HCI Design Research

This course aims to equip student HCI researchers with a foundational understanding of design and design research. At the end of the course, students will:

• Come to agreement on what is design and how it differs from engineering, art, or craft;
• Come to agreement on what constitutes a design reserach contribution;
• Learn to review (and write) design research papers.

Prerequisite: None; however, prior experience in HCI design and/or HCI research would be beneficial to help students appreciate the practical implications of the theories covered in this course.

Format: Reading and theoretical discussion. The course project involves conducting a literature review on a topic of the student’s choice and proposing a research method that aims to make a HCI design research contribution.

Acknowledgement: Several reading lists were referenced in the creation of this course, and I am grateful to their creators: (1) The Graduate HCI Design Course offered at Cornell Tech, designed by Wendy Ju; (2) The Design Mini offered at Carnegie Mellon University, designed by John Zimmerman; and (3) the HCI Ph.D. prelim reading list designated by UC Berkeley’s EECS PhD Program.

Lecture 1 | What is Design?

• The First Tradition, a chapter in the book The Design Way: Intentional Change in an Unpredictable World, Nelson and Stolterman, 2012
  • Takeaway: When solving social-political problems, we often do not know how to define the goal; we often do not know what success looks like.
  • Key concept: Wicked problem, design vs. art.
• The core of ‘design thinking’, Dorst, 2011 (12 pages)
  • Takeaway: Designers reframe hard-to-define problems (i.e., “wicked problems”) to make them more workable. Engineers solve well-defined problems. Both are essential for problem-solving.
  • Key concept: Problem (re)framing, design vs. engineering.
• Briefing and reframing: A situated practice. Paton & Dorst, 2011
  • Takeaway: Design is not about fulfilling a client’s requests (i.e., “design brief”) per se; it’s about understanding the underlying problematic situation and redefining those requests (i.e., “reframe the problem”.) Designers re-discover what their clients truly want.
  • Key concept: Differentiating design brief from design goal.
• Discuss: Can one be doing design if they never reframe their goal?

Lecture 2 | What Do Designers Do? Part 1. Design-Oriented Empirical Work

• Analysis-Synthesis Bridge Model, Dubberly et al., 2008
  • Takeaway: In order to reframe a problematic situation, designers conduct empirical work to construct a conceptual model of “what is”, in order to take a creative leap and envision a new model of “what might be.” In other words, design-oriented empirical work traddles the line between understanding a problem and solving it.
  • Key concepts: Problem-understanding, problem-solving.
• Field: How to Follow Design through Society, a chapter in the book Design Research Through Practice: From the Lab, Field, and Showroom, Koskinen et al., 2012
  • Takeaway: “For them (designers), first-hand experience of context is typically more important than fact finding, or even careful theoretically informed interpretation (of the facts).”
• Implications for Design, Dourish, 2006
  • Takeaway: Not all good enthronographic studies produce good design implications. Not all ethnographic studies that produce valuable design implications contribute theoretically to the humanities or social sciences.
  • Key concepts: Implications for Design /s
• Discuss: Do we need a hypothesis when starting a design process?

Lecture 3 | What Do Designers Do? Part 2. Sketching and Prototyping

• Sketching User Experiences: Getting the Design Right and the Right Design (Book), Buxton, 2007
  • Takeaways: (1) Buxton defined sketching as any design process where the output is quick, plentiful, disposable, ambiguous and with minimal detail. “The last thing to do when sketching is to write code.” (2) Figure out what’s the right thing to design first, before designing it right.
  • Key concepts: Right thing to design, design the thing right
• The anatomy of prototypes: Prototypes as filters, prototypes as manifestations of design ideas, Lim et al., 2008
  • Key concepts: Prototyping, “fail fast, fail early”, tinkering.

Lecture 4 | What are Designers Thinking When They Design?

• Futures Cone, Voro’s 2017 summary of prior literature
  • Takeaway: When addressing a wicked problem, designers explore many possible futures before identifying a preferred, possible future.
  • Key concepts: Possible futures, preferred futures
• The Design Squiggle, Newman 2006
  • Takeaway: Because designers explore many possible futures before selecting a preferred one to pursue, the goalpost of the design process shifts constantly. Therefore, early stages of design often feel uncertain and frustrating—until the idea of a preferred, possible future arrives.
• Design as a Reflective Conversation with the Situation, a chapter in the book The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action, Schön, 1992
  • Takeaway: Designers envision various futures, and tinker with various levers (e.g., technologies) that they can possible pull to realize them, until they find a possible, preferred future.
  • Key concepts: Affordance, reflection-in-action, reflection-on-action

Lecture 5 | What do Design Processes Deliver?

