HCI and design: uncomfortable bedfellows?

of information technology in everyday life has greatly increased the public awareness and prestige of good design. In real life, the relationship between these two areas has been far from straightforward, but strained and complex. It took 15 years before an industrial designer was able to give a talk in the major HCI conference as a designer, and the relation to other direction has not been much more embracing. Although some development has taken place the contact points between the areas are still sparse after quarter a century of overlapping existence. Why is this so? The paper will explore the issue by tracing the intellectual development of the HCI during the last 25 years, and comparing that with the design world. The point of interest will be the HCI “turn to design” in 1990s. There was a lively theoretical discussion within IT in the 1980s about the philosophical foundations of information technology design, resulting e. g. such classics as Winograd & Flores’ „Understanding Computers and Cognition“ 1986 and Ehn’s „Work-Oriented Design of Computer Artifacts“ 1988. This discussion did not, however, survive into the 1990s but it was ten years later replaced with a novel direction, the “turn to design”. Why did this turn take place, and did it succeed?