Getting around the task-artifact cycle

TLDR

The paper develops an action science approach to HCI that integrates understanding and design activities, and clarifies the authors’ commitments and practices. The method applies current HCI development practices, explicit design rationale, and causal schemas (claims) that map user scenarios to psychological rationale to guide design decisions.

Abstract

We are developing an “action science” approach to human-computer interaction (HCI), seeking to better integrate activities directed at understanding with those directed at design. The approach leverages development practices of current HCI with methods and concepts to support a shift toward using broad and explicit design rationale to reify where we are in a design process, why we are there, and to guide reasoning about where we might go from there. We represent a designed artifact as the set of user scenarios supported by that artifact and more finely by causal schemas detailing the underlying psychological rationale. These schemas, called claims , unpack wherefores and whys of the scenarios. In this paper, we stand back from several empirical projects to clarify our commitments and practices.