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Erik Stolterman has been visiting Carnegie Mellon for the past few days, during which he gave a lecture on “The Design Paradox – and the nature of design research.” The premise of the talk, aimed at HCI researchers, was that HCI research, which is mostly aimed at improving design practice (his assumption), does not seem to influence practice. Hence, the paradox.

But the design paradox was not what interested me most. I was more intrigued by his argument that HCI researchers need to understand the nature of design; and for that matter, that designers themselves need to better understand what they are doing. Why? It helps practitioners to make the case for what they do. A more developed theory and philosophy of design will help designers recognize what they do and help other people understand that. This happens to be the basic premise of my thesis paper.

So what is it that researchers and designers themselves don’t understand? The rigor, logic, and discipline of design. “A good designer understands the rigor and logic of doing design in a disciplined way,” Stolterman says. After the lecture, I asked how we can better understand the rigor, logic, and discipline. He did not have an answer.

Nevertheless, the co-author of The Design Way had some great points about the nature of design and how it is different than art and science. In fact, Stolterman said he puts design on the same plain as art and science.

“Design is not art, design is not science, it’s its own tradition. It’s a choice to use design. An approach to change the world.”

As an approach, he argued, design gives us results that the other approaches don’t deliver. Design is set up to deliver unexpected outcomes. If we knew what we wanted, we wouldn’t use design, he said. Further, in understanding design, you must accept the complexities of design practice: mind set, knowledge set, skill set, tool set. In addition, must accept that design is mind and hand: sensibility and judgment; craft and skill.

He also provided a simple definition for judgment, which was great for me because I have been struggling to understand what this means in the writing of my paper. He said judgment is being able to recognize good quality. Now if I could just explain simply how a designer develops judgment, I’d be set.

As for interaction design, he said it is one of the most important fields in our society today. I got goosebumps when he said this, then quickly turned skeptical, then appreciative.

One remark that I didn’t understand was that someone who has no knowledge of the nature of design can move through the design process successfully. I thought I misheard him because it seemed like he was saying the opposite of this: that you need to understand the nature of design to move through the process successfully. This is a question I have pondered in my thesis.

Fortunately, I had the opportunity today to ask him to clarify the remark when he dropped in on our thesis meeting. Yes, he said, you can go through the design process without understanding design and be quite successful. But his belief is that understanding the nature of design will make you a better designer. I think I both believe this and disagree, and presume it will be on my mind for a while.

Overall, I really enjoyed the talk, even though it was very familiar. If you’re interested in these ideas, I recommend both The Design Way and Thoughtful Interaction Design, both of which I am referencing in my thesis.

I got back from the first Interaction Design Association (IxDA) conference, Interaction08, late Monday night after an 11-hour drive in a rented minivan with five other of my Carnegie Mellon peers. Rather than provide a blow-by-blow, I’ll apply a little bit of poetic license and start at the end.

At the end of the second day of the two-day affair, in lieu of one of the presentations, anyone who wanted to share their thoughts on the conference and what it should be next year was invited to attend a group meeting. At first, I wasn’t going to go, but one of my peers, Kyle Vice, was going, and the previous presentations were not inspiring me.

Kyle and I were the only ones to show up, initially. But eventually a small band arrived, totaling nine, though most were already IxDA board members. Thus, CMU students represented 25 percent of attendees. Not counting the board members, 50 percent. Gregory Petroff led the session and asked each of us to say why we came, what we thought could have been better, and what we would like to see next year. That seems like a reasonable way to construct this post.

Why did I attend?

I agreed with Bill DeRouchey, who was also present, who said that it felt important to be at the first conference on interaction design. I also mentioned that as an interaction design graduate student, who has been in the bubble of academia for the past two years, I wanted to see what the discipline thinks of itself, and contrast that against my thoughts of interaction design attained at Carnegie Mellon. What I didn’t say was that at the School of Design, we explore interaction design is a broad sense, and often talk about design and interaction design interchangeably. In design, there is no subject matter. My peers and I bring this perspective to interaction design and are thus interested in applications of interaction design beyond the screen and software.

