Abstract
This chapter sets out to explicitly contrast scientific and design approaches to knowing. In both cases, practitioners create situations for people to engage, and the results may be of interest to the research community. Scientific researchers need to be able to defend the logic of each step of their process from hypothesis to test to theory. Design, in contrast, relies simply on the success of the artefacts it creates. This implies a great degree of methodological liberty, including the potential to create open-ended designs that occasion new and illuminating engagements with the world.
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Notes
- 1.
Ludic engagement refers to forms of interaction that are not utilitarian or task-oriented, but exploratory, provisional and curiosity-driven: playful in the broadest sense (see Gaver, 2009).
- 2.
Many others have discussed whether and how design and science are distinct approaches, as well as whether they should be or not. I do not present a survey here, but see e.g. (Cross, Naughton, & Walker, 1981; Louridas, 1999; Schön, 1999; Cross, 2007; Stolterman, 2008; Gaver, 2012; and particularly Nelson & Stolterman, 2003).
- 3.
To make matters worse, I am purposely not distinguishing design in general from “research through design” in what follows. Such a distinction is neither simple nor productive, in my view. For instance, people have suggested that research through design is different from “real” design in not having a client, or clear problem to solve. But researchers do have their clients, including research funders, academic audiences, and the people who might encounter their work, and these are not so different from the managers, colleagues, other departments, purchasers and end users that “real” designers have to please. Equally, many “real” designers do not solve problems so much as they explore new configurations of materials and form in an endless conversation with each other and the surrounding culture, while practitioners of research through design commonly do address problems, such how to reflect new aspects of human experience.
- 4.
Others design “probes” to avoid such disruption; see Boehner et al. (2007).
- 5.
- 6.
Of course science and design may be intertwined in practice; what my argument here suggests is the importance of being clear about the form of accountability claimed for different aspects of the process and results.
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Acknowledgements
This discussion is an updated version of keynote addresses delivered to DIS’00 and HCIC’10. The research was supported by European Research Council’s Advanced Investigator Award no. 226528, “ThirdWave HCI”. I am grateful to John Bowers, Eric Stolterman, Kirsten Boehner, Anne Schlottmann, Wendy Kellogg, Judy Olson and John Zimmerman for their comments on this chapter, though it must be admitted that few if any of them would fully agree with the result.
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Gaver, W. (2014). Science and Design: The Implications of Different Forms of Accountability. In: Olson, J., Kellogg, W. (eds) Ways of Knowing in HCI. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-0378-8_7
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