Understanding Interaction Design Practices
Understanding Interaction Design PracticesElizabeth GoodmanErik StoltermanSchool of InformationSchool of InformaticsUniversity of California, Berkeleyand ComputingBerkeley, CA 94720 USAIndiana University, n, IN 47405 USAestolter@indiana.eduABSTRACTThere is an undesirable gap between HCI research aimed atinfluencing interaction design practice and the practitionersin question. To close this gap, we advocate a theoretical andmethodological focus on the day-to-day, lived experience ofdesigners. To date, this type of theory-generative,experientially oriented research has focused on the users oftechnologies, not the designers. In contrast, we propose thatHCI researchers turn their attention to producing theories ofinteraction design practice that resonate with practitionersthemselves. In part one of this paper, we describe themismatch between HCI research and interaction designpractices. Then we present vignettes from an observationalstudy of commercial design practice to illustrate the issuesat hand. In part two, we discuss methodological andtheoretical changes in research practice that might supportthe goal of integrating HCI research with interaction designpractices. We then discuss current research methods andtheories to identify changes that might enlarge our view onpractice. In part three, we elaborate on our theoreticallyminded agenda and a kind of ideal-type theory.Author KeywordsInteraction design, practice, theoryACM Classification KeywordsH5.m [Miscellaneous]; K.4.3 [Organizational Impacts]General TermsHuman FactorsINTRODUCTIONIn many academic disciplines, one major research goal isinfluence on practice. The sharing of examples and theoriesof practice fuels education, research, and innovation incommercial activity. Indeed, human-computer interaction(HCI) researchers often describe HCI as an integration ofacademic practice and professional practices [3, 18, 32] – inPermission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work forpersonal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies arenot made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copiesbear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise,or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires priorspecific permission and/or a fee.CHI 2011, May 7–12, 2011, Vancouver, BC, Canada.Copyright 2011 ACM 978-1-4503-0267-8/11/05. 10.00.Ron WakkarySchool of Interactive Artsand TechnologySimon Fraser UniversitySurrey, BC Canada V3T 0A3rwakkary@sfu.caparticular, the new profession of interaction design.Interaction design – the specification of digital behaviors inresponse to human or machine stimuli – is a complexdiscipline. Ideally, interaction designers combineknowledge of technological possibilities of the platformsand systems in play, skilled aesthetic judgment, andempirically informed empathy with potential users [28, 36].Interaction designers as practitioners work in many arenasof technology development, from universities and researchlabs to business product groups and small start-ups.Multiple studies have suggested that many frameworks andtheories proposed in HCI research (ie, [34, 43]) have notfulfilled creators’ goals of influencing professional designpractice. We propose this disconnection in part emergesfrom a persistent failure to adequately address the livedcomplexity of design practices. HCI’s research commitmentto systematic analysis of how people make use oftechnologies is well-known. Yet there has been much lessattention paid to understanding the diversity ofenvironments in which design takes place. This inattention,we propose, results from an assumption that the socialworlds and epistemological beliefs of the imagined “users”of HCI theories and frameworks — in particular,professional interaction designers — are largely identical tothose of the researchers producing them.Interaction design, as a profession, has its own distinctprofessional associations, publications and conferences1. Ifwe as HCI researchers want to participate in this world, wewill need to broaden our current research agenda. Wecannot even assess the existence and nature of any gapwithout attending more closely to how professionaldesigners actually work, and how they understand ofessional roles. A broader research agenda could helpHCI researchers understand and theorize what interactiondesign is, and present opportunities for HCI research tocontribute to a broader range of practices.1For example, the Interaction Design Association (IxDA) association andannual conference, the interactive track of the South by Southwest(SXSW) conference, and the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA).
