Composing my practice: Interaction Design Research (IxDR)
It’s been a while since I've posted here, so I thought i’d discuss an discipline I've begun to align with: Interaction Design Research. This is a part of a few pieces which elaborate on my PhD design research and directions, taking on experimental practice in design for healthy ageing in aged communities
As an introductory note, i’m going to refer to being practice-based, to ‘situated’ in fields and the developing of my own design research practice. Why these notions? My design studies are being undertaken as practice research, my University's long-standing program of research into what designers actually do when they design, and into developing new and innovative approaches to creative practice. This enables practice-based researchers like myself to determine and examine both the fields i’m partaking in and to determining whether to adopt, adapt or reject the established practices in the wider research communities research as necessary (Vaughan, 2017).
For those not well-acquainted with the overlapping nature of design practices, the creative fields have a storied history of combining, diverging and exploring each other, sometimes through cherry-picking theory and also through re-imagining well-established methods (examples like design ethnography, green-service design & critical design come to mind). This resolves in a state-of-the-art which looks something like the model above: a clustering of engagements and overlapping interests, through merging and evolving ideologues and doctrine. For someone trained as an Industrial Design like myself, or anyone who has worked in the creative industries, this isn’t too problematic, as many designers often identify as hybrid UX-UI, Industrial-Sound, Visual-Content-Interaction or even the ‘The Unicorn Designer’ (UX, UI, IxD, Front-end Dev). This can often improve job opportunities, but also limit chances to specialise in your profession, a key aspect of researching.
While adding on the design ‘badges’ is one approach to defining your design practice for many creatives advertising with industry standards, I’ve not felt this to be involved or reflective approach to determining practice. For my research, I elected to be supervised by two co-primary researchers from very different fields, Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Design, as well as supported by an artist and digital ethnographer. Quite the collective. This forced a discussion and evolving discourse around bridging or blending HCI and Design fields, instead of say, attempting to pile these fields onto each other (my practice wasn’t going to be Digital Ethnography in Artistic HCI-Design Research). With this predicament, I turned to both reflecting on my own practice up to this point, and establishing where the developing research context would be. I reviewed a few different streams: my undergraduate industrial design studies & projects, my industry career so far and then determining contemporary research approaches.
To stage the scene, when I entered my bachelors , I knew I had a passion for designing and creativity, but unsure of where to place my energies. This is apparent in my choices or projects and studios, exploring the tacit practices of Precious Metal Fabrication to Sports Composites, as well as digital creation through Interactive Manufacturing Systems, Sensor Health Tracking and Virtual Multi-Sensory Therapy Tool. Aperture, the Virtual MST Tool, served as my Honours project and reflected a developing concern for implementing emerging technologies in unique and complex contexts, exploring notions of agency, collaboration and wellbeing through the project.
These courses re-enforced my inclinations towards research: Design for Health & Wellbeing concerns and undertaking Stakeholder/Patient studies really interested me. It also spoke to skills which I had tested through several design internships and positions: CoDesign Studio, ILANEL Bespoke Lighting Design, Exertion Games Lab & MWT Retail Solutions. I had, as many creatives do, a passion for hand-fabrication and materiality, effective skills in digital design and with it’s tools, but also growing strengths in user-research and applying theory into practice.
In inspecting contemporary fields, I found Industrial Design to be often limiting to pragmatic and constructive modes, while Service and Communication Design struggled to provide the granularity I enjoyed in previous user-research projects. In HCI, a strong methodology which enables often speculative research exploring technologies through paradigm ‘shifts’, emphasizing the evolving relationship of humans and computers. As per my research topics, I wanted the questions of such relationships and interactions to be explored through contextual, collaborative and situated means.
As I intend to continue to publish and engage with HCI design research (Human Factors in Computer Systems, Designing Interactive Systems, Interactions Magazine) as well as Design research conferences and journals (Design Research Society, Design4Health & NERD — New Experimental Research in Design), my review led me to review the relevant and developing approaches from the field’s literature.
Not wanting to put you, the reader, through the long and arduous journey (such are the pleasures of literature reviews) that I undertook, I resolve in discovering the emerging synthesis of Compositional interaction design. As I then backtracked to discover, Erik Stolterman & Mikael Wiberg as IxDR innovators, came to this approach to reflect a divergence in the practical tools and established methods being used in the discipline. In combination with this indication, their publication details contemporary interaction design practice, outlining it’s established approaches (traditional-engineering, human-centred, craft-orientated) and observed movements towards element-based designing. This recognition of design which integrates pre-existing elements, rather than working from scratch, aligns with my own perceptions of design practice and approach.
Briefly, they propose compositional interaction design can be defined as a practice of knowing, mapping, configuring and connecting elements to form larger compositional wholes. As this is conceptual, I‘m interested in exploring a experimental methodology in order to determine or establish it as a approach. Below is my interpretation of such practice and it’s suggestions of growing complexity, based on a graphic artifact from Between Two Worlds, an exhibit of M.C. Escher (1898–1972) and nendo. My future writings intends to explore this approach and led to new experimental research in design.
My backtracking from finding this article saw me collate a large amount of information and literature on the evolving discipline in Interaction Design Research (I’ve denoted it IxDR), with the implications for my work clarifying. Stolterman & Wiberg, alongside their academic contemporaries Janlert, Ghajargar, Stienstra, Fallman, Dalsgaard, Goodman & Wakkary, have seen IxDR develop as a close collaborator to both HCI studies and through Design research as an emergent discipline. Research in the field is increasingly practice-based, as field-based human-centred research and craft-orientation in makerspaces and hackathons have led to the tools and methods of practice directing approach and theory.
