On methods

Associate professor at Virginia Tech and award-winning architect and creator of design tools. Associate professor at Virginia Tech; her specialties include CSCL and CSCW systems. Dream big visions; dream big methods. Novel methods are overrated (or at least more highly rated than old methods). Methods are taught as if they were the research or design itself. " Hey, we're designers too! We have big visions and design big systems! We want to share them with our students! " Special methods for a special discipline. Many interaction design instructors believe interaction design intrinsically requires methods unique and specific to HCI. They avoid the methods of its root disciplines—computer science, cog-nitive psychology, industrial design, graphic design, and informatics, to name a few. Perhaps the fear is that borrowing methods might premi-ate one foundational discipline over another, or that design students will lose their tenuous grasp of the ineluctable nature of interaction. Let's use their methods—they must know something we don't. Just as there are those interaction design instructors who believe that interaction design requires unique methods, there are those who try to use design methods of engineering—particularly software engineering. Of course, implementation often takes interaction design into the realm of software, but that is not a reason to mold interaction design processes into more attention. There is nothing wrong with these techniques. But their use in practice is much more limited than that of many neglected or untaught methods. We have a few theories about why HCI design instruction is unbalanced. Simon says. Abstraction is overrated. We single out Herb Simon for some of this: In addition to his many accomplishments, unfortunately , Herb Simon's The Science of the Artificial did create at least one disservice. By taking the notion of design to dizzying heights of abstraction, he made it difficult for interaction designers to see particulars in disciplines that traditionally took design activity as central [1]. In some fields—economics, psychology , computer science, and, indeed, engineering—an idea is often considered better and more powerful if it is more general; a system that encompasses an entire process is often considered better than a system that implements only one piece of the process. Consequently, simple, reliable design methods become less valued than more general, all-encompassing ones and disappear from consciousness. This may be useful in many of our allied disciplines, but not so in interaction design. Some design methods are used but not …