Many of my peers were frustrated and angry with a lot of the presentations, as was I. Though I was tempered by the expectation that there would not be much new material, given that my life is currently devoted to the study of interaction design. That said, we found the application of interaction design by the representative community narrow, which brings me to the second question: what could have been better?

What could have been better?

I told the group that I would have liked to have seen a discussion and attempt at defining interaction design. Of all places and times to address this question, the first conference on interaction design seemed to be a likely place. And as this is a question that plagues every interaction designer, and serves as fodder for heated debate on the IxDA discussion list, I hoped it would receive some attention. Instead, the definition of interaction design escaped discussion, which I found disappointing. In relation to this, I also said that I would have liked to have seen a greater exploration of the boundaries of interaction design. What I didn’t say, and what my peers echoed, was that interface and software received too much attention. Surprisingly, there was very little presented regarding mobile interaction, physical products, ambient devices, gestural interaction, wearables, ubiquitous computing, and the role of interaction design in experience design, service design, organizational change.

Ironically, during the closing remarks, Dan Saffer listed five themes he garnered from the conference. The first was that we were exploring the boundaries of interaction design. In addition, he remarked that we skipped the question of the definition of interaction design, which received cheers from the crowd. This distressed me for the reasons stated above.

Five Themes

Since I brought it up, now seems like a good time to go over the five themes, mentioned in Saffer’s closing remarks.

Boundaries Where is our role? What defines us? Answer: comes from what we’re working on; common tools and prototyping

Tradition Not practicing in a vacuum

Context Space/time; organizations

Argument Providing tools for argument; and products are an argument

Influence How the products we create influence the way people behave

As I said, I did not think there was enough exploration of the boundaries, evidenced by the gap between what my peers and I think of interaction design and what we saw as practice at the conference. I disagree that what defines us is what we’re working on. It may be how others currently perceive interaction designers because other opportunities do not exist. But it doesn’t define us.

In talking with other attendees, I was glad to hear that people entertain the application of interaction design to more arenas. But it seemed evident that everyone was limited by their current circumstance and no place else to go. This is a fear that many of the students at the School of Design have when considering employment opportunities. If this is the situation, perhaps interaction design needs to design its way into other areas.

What would I like to see next year?

In the meeting, I said it would be great to see more representation from outside the community, like business and management. And for presentations, it might be nice to see designers and clients presenting both sides of the endeavor. What I didn’t say, perhaps because I felt it was assumed by my earlier comments, was that I would like to see a good and constructive discussion of the definition of interaction design, or some acknowledgment of the struggle. We did this at the Emergence conference with the question of service design both in the first and second year, and people seemed to respect the discussion and appreciate the struggle.

In addition, it would be great to see more case studies with actual projects. Heck, it would have been interesting to hear about the role of interaction design in the Charmr project. But what about interaction design for a service design project? Or the process of interaction design in organizational strategy?

One of the group participants mentioned a forum where attendees could show their work. This is an intriguing idea, which would allow greater attendee participation and provide greater exposure to the different types of work in interaction design. One project on interaction design in an area that is off the radar could spark debate and inspire curiosity and further broadening of current practice.

The Good

OK, now that I’ve offered some criticism, constructively, I hope, let’s talk about the good.

Dan Saffer, who according to my understanding, put together a lot of the content, did a great job of attracting some quality speakers. I especially enjoyed seeing Alan Cooper and Bill Buxton (not that I agreed with them). And I could see the attempt to have both practical and more philosophical presentations. Other speakers I enjoyed include Matt Jones and Carl DiSalvo.

Savannah is a great location to have a conference in February. T-shirt weather. Not too big. Lots of bars and restaurants. Also, the Savannah Collage of Art and Design was impressive. Carnegie Mellon should take note.

The food was top notch. Sunday’s lunch was better than any wedding I have ever attended. And parties with free food and booze are always welcome, and I would say essential for a successful conference.

