Rigor and relevance in interaction design research

Establishing Criteria of Rigor and Relevance in Interaction Design Research by Daniel Fallman and Erik Stolterman is a paper about the epistemological underpinnings of interaction design. It addresses the problem of ‘disciplinary anxiety’ that is often felt by people in this field and the inherent discussion about what constitutes ‘good research’ in terms of rigor and relevance.

The author uses the following model, called the Interaction Design Research Triangle, to map out a two-dimensional space for plotting the position of a design research activity drawn up in between three extremes: design practice, design studies, and design exploration:

Some comments from the authors:

“The three forms of research do not randomly advocate certain research methods, techniques, or tools, instead they are a consequence of years of trial and error, practice, and experience, through and by which appropriate methods have emerged. The methods that have survived have been and are continuously tested against the purpose of the approach and they have thus proven over time to deliver the kind of results looked for in a way that makes sense. We therefore make the argument that the only way to discuss and examine rigor and relevance for interaction design research is to do it in relation to the three forms of research and to their particular purposes.
(…)
this is not done consistently in our field today. This sometimes leads to misunderstandings, confusion, and mistakes when design research papers and articles are reviewed, assessed, and evaluated. We argue that reviewers often come to apply the wrong notions of rigor and relevance to a particular research effort by not taking into consideration what form of research it is.“

Why do I blog this? Currently writing a research project about the role of user research in interaction design, this kind of article is relevant to set the theoretical framework in the document I’m working on.

SXSW2012 talk about mind and consciousness as an interface

Yesterday at SXSW Interactive 2012, Julian and myself participated in a panel about “mind and consciousness as an interface”. We basically covered the whole spectrum from the cultural backdrop (science-fiction movies, reiki approaches) to current technologies involved in this. We also concluded about the interaction design issues and limits at stakes. See the slides below:

Touch technologies in shared public toilets

Towards Touch-Free Spaces: Sensors, Software and the Automatic Production of Shared Public Toilets by Martin Dodge and Rob Kitchin is an essential read for anyone interested in how software-enabled technologies have implications at various spatial levels.

In this case, it’s about touching things with hands (pressing of buttons, pulling of handles, flicking switches, twisting selector dials), a relevant situation to understand the “nature of the recent automatic production of touch-free spatiality”.

(Toilet interface in Geneva)

Some excerpts that fascinated me:

“in spite of the hype and some potential benefits from touch-free technologies for enhanced convenience and hygiene, their real world implementation is always imperfect. The incomplete deployment of sensors and software across the sequence of activities (including opening doors) means that toileting as a whole can never be rendered fully touch-free and the bathroom fails to become a completely automated code/space.
(…)
Touch-free technology is almost always implemented partially, and also partial in different ways, which can make for user frustration as one is uncertain about how bits of an unfamiliar bathroom are meant to work: ‘so where do I wave my hands to get some soap?’.
(…)
The danger is then that toileting is set to become an over-determined activity. Attempting to make avowedly simple activities touch-free with digital sensors and software algorithms is simply unnecessary it could be argued, and an excess of automation in the bathroom could be critiqued as an example of disciplining the body through ‘technological paternalism’ “

Why do I blog this? Being interested in the usage of digital technologies in various places as well as the implications of automation, this is a good example of how to explore a specific locus of interaction.

Structured curiosities: personal approach to design projects

In California this week for a workshop at Nokia Design about location-based services. Today at lunch, I also gave a brownbag seminar about my approach to design/innovation projects.

Here are the slides of the presentation:

Why do I blog this? It was a good opportunity to finally step back and describe informally how I work, what I’m interested in and what kind of assumptions I have when carrying out projects (self-funded or with clients).

Devices showing their inner selves

I found this gem on the website of the Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories:

“Meggy Jr RGB is a new kit that we designed as a platform to develop handheld pixel games. It’s based around a fully addressable 8×8 RGB LED matrix display, and features six big fat buttons for comfy game play. (…) A unique feature of Meggy Jr RGB is that it is designed to be mounted inside a “handle set” — a wooden or plastic case that’s safer and more pleasant to hold than a bare circuit board. You can make, mod and customize your own handle sets to suit your taste– These are like faceplates in that you can switch whenever you want to suit your mood or the game that you’re playing, however different handle sets can radically change what the Meggy Jr looks and feels like. Above, you can see what our basic handles (left) look like, as compared to a set of custom smoke-colored batwing handles (right).“

And you can even make your own handle (or to have them fabbed) on platforms such as Ponoko or Pololu. I’d be curious to test it and see whether the interface itself is easy to play with, without a shell.

Why do I blog this? What fascinates me, beyond the fab/open platform, is the device aesthetic. That might be the equivalent of Centre George Pompidou (Beaubourg) for digital devices! Showing the internal guts of a technical apparatus is an intriguing approach that can be traced back to other architecture/industrial design traditions. It can be about making things visible and transparent to the users/people.

