I like research a lot. I don’t like to design without it. Sometimes I can’t figure out how the pieces fit together. I think about this a lot lately, as I am more interested in pure research or applied research than in…well in what? This is where I stumble over design research, and the way that research is thought about in design.
Take interaction design specifically. If you are in industry and you talk about research what you are usually talking about usability or ethnography.
Before the web the people who did the interaction design were engineers or psychologists or human factors specialists. This was not bad, though we might argue it also wasn’t good. I might also argue though that the interfaces designed by engineers for engineers worked for engineers.
With the advent of the web a new class of designers appeared. They were not trained in human factors or HCI, the vacuum was filled with people whose brains were good at organizing and seeing patterns and understanding relationships, it was the wild west and in the early days being good at it was what it took. Education here was often English or library sciences degrees. Engineers were relegated to back rooms.
As the majority of practitioners were not academics, research took on a different meaning, in practice, in industry. It was about making the interface model that existed better, starting from what was all ready known. This resulted in heuristics that became rules of thumb, of pattern libraries that assume most things work reasonably well when they are all the same. Research looked at smaller and smaller elements for usability and ethnography snuck in as understanding the consumers became more important as a point of differentation.
So where then, is the research I love? The cognitive science, neuroscience, decision making models, behavioral economics, psychology, and other fields that inform how and why humans do, act, respond, relate, and interact? Some of it is in research groups within large organizations – Yahoo!, IBM, Microsoft, though I haven’t yet sorted out how the research and the design work to inform each other. Judging by design output and conference papers, I am not sure this is happening, at least not well. At smaller research labs there seems to be more interesting work happening, where research includes science and building in a different relationship. And then there are organizations that seem more focused on pure research, though I cannot tell if and how their work becomes the basis of any of the design that reaches standard consumers.
I wish I better understood these pathways. Design Research as done by people trained in design is inadequate for me as a field, it feels most like an offshoot of consumer marketing. Research within major software/content companies has the strange requirement of insisting on a PhD, which in many cases removes the researcher from some of the reality of design for the real world, which could inform output. And Applied research, pure research, where are you and what are you doing? That which is within universities seems to most pop up at CHI conferences but often the topics are things known by industry practitioners. What use is this? Where are the hybrids which can engage in high level research that could change from the status quo AND can apply it to real world situations?
If you are out there, I’d like to meet you. I need to figure out more context in this realm.
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