As with any conference, the best part without doubt were the people that attended and the conversations that ensued. I was happy to run into designers who knew me from Emergence and UX Week, and to see some CMU alumni. Best yet, I made some new friends whom I hope to see at the next conference or elsewhere in the small but healthy interaction design community.

While I haven’t covered everything, these are the things that are resonating with me. I am happy that I went and feel that overall for the community it was a success. I am very curious to see how things shape up next year.

In total, eight interaction design graduate students from the School of Design attended the conference: Kipum Lee, Srividya Sriram, Carrie Chan, Kyle Vice, Beste Nazilli, Joe Iloreta, Imran Sobh, me.

For this service design project, our team worked with the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) Center for Quality Improvement and Innovation to identify design opportunities for Dr. Amin Kassam’s Neurosurgery Clinic. Due to being able to perform a rare brain surgery by going through the patient’s nose rather than cutting open the skull, Dr. Kassam’s once-a-week clinic is overwhelmed with patients.

Our team spent a fair amount of time at the clinic observing and interacting with patients. We worked closely with the staff and shared our process and insights with them every step of the way, which built trust and gained their support. This enabled us to gain access to patients in the exam room and interactions between Dr. Kassam, his staff, and patients. We also shared our concepts with the patients, iterating as much as we could to refine our ideas and final solution.

Team

• Melissa Cliver
  Interaction Design
• Jamin Hegeman
  Interaction Design
• Kipum Lee
  Interaction Design
• Leanne Libert
  Communication Planning and Information Design
• Kara Tennant
  Communication Planning and Information Design

Deliverables

• Dr. Kassam welcome booklet
• Concept and process documentation
• Clinic Chat concept video

Process

After many visits to the clinic, we had to sort hundreds of photos and observations.

Me, during a group meeting to synthesize the data.

Service blueprint of the patient experience highlighting opportunities for engagement.

We engaged with patients to get input and feedback as our concepts developed.

We generated and visualized numerous concepts through words and sketches.

Concept storyboards generating to solicit patient feedback.

In trying to understand the emotions and needs of the patients during their journey, we created this visualization, which we included in our final book for UPMC.

Concept rendering.

Page layout from the welcome booklet we created as an artifact UPMC could implement right now.

Visualization of the ideal interaction between patients, Dr. Kassam, and his staff.

Page from the book delivered to UPMC.

A system overview of Clinic Chat.

A part of our research, we went to the OR to see Dr. Kassam perform brain surgery.

More process and solution photos

“Posters and toasters are swell.” If you ever listen to Richard Buchanan talk about design, you’re bound to hear this phrase at least once. I’ve heard it many times, most recently in the course I’m taking this semester, Design Management and Organizational Change. Buchanan believes this to be the most exciting branch of design today, calling it a “new branch of design thinking.”

As an interaction designer, an instructor for a foundational interaction design course, and a frequenter of the IxDA discussions, I know that the majority of practicing interaction designers work in web and software. But I believe interaction design has much more to contribute to design and humankind than screens.

The design management course represents a different arena for interaction design. The course is about taking what we know as designers and applying it to organizational life: how people interact in groups and work together. We can think of organizations as environments, and design for the environment and the interactions.

As to the significance of and relationship between design and organizations, Buchanan says that you could argue organizations are the most important design products of the 20th century. The complexity of organizational life make the subject matter very difficult to tackle: a perfect candidate for design.

Related to my interests in the unrecognized power of design and the troubling disparity of design as a discipline, I find the subject matter fascinating. Buchanan hypothesizes that management and organizational thinking are unrecognized products of design. With the view that there is no absolute right answer for an organization, and that the complexity makes organizations too difficult to understand in full before making decisions to bring about change, the likely candidate for the force behind organizational change is design, as design is well suited to such wicked problems.

Another point that Buchanan postulates is that from a design point of view organizations are products and that they serve human beings. If the purpose of design is to serve others, as stated in The Design Way, and organizations are products, this indeed is a ripe area for design. As an interaction designer, contemplating the idea that organizations are products that can be designed possibly to serve people better intrigues the hell out of me.