It also reminds me of this Mehmet Erkök’s Extreme Personalization phones. The phone shell, personalized in a very expressive way, can be seen as an interesting approach to customization:

“it’s not the strangeness of the work as much as their thinking process that counts”

An interesting excerpt from the interaction12 day1 report by Johnny Holland about Antony Dunne’s speech “Crafting Design Speculations”:

“One audience member did ask the obvious question: where is the role for such out there work in everyday interaction design? His answer was that these students come from work and many return to the commercial field being employed by big corporations: it’s not the strangeness of the work as much as their thinking process that counts.“

Why do I blog this? that’s simply a good quote/answer to the question since it reflects the value of design.

PHOTO/NYKTO: a game played by switching on and off the lights

PHOTO/NYKTO is a project designed by my colleague Annelore Schneider & Douglas Edric Stanley at HEAD in Geneva:

“« Photo/Nykto » is an experimental game conceived by Annelore Schneider and Douglas Edric Stanley as part of the « Unterplay » project at the Master Media Design —HEAD, Genève. It is a game for nyktophobes and photophobes. It is played by switching on and off the lights in order to avoid reaching the edge of the screen. The score increases exponentially near the edges, and speeds up with each change from light to dark and back.“

Why do I blog this? Fascinating gameplay!

About location-based advertising

Few articles raising doubts about location-based advertising:

Unni, R., Harmon, R. (2007) Perceived Effectiveness of Push vs. Pull Mobile Location-Based Advertising. In: Journal of Interactive Advertising, Vol. 7, Nr. 2:

“Pull LBA fared better than push LBA. However, value perceptions of LBA and intentions to try this service appear to be quite low. Also, privacy concerns relating to location data were high, and perceived benefits were low.
(…)
Interestingly, initial surveys by market research agencies such as Driscoll and In-Stat showed a high level of interest and willingness to pay for location-based services such as navigation (driving directions), maps and guides, and traffic updates. Unlike LBA, these services are perceived to be more utilitarian and hence benefits and perceived value are easier to communicate. Results of our study show that the perceived benefits from LBA are low.“

Banerjee, S. & Dholakia R.R. (2008) Mobile advertising: does location-based advertising work?, MMA International Journal of Mobile Marketing,

““location inertia” seems to characterize consumer responses from a private location. We use the term location inertia because this relative unwillingness to shop when advertised in private places has nothing to do with geographical distance from the store. In the LBS scenarios, private or public locations, the distances of the advertised store were specified as exactly the same (less than 0.1 mile away) but it appears that the actual distance does not matter; despite knowing that the store is the same distance away, a consumer is less likely to avail the offer when the ad is received at a private location than a public location.
(…)
The example of mobile advertising discussed in this paper can be simply viewed as an Internet pop-up ad that has traced the consumer’s location and accordingly appeared on his mobile phone.“

Why do I blog this? I’m not necessarily into this kind of application but I’m often asked by clients and journalists about the co-called “effectiveness” of using location-based ads in a “push” mode. My general understanding of these technology is that users find it intrusive and not very useful but it’s good to have more data up my sleeve to discuss the complexity of people’s perspective on this.

The main problem I see in the research papers about this is that they generally focus on projective methods (as opposed to following people using location-based advertising platforms).

From idiosyncratic detail to design

Preparing my course about interaction design next week, I got back to the work by Bill Gaver about cultural probes:

“Tactics for using returns to inspire designs

1 Find an idiosyncratic detail: Look for seemingly insignificant statements or images.

2 Exaggerate it: Turn interest into obsession, preference to love, and dislike to terror.

3. Design for it: Imagine devices and systems to serve as props for the stories you tell.
4. Find an artefact or location. – Deny its original meaning. What else might it be? – Add an aerial, what is it? – Juxtapose it with another, what if they communicate?“

Why do I blog this? Although the quote above is about probes, this is exactly the sort of direction I try to show as an alternative to “standard” (or utilitarian) user-centered design. As a design exercise, it would be good to use this in a cadavre-exquis way (observation/design/observation/design…).

Weeknotes

Always good to do some weeknotes once in a while, as a way to reflect what has been done in the past few days.

Monday was devoted to Lift12, working on the program of the upcoming conference in Geneva… getting the ducks lined up, discussing with the last speakers, calling people interested in workshops.

Tuesday was a conference day, at the Serious Game Expo in Lyon, France, where I participated in a session about location-based games with Mathieu Castelli, as mentioned in my earlier post. It was also a good occasion to catch up with him and test his new project called Meatspace invasion. The rest of the day (4 hours of train and the whole afternoon) has been spent on data analysis: videos and picture from a field research projects that involves mobiles phones and 3D.

Wednesday was a mix of discussion with masters students at HEAD-Geneva about their masters thesis, the monthly meeting with colleagues and… a session of data analysis (for the aforementioned projects)… and a 3-hours workshop at EPFL in which we engaged engineers in a series of creative activities to design an accessory for book reading (based on assignments such as post-its brainstorming and drawing exercises with storyboards).

Thursday was a combination of client meetings, data analysis, fondue with the friend at Bookap in Lausanne and a workshop with a client (an electricity utility) that finished with a cooking workshop in Vevey.

Today was a conference day, the annual Swiss Design Network conference in which I participated in a panel about design research, games and cognitive sciences. It was a good opportunity to meet up with like-minded people such as Gesche Joost, Martin Wiedmer, Alain Findeli, Massimo Botta and the guys from emphase.ch.