DESIGN RESEARCH

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DESIGN RESEARCH

• for Situationally Appropriate Interactions

Jodi Forlizzi HCII and School of
Design September, 2001
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What Ill talk about today...

• What is design research?
• My history of interest in Situationally
  Appropriate Interactions
• Lessons learned from research in kinetic
  typography
• Whats next?

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What is design research?

• A new field
• More than doing research related to a specific
  product or conceptual outcome
• Three types case-by-case applied
  theoretical

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Case-by-case research

• Solution of individual problems
• Study of individual cases
• Outcome is generalization that makes a
  contribution to the field of design for
  example, case studies or products

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Case-by-case research
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Applied research

• Investigation of a group of problems or phenomena
• Discover rules of thumb, principles, or processes
  that can be shared across a range of cases
• Outcomes academic papers, demonstration
  products, design principles

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Applied research
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Theoretical research

• Investigation of principles and causes related to
  a particular problem
• Involves development of theory or speculation
  related to the making of products, investigating
  the practice and consequences of design
• Outcomes papers and contributions to design
  theory

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Theoretical research
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Characterizing approaches

• Two basic flavors
• Make a bunch of stuff to learn new design
  theories or principles
• Observe a human need and try to develop something
  to address it
• Todays example is a case of the former
• Are there advantages and drawbacks in approaches?

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A history of interest in SIA

• Overarching research questions
• What dynamic visual and auditory events affect
  human perception?
• Can we design such events systematically to evoke
  intended responses?

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Kinetic typography

• Research done as masters student in 1996-1997
  with Suguru Ishizaki and Shannon Ford
• First three months very free-form
• Largely unspecified research plan
• Five-minute writing task each day

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Kinetic typography lessons learned

• We need two levels of investigation applied and
  theoretical research
• Applied research to address perceptual and
  aesthetic issues applications for elements
  besides textual ones
• Theoretical research to address response,
  context, appropriateness, and replicability

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Whats next?

• Look at a body of examples in the world
• Make more examples from other domains
• Still limited to largely conceptual stuff

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Whats next?

• Abstraction of issues
• New insights made more robust by input from other
  disciplines
• Current interest human visual perception

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DISCUSSION