If at its simplest definition interaction design can be said to be designing for behavior, the behavior of organizations appear to be fair game and an exciting move beyond screens for interaction design.

Yesterday I received word that the work-in-progress paper I submitted to CHI was not accepted. As it was not my idea to submit to CHI because I do not view it as a good view for design, I was not disappointed. However, I will gripe about the comments I received because they emphasize CHI’s lack of design understanding.

My paper was based on my thesis project work, which explores the idea of being able to prototype your identity in the physical world. I’m taking a research-through-design approach, which means I’m creating a solution to produce knowledge on how explore solutions. This is very much a design approach, using a design process and methods to develop insights and inform direction.

Overall, the three reviewers were interested in the work, but felt it was not fully developed (quite probably). I received an overall rating of 3 (of 5, I assume) from all the reviewers. The 3 translates to “Borderline: Overall I would not argue for accepting this paper.”

The first reviewer begins by stating that the motivation of my work is “not well motivated and embedded in psychologist’s work.” As my work is totally motivated by designer’s work, I completely agree. For the reviewer, it seems a more scientific approach would have been better received. Having gone to CHI last year and witnessed the emphasis on the quantitative and the lack of design, this does not surprise me.

The second and third reviewers share the first’s skepticism, questioning whether the findings could be applied universally and generalized. The third also states that “the conclusions drawn seem to be too subjective.” While it’s entirely possible that my findings were not well argued, thus appearing “too subjective,” I can’t help but wonder if there would have been any room for any subjectivity at all.

While I applaud CHI for attempting to bring more design into the conference (though I also wonder why), I question how design might find its way in if the reviewers do not seem to understand the approach and methods.

And speaking of CHI and design, today I received an ACM bulletin which states: “Each year the SIGCHI conference draws together engineers, designers, educators, and many others concerned with interaction design.” Interaction design? Really? Of all the things they could have said, why not human computer interaction? If making a claim about a conference that draws people together who are concerned with interaction design, it might be best to point to something like the IxDA conference. As someone concerned with interaction design, that’s where I’ll be.

The first assignment for the Basic Interaction course I’m teaching this semester was due today. With it being only a week into the semester, I did not know what to expect from the students. But their efforts provided fodder for some stimulating discussion and considerations for interaction design. The assignment was as follows, originally developed by Chris Pacione (now at BodyMedia).

A: Physical cube

Starting with a cube, design an interactive object that you think best communicates the following uses. The cube should look as though you can:

• rub it
• turn it
• squeeze it

The cube can be no bigger than six inches in any dimension. You may add or subtract from the cube, but it has to remain cube-like. Other shapes may be used as long as they play a secondary role. You may also use color, texture, material as well as a relative context. For example, the final solution might be a green fuzzy cube with little circular nibs placed on the floor.

With no mention of research of audience, the students were left to their own devices in their interpretation. There were a range of solutions, many made of some sort of foam or sponge to afford squeeze, a lot of fuzzy bits for rubbing, and various measures to suggest turning.

After some discussion, we started talking about the success of the requirements from a distance and then once you got the cube in your hands. I saw this as a macro/micro perspective similar to how you might talk about a poster. From across the room you might be attracted to a cube because it looks like you can interact with it in one way, and then upon close inspection you discover further ways to interact with it. I had not thought about affordances as being macro and micro before, so I thought this was an interesting point to emerge especially when thinking about keeping people engaged with a product by not revealing all its tricks up front, but allowing for some exploration and discovery.

We also talked about the range between explicit and implicit affordances. For example, an explicit means of communicating that the cube should be turned might be by an arrow. In the middle of the spectrum might be a quote or line of text that starts on one side of the cube and continues across multiple sides, provoking the user to turn it to read the whole sentence by not explicitly telling them. On the implicit side might be a cube that is a puzzle that can be pulled apart and put back together. This act requires the user to turn the cube to examine all the sides to figure out the puzzle.