In this paper, we contend there is a need to produce theoriesof designerly practice that are resonant with the everydaywork of interaction designers. We believe that empiricallygrounded descriptions and critical analyses of designpractice activities will offer frameworks for reflection onpractices that designers can find useful. Such a researchenterprise could then help create opportunities for HCIresearchers to build longterm engagements with designpractice that make sense to practitioners.About this paperThe paper has three parts. In part one, we summarize twodecades of publications that suggest a lack ofsynchronization between HCI research and interactiondesign practices. We then argue that many rational andscientific theories of design overlook the everyday practicesof interaction design. We then move to three vignettes ofeveryday interaction design work to demonstrate howprofessionals negotiate research questions relevant tointeraction design practice.In part two, we discuss changes to the HCI research agendathat might better integrate HCI research and interactiondesign practices. We divide our discussion betweenmethodological and theoretical concerns. We examine somecurrent research methods and suggest how they couldchange to enlarge our views on practice. Moving totheoretical frameworks, we then draw out how some currenttheories suggest a kind of ideal-type theory.In part three, we shift from the goal of researchinginteraction design practice to the aim of generating theoriesof practice. We elaborate the theoretically minded, practicegrounded agenda that we propose. We describe theopportunity for new theories to provide a language fordiscussing practice. Such a language would enablecomparison of processes and projects, help supportpractitioners, influence the development of methods, toolsand techniques for practice, and help evaluate the theoriesthemselves.We conclude with the notion that a research agenda for HCIpractice oriented research would aim toward accounting forepistemological orientations, coherent principles that areopen to critique and debate, and open methods to flexibilityover prescriptions, and lastly but most importantly,mobilize theoretical ideas in a way that is accessible inpractice and open to revision through practice.DEFINING PRACTICEThe word “practice” has multiple meanings, and so we willclarify them before we continue.The colloquial meaning of “practice,” as employed by bothHCI researchers and professional interaction designers,often refers to professional design activities intended tocreate commercial products, as in articles such as “CHI andthe Practitioner Dilemma” [1]. This definition of “practice”assumes a division between the interests and perspectives ofuniversity and corporate research and those of professionalpractice. The social sciences, however, suggest morediverse notions of practice. This is particularly visible inresearch on professionalization [15, 19, 36].Green recently argues for a definition of “professionalpractice” as four “senses” in which the concept can beunderstood and operationalized [15]. The first sense iswhen professional practice is seen as referring to the“practicing of a profession” as in ‘practicing medicine’,‘practicing law’, etc. Secondly, the notion can refer topracticing professionalism, that is, it has a focus on what itmeans to be a professional, related to identity and position.Thirdly, it can refer to moral-ethical qualities of practice.Finally, professional practice can be opposed simply toamateur work. However, Green also argues that, in mostdefinitions, regardless of “sense”, it all comes down to astudy and understanding of three aspects, and those are theactivities, experiences, and contexts of practice. Practicebecomes the composite of what practitioners do, what theyexperience, and the context where this takes place.How then to think about analyzing that composite? Wedraw on the rich and extensive tradition of “practice theory”here. Studies of design work have often focused on specificand fairly well defined activities, for instance, the processesof idea generation through sketching and brainstorming(i.e., [5]). In studying the social shaping of technology,Mackay and Gillespie [25] refer to this orientation as amicro view. Among other approaches it tends to aconstructivist understanding of interactions and activities.Alternatively, they propose a macro orientation thatexamines phenomena from an ideological framing and isbroader in its consideration of socio-economic factors.However, a practice-based perspective on design need notoppose macro and micro analyses.Drawing on Kimbell’s application of practice theory indesign [22], we can see interaction design practice as“carried by individuals” but constituted collectively. Thatis, looking at activities, experiences, and contexts requiresthat we look not just at individual minds and bodies, butalso technical systems, organizational structures, tools, andknowledge [37]. Practice theory prompts us both toexamine the embodied effort of designing technologies,using tools, and learning trades – but also how theseactivities are produced by and in turn sustain organizations,systems, and infrastructures.HCI RESEARCH AND INTERACTION DESIGNWe are not alone in our concern that scholarly HCI researchaimed at influencing professional design practitioners hasfallen short of this goal; nor is this concern recent.Publications spanning the last two decades have identifiedvarious gaps between research — whether in universities orcorporate laboratories — and non-research professionalwork. These publications have diagnosed three mainproblems. First, they have portrayed designers as relativelyunaware of scholarly theories and methods [34]. Onecommon complaint describes a lack of “knowledge
