[IxDA Discuss] At CHI? Why? Or why not? -> Summary, etc.

[Jonas Löwgren]

Picking up on Tom's thread, I thought I might add a few lines since I  
was at CHI. (Well, only for 3 days out of 4, but still..)

Tom's summary matches my impressions quite well. But: I am not sure  
about how, or whether, Tom makes distinctions between the design  
community and the concept of practitioners.

As a person being employed by a university to do research through  
design and research for design (specifically, interaction design), I  
found that the number of times "design" was referred to at the  
conference paper sessions by far exceeded the actual design quality  
of the work being presented in the same paper sessions.

Three main comments, very brief:

- The design quality of the concepts/prototypes presented as  
contributions in research papers was variable, to put it gently;
- The reporting of design work frequently lacked rigor and substance  
-- in terms of judgments, deliberations, explorations of  
alternatives, or rationale for key decisions;
- "Users" and "user testing" are assumed to provide the "right"  
assessments by default, even when very few people or the wrong people  
are enlisted to use the prototype for a little while in a highly  
artificial situation.

It is not hard to see how these three comments relate to each other.

Why am I making these grumpy remarks, anyway? Because I see another  
possible role of a design community at CHI (possible different from  
IxD practitioners), which would be to engage in design and rigorous  
discourse around it as a way to collaboratively construct knowledge.  
Like any other academic community does within its field of expertise.  
The paper program, the panels, the alt.chi and the experience reports  
I managed to catch at this year's CHI still seem to have a bit of  
work to do in this respect.

Regards,
Jonas Löwgren

----
Arts and Communication
Malmö University, SE-205 06 Malmö, Sweden

phone +46 7039 17854
web http://webzone.k3.mah.se/k3jolo