Finally, it was interesting that no one challenged the requirements by creating affordances that did not deliver. For example, no one purposely designed a cube that looked like you could turn it but actually did not turn. This brings up a point about intention (and perhaps manipulation) in design. When would you want to suggest an action that could not actually be performed? Unfortunately, we did not have time to discuss this. Perhaps for the next assignment.

As for this assignment, I think it’s a great introduction to interaction design because it gets people thinking about interaction design outside of the context of digital interfaces, it’s easy to talk about because you have tangible artifact to interact with, it’s quick, and it’s fun.

In case you are acronym challenged, that’s Interaction Design from an Industrial Design Point of View. What I’m talking about is the recently Coroflot post Interaction Designers, and How They Got that Way, which takes a few snarky jabs the profession. For example:

“Anyone who’s been following the creative job market at any point in the last few years is probably aware of the feeding frenzy currently going on, as companies large and small seek interaction designers to do…well…whatever it is that they do.”

I read this as more funny than offensive, because to a certain extent, it is difficult to describe exactly what an interaction designer does. Design for human behavior, improve the human condition, and facilitate connections between people are very difficult things to point to.

“David Malouf, the IxDA’s vice president, identified the one crucial skill all Interaction Designers must have as “prototyping.” When pressed for greater specificity, none was to be found, and this in the end may be what makes IxD so useful. It is a continually self-evaluating field, but one content to let the process of asking be sufficient. Similarly, it is a field unwilling to cling to any particular tool, knowing that the selection of the right tool–even if it must be learned from scratch–is in fact the most important step.”

Definitely a funny comment from the IxD graduate student perspective. Learn tools from scratch is now second nature.

But in addition to tools, I would also add that interaction designers are technology and problem domain agnostic. We are useful all over the place, and not, as the articles suggests, indispensable.

This post is inspired by Jack Moffet’s Mystory, which was inspired by a recent IxDA discussion on when/where/how you decided to become a designer.

To answer this question, I could go through my life story—army » engineering » poetry » journalism » web producer » editor » web developer—but that would be rather long and tedious (for me, fascinating for you!). Instead, I’ll skip to the end.

I recognized myself as a designer some time after my first semester in the interaction design graduate program at Carnegie Mellon, about a year ago. I say “recognized” because in retrospect I had been practicing design, but not fully and without understanding design as a rigorous approach to solving problems. Prior to that recognition, I did not think of myself as a designer.

After being educated about and exposed to the design process and design thinking, I realized that the design way of solving problems was not foreign to me and therefore my experience was not zero. But I began to think of myself as a designer only after recognizing that my thinking and my process were designerly. I suppose it was then that I chose to be a designer. By choosing, I committed myself to the development—or the design—of myself as a designer. Being immersed in a graduate program has enabled me to accelerate this process.

That’s not to say that I think everyone needs to go to school to be a designer (it certainly helps). But transitioning from a non-design role to a professional designer isn’t something you can just pick up by reading a couple BusinessWeek articles about design thinking. In fact, I think the current business focus on design, while good in raising awareness of a design approach, may actually be harmful because it does not emphasize the difficulty of producing good solutions, the irrational, nonlinear nature of the process, the need for experience and design wisdom, and the traits that make people good designers. The need for design has been identified, but not how to shift the linear, number-crunching culture to design culture.

But I digress (into thesis paper territory). My point is that being a designer is a journey, a process. It’s not easy, nor is it for everyone. It feels right for me, despite having somewhat blundered into it. So I feel quite lucky to call myself a designer.

Steven Johnson’s “Emergence” attempts to connect the lives of ants, brain activity, urban interaction, and software to show how decentralized and bottom-up interactions emerge as an intelligent swarm.

I was at first skeptical about the book, as it seemed to take a very scientific view, which I am wary of given my thesis on design thinking and its relation to a scientific approach to solving problems. But I got over myself and began to appreciate the perspective and what it might mean for interaction design. (Notably, the word “interaction” is repeated a lot throughout the book.)

