Research through design as a method for interaction design research in HCI

J Zimmerman, J Forlizzi, S Evenson - Proceedings of the SIGCHI …, 2007 - dl.acm.org
Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, 2007dl.acm.org
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 …
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.
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