Research through design as a method for interaction design research in HCI

TLDR

The HCI community has long struggled to integrate design into research, despite design’s strong presence in practice. The paper proposes a new model for interaction design research in HCI and formalizes it with four evaluation lenses and three illustrative examples. The model is implemented via a research‑through‑design approach where designers create novel integrations of HCI research to produce transformative products, and the authors provide four evaluation lenses and three examples to formalize the model. The model enables interaction designers to contribute research by leveraging their strengths in tackling under‑constrained problems, as illustrated by the provided examples.

Abstract

For years the HCI community has struggled to integrate design in research and practice. While design has gained a strong foothold in practice, it has had much less impact on the HCI research community. In this paper we propose a new model for interaction design research within HCI. Following a research through design approach, designers produce novel integrations of HCI research in an attempt to make the right thing: a product that transforms the world from its current state to a preferred state. This model allows interaction designers to make research contributions based on their strength in addressing under-constrained problems. To formalize this model, we provide a set of four lenses for evaluating the research contribution and a set of three examples to illustrate the benefits of this type of research.