In Research Through Design in HCI, John Zimmerman and Jodi Forlizzi write about Research through Design: “an approach to conducting scholarly research that employs the methods, practices, and processes of design practice with the intention of generating new knowledge”.

I was struck by their description of the “early days of HCI”. Researchers Jack Carroll and Wendy Kellogg wrote “with great frustration” that in HCI:

The thing proceeds theory instead of theory driving the creation of new things (1989). They noted that the mouse needed to be invented before studies could be done that showed this was a good design.

This reminded me of Don Norman’s 2010 comments in “Technology first, needs last: the research-product gulf”. Norman opens by quoting David Nye’s Technology Matters: Questions to Live With:

Necessity is often not the mother of invention. In many cases, it surely has been just the opposite. When humans possess a tool, they excel at finding new uses for it. The tool often exists before the problem to be solved.

Norman’s piece is delightfully controversial, and I recommend reading it:

New conceptual breakthroughs are invariably driven by the development of new technologies.

He attacks as a “myth” the idea that “to achieve major conceptual breakthroughs, we should do ethnographic field studies to understand the hidden, unmet needs of our potential customers.” Spicy!

These writings all point to the same tension expressed in many ways:

  • Theory ↔ Thing
  • Necessity ↔ Invention
  • Unmet needs ↔ New technologies
  • Motivation ↔ Design

The tension between theory and thing comes up constantly while peer-reviewing papers describing a new system. In response to Tessa Lau’s 2010 blog post “Rethinking the Systems Review Process”, David Karger writes: “A systems paper could be interesting thanks to a thorough analysis of its deployment and usage (evaluation). Or it could be interesting thanks to a well-argued discussion of why it was built a particular way (design). Or it might just demonstrate that a given interesting capability could be created at all.”

Further reading