The authors of Thoughtful Interaction Design go beyond the usual technical concerns of usability and usefulness to consider interaction design from a design perspective. The shaping of digital artifacts is a design process that influences the form and functions of workplaces, schools, communication, and culture; the successful interaction designer must use both ethical and aesthetic judgment to create designs that are appropriate to a given environment. This book is not a how-to manual, but a collection of tools for thought about interaction design. Working with information technology—called by the authors "the material without qualities"—interaction designers create not a static object but a dynamic pattern of interactivity. The design vision is closely linked to context and not simply focused on the technology. The authors' action-oriented and context-dependent design theory, drawing on design theorist Donald Schön's concept of the reflective practitioner, helps designers deal with complex design challenges created by new technology and new knowledge. Their approach, based on a foundation of thoughtfulness that acknowledges the designer's responsibility not only for the functional qualities of the design product but for the ethical and aesthetic qualities as well, fills the need for a theory of interaction design that can increase and nurture design knowledge. From this perspective they address the fundamental question of what kind of knowledge an aspiring designer needs, discussing the process of design, the designer, design methods and techniques, the design product and its qualities, and conditions for interaction design.
Design-oriented research practices create opportunities for constructing knowledge that is more abstracted than particular instances, without aspiring to be at the scope of generalized theories. We propose an intermediate design knowledge form that we name strong concepts that has the following properties: is generative and carries a core design idea, cutting across particular use situations and even application domains; concerned with interactive behavior, not static appearance; is a design element and a part of an artifact and, at the same time, speaks of a use practice and behavior over time; and finally, resides on an abstraction level above particular instances. We present two strong concepts-social navigation and seamfulness-and discuss how they fulfil criteria we might have on knowledge, such as being contestable, defensible, and substantive. Our aim is to foster an academic culture of discursive knowledge construction of intermediate-level knowledge and of how it can be produced and assessed in design-oriented HCI research.
In a recent issue of this magazine, Bill Gaver and John Bowers address the role of design practice in academic research and provide a concrete suggestion: "We propose the notion of annotated portfolios as a way to communicate design research. In part, we do this to provide an alternative to accounts that suggest for design to become productive as research, it should engage in some sort of theory formation. While what exactly is meant by theory is not always clear, writers usually have in mind some conceptual machinery that can explain and predict" [1].Briefly, the notion of annotated portfolios entails selecting a collection of designs, re-presenting them in an appropriate medium, and combining the design re-presentations with brief textual annotations. Gaver and Bowers characterize their proposal as a methodology for communicating design research, and more specifically, a methodology that is very familiar to designers as well as artists.The idea of annotated portfolios takes its departure from a growing sense of discomfort with the way in which design practice is increasingly misappropriated by "scientistic" notions of academic research: "Rather than [finding ways for design to contribute to HCI] by mutating design to become more like "real" research, however, we believe it is better to grow design's identity as research from its existing practices and reasoning" [1]. This is a very timely proposal, given the increasing debate on design research and its relation to HCI (see also [2] and [3]). Moreover, the idea of annotated portfolios intuitively appears well grounded as well as appealing. However, the slate is not entirely clean-there are some precedent ideas that address similar concerns, and my sense is that they can be fruitfully related to the notion of annotated portfolios. Thus, my hope is to complement the work of Gaver and Bowers by sketching out parts of the scholarly context, and thereby facilitate the ongoing discussion of the role of design practice in academic research. Design Practice, Academic Research, and KnowledgeIn my opinion, the foundational observation to start from is this: The essence of research is to produce knowledge, and the essence of design is to produce artifacts.
Science communication is facing a paradigm shift, based on the convergence of exploratory and explanatory visualization. In this article, we coin the term exploranation to denote the way in which visualization methods from scientific exploration can be used to communicate results and how methods in explanatory visualization can enrich exploration.
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