25 April 2006
14:30 - 16:00
Papers
Design: Creative and Historical Perspectives

Session chair – Jodi Forlizzi, Carnegie Mellon University

Dispelling Design as the Black Art of CHI [Best of CHI Nominee]
Tracee Vetting Wolf, Jennifer A. Rode, Jeremy Sussman, Wendy A. Kellogg

Jennifer Rode and Tracee Vetting Wolf are speaking

Purpose of paper –
What is creative design (graphic design or product design)?
How does it contribute and relate to UCD?

Rendezvous is a research project at IBM (conference call solution)
leverages social information

Nelson & Stolterman - The Design Way

Non-linear design process
design judgment
design artifacts span multiple judgment threads

compositional judgment
appearance judgment

design crits
virtual design crits – reinforce design culture

creative design is not allusive, visual form of knowledge, needs to be recognized as a formal profession

questions:
I’m not sure that you’ve succeeded in expelling design as the “black art.” Design is not objective, not formalized, and requires intuition and insight.
Intuition plays a large part but can be honed and practiced.

It sounds like you’re making a stake in the ground for CHI to take design seriously. Is it really necessary to do this at CHI?
A lot of design artifacts that we make are not represented at CHI or delivered.

Interaction in Creative Tasks: Ideation, Representation and Evaluation in Composition
Tim Coughlan, Peter Johnson

Presented by Tim Coughlan

people develop creative products within understood social contexts

how does technology relate to this?

observational study of musical composition

model of representation use diagram

when composers work with a piece of paper, they have more flexibility

taximozid idea representations used by musicians (play, covalisations, play gestures, recordings, etc)

designed a support tool for idea representation

musical composition involves cyclical process of ideation and evaluation

somethings are domain specific and somethings can be generalized

questions:

were you surprised that musical composition involves a cyclical process?
No

you acknowledge that software tools constrain creativity, your tool seems to try to support the ideation phase of composition, is that really the phase that needs support of software? Most composers are looking for new ways for expressing their ideas. I'm not really sure what you're contributing.

Interfaces should support exploration. People were working across multiple sessions and needed a way to record that.

Implications for Design [Best of CHI Nominee]
Paul Dourish

what does ethnography do for us in HCI?

ethnography evolved from anthropology
ethnography is characterized by long-term, immersive, participant-observation

the marginalization of theory
ethnography isn't just part of a toolbox, "an ethnographer is not a tape recorder"
the ethnographer must take a stand (not just reporting)

ethnographic data is not "collected" but generated
interpretation and analysis are central

asymmetric disciplinary relationships
why is it unreasonable to ask, "what are the implications for analysis or theory?"

relationship between technology and practice
these are two separate worlds but ethnography can uncover the problems that link the two

implications for design are a poor metric for evaluating ethnographic contributions

questions:

you didn't go into great length about design. What is the distinction of theory and design?
I'm not really sure what design is but apparently it means something to somebody.