The behavior of ant colonies forms the backbone of the thinking behind the book. Despite popular belief, ant colonies have no pacemaker, meaning there is no top-down authority that tells the colony what to do. The queen does not give directions, she only lays eggs. The rest of the ants base their behavior on interactions with their compatriots using a very simple language using pheromones. Through the numbers of these low-level decisions by individual ants, the colony as a whole exhibits characterizable behavior.

“The colonies take a problem that human societies might solve with a command system (some kind of broadcast from mission control announcing that there are too many foragers) and instead solve it using statistical probabilities. Given enough ants moving randomly through finite space, the colony will be able to make an accurate estimate of the overall need for foragers or nest-builders.”

When I read that the ants made decisions through statistical samples of the overall population, it seemed related to how designers make decisions based on a small, but rich interaction with sample users. Given millions of design decisions resulting from random sampling of the population, will there emerge a better world for all? That’s the hope that a greater design culture brings.

Another intriguing argument is that through local interactions higher-level order emerges. One prime example given is the benefit of sidewalks in increasing local interaction of city dwellers. Neighborhoods often develop, not because someone planned them, but through interaction with others—individual decisions about where an how to live creates an order. Examples include class divides, ethnic areas, and gay neighborhoods.

Good designers recognize that they have only so much control in the way that there solutions are used. Johnson points out that emergent systems are not without rules. In fact they need rules to prevent chaos. This seems a likely place for design to contribute: by understanding the system as a whole and providing the rules for interaction, but not dictating how interaction should take place. Not all interactions can or should be designed. There is room to allow emergent behavior to determine the interaction, rather than interaction being dictated by the designer.

Does this sound a bit like co-creation or allowing users to design their own experience? I think so. To encourage emergent systems, Johnson suggests that in addition to rules, incentives should also be provided. For designers interested in allowing users to design their own experience, incentives for participation are paramount because they encourage investment and support.

Johnson entertains the principles of emergence being applied to all aspects of human activity, from social organization to urban planning to business management to political systems. For businesses looking for innovation, an emergent approach is worth considering. Johnson suggests an organization made up of smaller teams that act without top-down dictation.

“The role of traditional senior management grows less important in these models—less concerned with establishing a direction for the company, and more involved with encouraging the clusters that generate the best ideas.”

Through the lens of design, you could see this as employees designing their own work experience. With groups making the best decisions at the local level, the overall system would be more efficient and innovative. This idea definitely gains my interest, having worked in too many places where decisions made from above hurt the experience of employees and the effectiveness of the organization; and where everyone at the local level knew how to make productive changes but were discouraged and prevented from doing so.

Perhaps what I appreciate most about “Emergence” is Johnson’s ability to make connections between seemingly tangential subjects, as making connections is what good designers do. Overall, it’s an interesting read with insights into emergent behavior that are worth considering and perhaps bringing into current and future design challenges.

Dan Saffer just posted his list of the best interaction design blogs this year. Missing is his own blog and mine (just kidding about mine—but perhaps one day).

Given grad school time constraints, I don’t follow many blogs these days. But here are a few I have found either insightful or troubling over the year:

• IxDA: Difficult to keep up with, but I try to skim every once in a while. Something usually catches my eye for its dichotic view of interaction design to my own.
• Engadget: Design wisdom in part relies on knowledge of what else is going on in the world. This site helps me keep up with new technology and products.
• Core77: Also good for keeping up with what’s new in the world of design. Usually brief, but prolific, which means I can’t keep up.
• Adaptive Path: Often thought provoking and applaudable for their willingness to share methods and insights.
• odannyboy: If you’re an interaction designer, it’s good to know what the guy who wrote Designing for Interaction is up to.
• The Superficial: Has nothing to do with IxD unless you think that everything has something to do with IxD, in which case this site is required reading for gaining empathy for the ludicrous nature of celebrity, media, and the rest of us who are drawn to it. Oh, and it’s funny.

Deserving an honorable mention are two peer blogs. Electric Insomnia, while infrequent, often has good design food for thought. And thinkcarrie.com, also infrequent, provides budding insights into service design.