transfer” between the HCI research community and that ofdesign work [16, 23, 34]. Second, they have describeddesigners as knowledgeable but unlikely to apply thosetheories or methods because of time, cost, or laborconstraints [16, 43, 47]. Third, they have examineddifferences in scholarly researchers’ and commercialpractitioners’ perspectives on similar problems, such asdesigning a user interface [1, 35].Notably, in 2004, Rogers identified a “gap between thedemands of doing design and the way theory isconceptualized” based on a study of practitioners in the UKand US that analyzed recognition and use of then-commonHCI theoretical frameworks [34]. Assessing the influenceof theoretical perspectives intended to inform HCI design,she shows that design practitioners have not taken up thecomplex analytic frameworks produced for them byresearchers. Instead, what has persisted is “the pervasiveuse of a handful of high level concepts,” such as“situatedness,” “context,” and “affordances.” “Ironically,”Rogers writes, “it appears that the analytic frameworksdeveloped for use in HCI are not that accessible or easy touse.” She continues: “It would seem that quite a differentframe of reference is needed – one which focuses more onthe process of design and how the different kinds ofdesigners, themselves, want to be supported.”Another factor in the gap between HCI research andinteraction design practices may lie in how someresearchers define design complexity. Elsewhere, we haveargued at length that HCI research mistakenly treats thecomplexities of design practice as a problem to bescientifically solved [43, 45]. In essence, many researchersassume that commercial designers can and should tackle theeveryday experience of design complexity as they do —like scholarly scientists. This has led to a misapplication ofscientific reasoning practices to design situations that inturn leads to results (methods, tools, and techniques) thatdesign practitioners do not recognize as relevant.In part, we believe that treating the complexities of differentsorts of design practices as congruent to the work ofscientists has rationalized away the need to closely examineactual design practice. And so it is no surprise that we havefound so few rigorous, scholarly descriptions of theeveryday work of interaction design, and even fewer ofinteraction designers’ own understandings of what they do.One set of existing descriptions aims not to represent thefullness of design practice, but to motivate the developmentand refinement of methods, techniques, or tools to supportspecific design tasks. These studies approach designers aspotential technology users [8, 9, 31, 35]. While potentiallyvery helpful in creating and refining task-specific tools, thefocus on interaction design practitioners as users radicallylimits our perspective on how interaction designersmotivate their own actions, decisions, and processes.Another set of experimental studies aimed at understandingthe cognition of designers (notably, [6]) has resulted inrichly descriptive accounts of creative problem solving. Yetsuch studies often lack context by defining design situationsas a well-bounded set of conversations internal to individualminds or within small teams. Ultimately, we believe thatthis focus on well-defined cognitive processes also cruciallylimits the analytic scope of the findings. We believe thatthis problem – of limiting one’s perspective on where andhow design complexity comes into play – also helpsdisconnect HCI frameworks and interaction design practice.These factors suggest some reasons behind the continuingcomplaints within HCI of a division between“practitioners” and researchers. Without a shared set ofreferences, HCI researchers may treat the complexities ofdesign practice as inherent to a mysterious “black art” [46].Alternately, designers may view HCI researchers as overlyoriented to an objectivism anchored in science. Science isonly one of many cultural languages and lenses one coulduse to construct an understanding of design practice.Designers themselves simply may not share the values ofobjectivity, lack of bias, and a-cultural thinking held byscientists.A growing body of research (within and without HCI) hasbegun to produce a more practice-based perspective ondesign. Drawing on their own practice and on observationof others, researchers have described design as resting on aform of knowledge that differs from conventional notionsof science. In this approach, successful designers often inpractice value reflexivity, interpretation, and “judgment”above intellectual