• The Ultimate Particular, book chapter in The Design Way: Intentional Change in an Unpredictable World, Nelson and Stolterman, 2012
  • Key concept: Point of intervention

Lecture 6 | What is Design Knowledge?

• Designerly ways of knowing, Cross 1982
  • Takeaways: (1) An educated person is distinguished not as much by what they do as by what they ‘see’ or ‘grasp’. Cross argues this is too the goal of design education — a good designers can ‘grasp’ a problematic situation in previously unknown ways, thereby ‘seeing’ opportunities to improve it that others may not see. (2) This creative cognition skill of design is a tacit skill, like bicycle-riding, swimming, or playing golf.
• The Science of Design: Creating the Artificial, Simon 1988
  • Key concept: Science of the Artificial

Lecture 7 | How Do Designers Share Their Knowledge with Each Other?

• Book Chapter TBD, in Book<Design Research Through Practice: From the Lab, Field, and Showroom>, Koskinen et al. 2012
  • Takeaway: Designers use the artifacts they create to embody and communicate their design knowledge.
  • Key concept: Sensitizing concepts
• Strong concepts: Intermediate-level knowledge in interaction design research, Höök and Löwgren, 2012
  • Key concept: Strong concepts, intermediate knowledge
• Artifact as theory-nexus: hermeneutics meets theory-based design, Carroll and Kellogg, 1989

Lecture 8 | Archetypes of Design Reserach: (1) Research through Design

• Research Through Design as a Method for Interaction Design Research in HCI, Zimmerman et al., 2007
• Discuss: system versus design contributions, in research contributions in human-computer interaction

Lecture 9 | (2) Research into Design; (3) Research for Design

• Research in art and design, Frayling, 1993.
  • Key concepts: Research into Design, Research through Design, Research for Design

Lecture 10 | What Makes a Piece of Design Research Rigorous or ‘Good’?

• Design Methodology is not Design Science, Bartneck, CHI’07 WS
• The Nature of Design Practice and Implications for Interaction Design Research, Stolterman 2008
• An Analysis and Critique of Research through Design: Towards a Formalization of a Research Approach., Zimmerman et al., DIS 2010

Lecture 11 | What Problems Do Designers Solve? Part 1. Students who have taken INFO2451 will have read readings 1 and 2. Skim them to refresh your memory.

• 10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design, Nelson, 1994
  • Key concept: Usability
• The Definition of User Experience (UX), Norman and Nelson, 1998
  • Takeaway: Don Norman coined the term “user experience’’ as a counter-movement to the dominant, task-related “usability” paradigm at the time. By his definition, UX encompasses “all aspects of the end user’s experience’’ with a technology system. Therefore, while there exists widely-accepted rubrics for evaluating usability, an appropriate evaluation matrix for a UX design is often dependent on the technology and its design situation.
  • Key concept: User Experience (UX)
• Value-Sensitive design, Friedman, 1996
  • Key concept: value

Lecture 12 | What Problems Do Designers Solve? Part 2.

• The Participatory Turn in AI Design: Theoretical Foundations and the Current State of Practice, Delgado et al., EAAMO’23
  • Key concepts: Power and design, co-design versus participatory design.
• The intellectual challenge of CSCW: the gap between social requirements and technical feasibility, Ackerman 2000
  • Key concept: Socieotechnical systems
• Posthumanism and design, Forlano 2017
  • Key concept: Beyond-the-human design

Lecture 13 | What Levers Can Designers Pull to Solve these Problems? Students who have taken INFO4240 will have read some of these readings Skim them to refresh your memory.

• Design Interaction, Not Interfaces, by Michel Beaudouin-Lafon, 2004
  • Alterative reading: From Computing Machinary to Interaction Design, Terry Winogrand, 1997
• Chapter TBD in Book Plans and Situated Actions: The Problem of Human-Machine Communication, Suchman, 1987
• Somaesthetic Appreciation Design, Höök 2016
• The Future of HCI-Policy Collaboration, by Yang et al., 2024
  • Key concept: rules and incentives

Lecture 14 | Case Study: Design in Light of Uncertainty

• Exiting the Cleanroom: On Ecological Validity and Ubiquitous Computing, Carter et al., 2008
• Re-examining Whether, Why, and How Human-AI Interaction Is Uniquely Difficult to Design, Yang et al., 2020

Lecture 15 | Case Study: Design in the Context of Capitalism + Course Wrap-up