On the last day of the CHI conference, Dustin and I were juggling about whether to attend the ‘Tangible’ session or the ‘Critique on Design Research’ panel. And with the final decision we made, we agreed that the latter has made our attendance worthwhile.
It is not just because only then did we get down to some more-than-apparent discussions on design’s impact on technological innovation, but the ideas also resonate among the perennial problems with the CHI research method.
Ilpo Koskinen (one of the panelist) quoted Andrea Branzi’s theory of second materiality when addressing the societal context HCI is situated. Technology innovation will become more reliant on perfection of design, as our consumer groups mature in the appreciation for ‘beyond the functionality’. It somewhat indicated to Apple’s absence at CHI, who turns out to be the biggest celebrator of art and design in product innovation, without hosting a house of scientists and ethnographers at all. The charm of design often lies in its subjectivity and personality, something that is naturally attractive and doesn’t defy scientific analysis at all.
The panel also revolves around the absence of designers in ‘geeky’ communities. Are the papers written by designers seldom got accepted to CHI? Or the submission is too few? The answer to the question, however, is firstly about the fundamental criteria of paper writing at CHI.
Increasingly, the long-standing scientific method based on data evaluation, has shown its insufficiency for actionable inventions. Overtime, researchers become hallucinated by the notion that data explains everything and at the end of their experiments, a positive conclusion supporting their hypothesis is more likely to be drawn. The CHI experience left me with an intensified sickness for the word ‘user testing’. It is so difficult to surrender myself to the statistics from the testing within a small and generic group of people. E.g the presentation ‘Situating the Concern for Information Privacy through an Empirical Study of Responses to Video Recording’ as part of the Privacy session, the author distills four types of concerns to digital privacy via user survey, as a guideline for designing HCI interfaces. But when questioned how we design not just to acknowledge what the users are concerned but also what they should be concerned about, the presenters excused himself for the narrowed purpose of the research in understanding the users (which is a common skill for most of the presenters to shy from harsh questions). But then how can we innovate without reference to the commercial climate and historical trajectory of technology evolution?
A number of findings and conclusions drawn upon user behaviors and insights in CHI papers fundamentally reflects ‘design thinkings’. For example, using experimental psychology method to understand the drawing from participants, one will be able to draw the flow of affection in photo sharing users, instead of categorizing the opinion of participants themselves, which is inevitably biased.(Paper ‘A Photographic Affect Meter for Frequent, In Situ Measurement of Affect’).
Another questions being raised is how to arouse sense of responsibility for designers in field to influence HCI inventions and researches. There comes then, the common ‘working habit’ of designers, who enjoys making more than simulating what they are making, and who trust their intuition over rationale. It relates to the long-standing tradition of design educations: the over-emphasis on developing sensual languages. Therefore, deeper levels of thinking and the ability of ‘writing up a paper that makes sense to larger audiences’ become the new design techniques that will truly spark the innovation for HCI.
