Daniel Fällman: The Design-oriented Attitude

Although a substantial and increasing amount of research in Informatics and related fields such as Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) are addressed as 'design-oriented', in the sense of being directed at large towards innovation, design, construction, and exploration of new kinds of information and interaction technology, the understanding of such an attitude to research in terms of philosophical, theoretical, and methodological underpinnings seems relatively poor compared to other approaches to research.

In this seminar, based on bits and pieces taken from my thesis, I intend to specifically address and outline what it may mean to have a design-oriented attitude to research, by bringing forth what I believe to be significant influences from three different accounts of the nature of design: the conservative, the romantic, and the pragmatic.

I will argue that what design-oriented research 'is', is the synthesis of these accounts, and that just because it is the synthesis of the ingoing constituents that characterizes design-orientation--and not the ingoing constituents in themselves--this attitude to research cannot be easily modeled upon for instance the social or the natural sciences, or simply be considered as art or innovation. Some examples primarily from contemporary HCI will be provided to support this claim.

To sharpen the argumentation slightly, it will then become important to attempt to further develop what is more precisely meant by this arguable fuzzy notion of design-orientation as a 'synthesis'. Is there such a thing as a design-oriented style of inquiry? Or, in even more ambitious terms, how does the design-oriented researcher approach the world?

Välkomna!
Mikael Wiberg