Research Through Design as a Method for Interaction Design Research in HCI

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.</p

Discovering and Extracting Knowledge in the Design Project

Over the last twenty years, the rapid adoption of the graphical user interface followed by the emergence of the World Wide Web has created an increasing demand for interaction designers and interaction design research. Knowledge generated by interaction designers is needed not only by other designers, but also by researchers and practitioners from other disciplines. This evolution has generated increasing pressure for more refined models of design research and design research dissemination. To address this problem, we first explore the evolution of design documentation, detailing how it has evolved to meet the changing needs of designers. Then we present an opportunity map detailing where design projects produce knowledge. The map reveals areas for creating and communicating knowledge that is specific to interaction design, yet generalizable to a larger community that participates in interaction design

Designing to Support the Social Aesthetics of Inquiry

This paper addresses the design of socially centered tools to support Arts and Humanities PhD students in their Inquiries. We discuss the limitations of current products and describe our research of PhD students. Drawing on the work of the philosopher John Dewey, we find that inquiry is a characteristic activity of the members of an academic field. Inquiry as a shared human endeavor has aesthetic qualities that direct students. These aesthetic qualities manifest in social interaction and the material products of inquiry. We suggest that the fractured experiences associated with current inquiry-supporting tools can be avoided by designing from an understanding of the underlying aesthetics of inquiry. A product concept designed from this perspective is presented