Emergent Interaction: Creating Spaces for Play

Introduction Designers of technology always have designed for interaction. Everything in the built environment is made to be used in some way, by some people, for some purposes, irrespective of how peripheral any notion of “interaction” may have been during the design process. If the practice of interaction design deals with matters such as the determination of what interactive devices should be built, how functionality can be accessed, and how products can facilitate interaction, then among the questions that face interaction design “research” are methodological concerns such as how we should seek to understand what is built and how it is used—the implementation of technology and its appropriation. We will address these latter issues in this paper. “Interaction design” is a relatively recent term. In one sense, it is a document of the recognition of the importance of understanding the development and consumption of technology as being irredeemably situated in human, social, and organizational contexts. Yet it also is an acknowledgement of the central role of the designer in shaping human interaction with technology. As a disciplinary label, interaction design is a purposeful delineation from the more analytic discipline of human-computer interaction (HCI), a field to which it owes a historical and practical debt. This shift from HCI to the focus on the design of interactive systems carries with it familiar (to this audience) difficulties for the conduct of research. Only a few years ago, design research was characterized as an activity in search of a definition 1 in reference to the methodological pluralism and breadth of focus of research conducted within the field. Just how one should design, study design, conduct studies to inform design, and generate “design knowledge” continue to remain open questions for design research, with many competing perspectives being offered.2 These issues in design research are a more attenuated predicament for interaction design research, particularly when one considers the breadth of settings in which interactive devices are now used, and the topics of interest to interaction design. 1 Susan Roth, “The State of Design Research,” Design Issues 15:2 (1999). 2 Typically, design research has been informed by research practice drawn from other disciplines (e.g., psychology, physical and social sciences) with long, pedigreed and contrasting traditions of inquiry. There also have been moves away from established research models towards recasting design practice as a form of research itself, but this remains contested ground. See, for instance, Design [x] Research: Essays on Interaction Design as Knowledge Construction, Pelle Ehn and Jonas Lowgren, eds. (Malmo, Sweden: School of Arts and Communication, Malmo University, 2004); Bryan Lawson, “The Subject that Won’t Go Away, but Perhaps We Are Ahead of the Game: Design as Research,” Architectural Research Quarterly 6 (2002); and Darren Newbury, “Knowledge and Research in Art and Design,” Design Studies 17 (1996).