<i>Lingua Francas</i> for design

TLDR

Interaction design involves diverse stakeholders—designers, engineers, managers, marketers, researchers, and users—who often lack shared concepts, experiences, and perspectives. The study asks how design processes can effectively proceed without a shared linguistic or conceptual ground. The authors propose that interaction designers facilitate the creation of a lingua franca, illustrated through a community design case study and by adapting pattern languages as meta‑languages for generating project‑specific lingua francas.

Abstract

A central challenge in interaction design has to do with its diversity. Designers, engineers, managers, marketers, researchers and users all have important contributions to make to the design process. But at the same time they lack shared concepts, experiences and perspectives. How is the process of design-which requires communication, negotiation and compromise-to effectively proceed in the absence of a common ground? I argue that an important role for the interaction designer is to help stakeholders in the design process to construct alingua franca.To explore this issue, which has received remarkably little attention in HCI, I turn to work in urban design and architecture. I begin by discussing a case study in community design, reported by Hester [10], that demonstrates the power of alingua francafor a particular design project. I then describe the concept of pattern languages and discuss how they might be adapted to the needs of interaction design in general, and used, in particular, as meta-languages for generatinglingua francasfor particular design projects.