At present, IXDR is a concern with “how human beings relate to other human beings through the mediating influence of products”. It has become apparent overtime that the way in which which interact with such product is changing, from surface-bound to surface-free interactions, with the field developing discourse around the implications of complication (increasingly small and medium-sized artifacts with increasingly complex functions) and interaction technology (emergent technologies, smart wireless or other)(Janlert & Stolterman, 2015). The dominating aspect of interaction design research has been the interface, of which there are several though interpretations:
- a surface of contact between matching objects
- a boundary of an independent/self-sustained object
- a means for controlling an object
- a means for expressions and impressions, a target of interpretations and affectations
Due to this variety conceptual, interaction can often be measured and explained in a number of ways. For researchers, this explores interactivity as the phenomena of interaction, or as an ongoing interaction. Interactivity as activity may have both an instantaneous level of interactivity (fluctuating from moment to moment) but also an average level (the minimum and the maximum interactivity over an interval), is of interest.
Interactability is the intrinsic quality, the ability of things and systems, their potential, to engage in interaction. In contrast, interactiveness is the systems quality of and ability to engage a user. For a system to have the ability, or internal desire to interact or engage with user, it need to achieve certain goals through agency. The level of agency is applicable to the compliance to the user’s actions (lower agency), but can also be attributed to an artifact “acting up”. Such dysfunction can lead to stronger impression of agency than a an otherwise well-functioning artifact.
When it comes to creating, testing and refining such interactive products, digital technologies have enabled visual or tangible prototypes for trying out ideas to be easier and quicker than ever before. This improves the ability of both designers and users to experience their ideas outside of themselves as externalized objects, which is often required for complex or difficult concepts. Why is this useful? if a designer is taking a compositional approach to a project, digital tools enable both software and hardware to be flexible and accessible to human needs and shape, as well as offer opportunities for scalability.
As my research concerns both ageing and aged communities, research is suggesting that design researchers have a unique position in which to promote a sense of artistry and craftmanship in technologies, enable older people to be collaborators in the initial design of new technologies, and understand what drives these individuals to integrate these technologies into their everyday lives (Sharkey et al., 2020).
Enabling the interactive products to be both adaptive and scalability means that as both our environments and health conditions change with age, we enable systems which are compliant and considerate of changing needs and behaviours. For the benefit of older people, there needs to be some autonomy & visibility with the data they are providing, as well as uses which is augmenting in their activities and lives, not replacing. As IxD designers increasingly explore beyond surface-bound modalities (vision, touch, and direct object manipulations) to surface-free modalities (hearing, sound production, smell, heat, wind, breath, balance, posture, free gestures, etc.), they are finding new ways of better composing voice-based interfaces to support recreational and support actions or managing spatial experiences to provide therapeutic interventions.
So how am I composing my practice in light of all this? Well, as part of the research, I need to find and situate with a community of practice. The IxDR community has both a developed literature and precedents of work, method and mode. With this process of situating, the design practitioner will appraise existing and emerging trends and approaches, determining where they align and being to articulate the approach and context of contribution.
In the interaction design and research fields, the prominence and reliance on interactive technologies is being critiqued beyond representation and metaphor to focus on the materiality of interaction. Smart watches, smart cars, the Internet of things, 3D printing are indicative of trends toward combining digital and analog materials in design. This emphases on the virtual-physical and socio-technical demonstrate a maturing sense of purpose and place within the field, enabling applications into complex systems and situation, such as here the health and wellbeing fields.
The implications of interactive systems awareness and capabilities for the aged community are significant, not only to maintaining older people’s health but improving their wellbeing through therapy, recreation and socialising. As this research enables a discussion around where the physical ends and the virtual begins with older people, using collaborative and compositional methods is necassary.
Stolterman & Wiberg suggest that Compositional Interaction Design will likely stand in some contrast to other streams of development in practice (traditional, human-centred & craft), i’m more interested in taking a HCI ‘waves’ perspective: these practices are evolving alongside previous ones, referring to and appraising each other. Within the context of healthy ageing in aged communities, this serves to entangle human-centredness and craft approaches as not discreet but potentially integrated methods. This reflects my emphasis around a ‘experimental methodology’ of practice-based research.
“doctoral students in design would gain from stating more explicitly the design programmes they pursue and by embracing a more genuinely experimental methodology in their design (research) practice” — Binder & Brandt, 2017
By impressing the importance of such a methodology on design research, Binder & Brandt indicate the importance of innovative and exploitative practice as a cornerstone of doctoral learning, in having to both recognising the intention of the work (programme) and the epistemic nature of experimentation. This has been demonstrated above by Bang and Eriksen (2014). Here, the undertaking of a variety of experiments, producing several artefacts which can either support or modify the programme (Overall challenges/matters of concern).
Going forward, as I look to establish a systematic review of IxDR literature, theory and works which guides my line of questioning, how experiments of the program will develop in recognition of the future directions in the IxDR discipline. Exploring this with and alongside the older people at the heart of the future of ageing can hopefully lead to new and exciting ways of enabling and augmenting them towards healthy ageing.
Thank you for reading, while my field research is on hiatus due to the Covid19 global health emergency, I am making the most of working from home to reflect, and look forward to getting out at designing experimentally!
Take care and be safe over these uncertain times, as we need to care for the elderly and vulnerable more than ever.
Jacob Sheahan |Design PhD Candiate @RMIT| Industrial Designer
