I am reading two formidable articles on interaction design research:
Erik Stolterman’s The Nature of Design Practice and Implications for Interaction Design Research from International Journal of Design, 2(1), 55-65 - and
Research Through Design as a Method for Interaction Design Research in HCI from the SIGCHI proceedings from last year.
Whenever I read research in this field – as good as the above – I get enthusiastic and eager to participate in the discussion. I made some arguments in my dissertation about the nature of design research, and I am going to expand and pursue these further in the coming months.
But when reading Stolterman’s paper on design practice I also miss being in practice and doing design for clients full time. Although the research projects I work on have practical issues and require design work, it is very different from doing client work. The goal is different and the criteria for success is not necessarily that a design has success in the market place. The goal is often that we explore some interesting form of interaction based on its theoretical implications. This makes for a much more free and undefined design task, and in design (consulting) work it is often the constraints in the project and the direct interactions with a client that make an interesting project.
So, like many other design researchers, I have this dual focus on participating in leading edge discussions of the foundational concepts of design, research and interaction, and at the same time a desire to get out of research and into the dirty reality of designing for clients and the market place.
Thirdly I also have a strong desire to work with social change and collective intelligence in an organizational and social way – disregarding design and technology, and just focusing on facilitating healthy and evolutionary gatherings of people who can make a real difference right now. I tried to combine these foci last year while being an independent consultant, but it was too difficult to explain the span to potential clients.
Having three core interests can be a good thing for being able to see and approach the world from these three different perspectives. But it can also be an unhealthy state, as it it can lead to a state of wanting – regardless of where I am and what I am doing, I want to do something else, which might be able to better fulfill my highest potential.
A clever friend of mine once told me that I should think of the goal as “where my highest potential meets the needs of the world”. So either stay focused and on the edge with whatever one is doing, or look for where one’s diverse interests overlap and create your perfect platform.