objectivity [28, 41]. Phrases like thereflective practitioner [38], thoughtful designer [24]designerly knowing [6] mindful learner [20], and ambiguity[12] instantiate similar notions of a form of knowingspecific to design. Design reasoning may be seen asimprovisation or “artistry,” dealing with the particular, andonly located “in action.” Given this emergence fromsituated reflection, theorists often describe design as an actof particularity and contingency [22, 28, 38] rather than animplementation of objective principles or universalmethods.Our agenda for dealing with the complexities of designdraws from this reflective perspective, rather than from anotion of design as set of objectively graspable problems.Design practice complexity should be understood as thecomplexity a designer experiences in a particular designcontext [43]. In this view, design complexity emergeswithin activities of designing, experienced through acts ofreflection, decision, and judgment. Therefore, the “eye” ofthe practicing designer(s) defines it. This definition alsoresonates with the three core aspects of practice that Greenproposes (as mentioned earlier), that is, activity, experience,and context. Design complexity is experiential. It cannot beexclusively an attribute of function, form, or performance,nor of the design problem alone, without considering theactivities of designing and the contexts of designers’actions.
In summary, we locate the gap between HCI research andinteraction design practice in researchers’ distance fromtechnology development practices that differ from theirown. Design practice differs from scientific practice invaluing situated reflexivity and in locating complexity inexperience. Some research tries to define and then solve thecomplexity of design practice through prescriptiveframeworks. However, the complexity of design practice isemergent, experienced through reflection, judgment andpractice in a manner that is synthetic and irreducible. Aresult of this distance is insufficient interest in andexamination of the full complexity and richness ofinteraction design practice, and to even fewer attempts totheorize it. If we want a shared “frame of reference”between HCI theorizing and the practice of design, we willneed more systematic and close attention to the experiencesof the kind of practicing designers who are not alreadyrepresented in HCI.COMPLEXITY-IN-PRACTICE: STUDYING COMMERCIALINTERACTION DESIGNERSIn this section, we provide an description and discussion ofdesign practice that illustrates some of the ways thatworking designers grapple with complex questions of“good design.” It draws on a six-month study of interactiondesigners in San Francisco’s Bay Area.The study included in-situ observation of three interactiondesign projects at two consulting companies, as well asinterviews with eight designers outside the companies. Theprojects generally had one or more interaction designers,visual designers, and design researchers working alongsidea project manager and perhaps (in consultancies) a clientrelationship manager, making a team of about three to fivepeople. One project lasted six weeks; the other two lastedthree months.The participating consultancies were selected forrecognized leadership in the interaction design professionalcommunity. They were also chosen as contrasts inorganizational structure: a young, lightly staffed studioversus an older, larger firm. The interviewees were selectedfor individual breadth of technical experience as well asoverall diversity of organizational location, includingconsultancies, start-ups, and in-house design teams. All hadexperience designing for computer-based applications (weband desktop software) as well as mobile applications. Themajority of study participants were in the middle of theircareers, with seven to 16 years of professional experience.Many of the older designers had little formal training; theyoften described their first years as “learning on the job.”Participants in their late 30s and 40s could often pinpoint ayear in which they first used the phrase “interaction design”to describe what they did. Participants in their 20s and early30s often had interaction design degrees, or had receivedearly training through college internships. None attended —or wanted to attend — CHI or other ACM conferences,though one had an undergraduate degree in computerscience. Their professional biographies echo the growth ofinteraction design in the 1990s and the solidification of aprofessional identity independent of computer sciencethrough the establishment of university programs,professional associations, and specialized conferences.Despite differences in job description and organizationallocation, participants defined their work similarly: they sawthemselves producing representations to g
of interaction design. We then move to three vignettes of everyday interaction design work to demonstrate how professionals negotiate research questions relevant to interaction design practice. In part two, we discuss changes to the HCI research agenda that might better integrate HCI research and interaction design practices.
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