design research. It elaborates on the methodological approaches. At the surface, the approaches may seem like independent silos; if one goes beyond the surface, one will find a more common core. This shared core also explains why constructive design research differs from the rationalistic design methodologies. Interaction design has inherited its methodological premises from computer science. However, many products failed because they did not do what the users wanted or even needed them to do: No amount of massaging the details of the interface could address the fact that computers were often doing the wrong thing. For many reasons new ways to bring research into design were needed. There was a need to bring experimentation and “craft” into design research to more effectively imagine what could and should be. Researchers in the emerging field of interaction design turned away from cognition to post-Cartesian thinking: phenomenology, pragmatism, interactionism, and many strands of avant-garde art that connected designers to things like psychoanalysis and existentialism. These philosophies provided consistency and direction but encouraged exploration rather than prediction. They encouraged using judgment and nonsymbolic forms of intelligence. They also placed design in the center of research and saw theory as explication that comes after design. Finally, this turn connected design to the human and social sciences that had gone through a “linguistic turn” and “interpretive turn” two decades earlier.