Crafting a Place for Interaction Design Research in HCI

Abstract

In recent years, a number of academic institutions around the world have worked to integrate design practice and thinking with engi neering and behavioral science in support of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) education and research. While the HCI commu nity 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 contribution exists. Over the last three years, we have undertaken an inquiry to understand the nature of the relationship between interaction design and in HCI, and to discover and invent methods for interaction designer researchers to more substantially collaborate and contribute to HCI research. Through our inquiry, we learned that many HCI researchers' commonly held view of design is focusing on the surface structure of products. This echoes Ble vis et al's claim that most people in the world view design as adding decoration.1 This limited view of design makes it difficult for HCI researchers to articulate how they would like designers to participate in research. In addition, the interaction design community lacks a unified vision of what design researchers can contribute to HCI research, and to interaction design at large. The current lack of design participation in HCI represents a lost opportunity to benefit from the added perspective of design thinking in a collaborative, interdisciplinary environment. The HCI community has much to gain from the addition of design thinking; a design perspective that employs a holistic approach to addressing under-constrained problems, and that adds a needed counterpoint to the reductionist approach favored by the scientists and engineers. To address this situation, we have developed a new model of interaction design in HCI intended to allow designers to participate more evenly. While this is not the only way for designers to participate in HCI research, we wanted to create a method that allowed designers to make a design contribution without imitating the methods of other disciplines. Our model builds on Frayling's2 idea of research through design, stressing how interaction design