Dear Ken,

 

Pax domine

 

In my previous email I was pointing to the possibility of a new area of
theory advance in design research that offers benefits over the existing
approaches.

 

I suggest there is a path to creating causal theories about designers and
users response to new and unknown designed outcomes based on humans' typical
reactive responses in this situation.

 

This approach has the benefit of deriving testable causally-based theories
in their explanatory power go beyond the associatively-derived theories
about human responses to designs that currently dominate this area of design
theory. This latter follows from the general rule that tested causally-based
explanations are more useful than associatively-derived information. This is
because causally-derived theories can predict outcomes for novel situations,
whereas associatively-derived information can only guide the design of
things that are similar or with incremental changes. 

 

The underlying reasoning for the idea of creating causal explanations about
designers and users response to new and unknown designed outcomes is
straightforward: 

 

1.       It is widely agreed that humans act on the basis of their previous
experience and learning combined with in-born responses. 

2.       This using of previous experience, learning and in-born responses
is evident in how humans respond to something new.

3.       Designers create new and novel things

4.       Users have to respond to the new and novel things designers create

5.       Design researchers improve design processes and outcomes by
understanding how and why designers respond to the 'new' that emerges in
their minds and from their other design practices.

6.       Design researchers and designers improve design processes and
outcomes by understanding the basis of how and why users respond to the new
and novel things designers create.

7.       Causal explanations of the how and why designers respond to the new
provide the understanding of why these responses happen and thus offer
predictive power that can be used in other design situations.

8.       Associative data about designers and users response to the new is
limited to providing information about how things have happened in
particular past situations. 

9.       Design theory development comprises formalising the above
knowledge.

10.   Design theory development benefits more from causal explanations than
associative data.

11.   Currently, the literature on these issues is dominated by associative
data (e.g. the excellent work by Vesna et al in QUT on intuitive interfaces,
Nielsen's work on usability, the work on Design and Emotion, the CSCW
literature, the HCI literature...)

12.   Individual human responses to the unknown are typified by fixed,
'chunks of response triggered by their observation of aspects of the new
situation.

13.   Evidence of the above is from multiple sources including research
findings relating to 'knowledge chunking', 'fixed action patterns',
'archetype use', 'value judgement', 'paradigms', 'disciplines and
professional knowledge' along with everyday empirical experience.

14.   The most obvious way, to me, to start to develop such a causally-based
subfield of design theories is to first map examples of where users exhibit
archetypical responses and then catalogue these archetypes and responses in
terms of set and mereological taxonomies.

15.   These provide a conceptual basis for analysing how and why designers
and users respond using these archetypical responses, i.e. the
identification of a taxonomy of typical trigger factors.

16.   The relationships between elements in taxonomies are the basis of
mid-level causal theories of how designers and users respond to the new.

17.   Analysis of the underlying foundations of the responses, archetypes in
these taxonomies provides an epistemological and ontological foundation for
such mid-level causal theories, and themselves offer low-level causal
theories of how designers and users respond to the new. Almost certainly,
these latter will be ta the level of biological basis of aspects of
cognition, perception and emotion (biological basis of embodied behaviour).

18.   The development of effective design guidelines is restricted by the
types of theories about how designers and users respond to the new. The use
of theories based on associative data is limited to identifying design
guidelines of things that are similar, i.e. are limited in their validity to
incremental design (by definition).

19.   The outcome is a new causally-based body of theory about how designers
and users respond to the new that offers a foundation for better design
guidelines that can address truly novel design rather than incremental
design. 

My apologies, I was trusting you would infer all the above (and more) from
my previous post on the help desk employees rant about user's
'superstitious' thinking.

 

At this moment, I have no institution funding me for writing for journals
and attending conferences.  This means I'm now publishing my research and
analyses direct to the public domain. I claim moral ownership of this
material and ask that people reference and credit  it appropriately if they
use it in their own research and publications.

 

Best wishes,

Terry

==

Dr Terence Love, FDRS, AMIMechE, PMACM, MISI

PhD, B.A. (Hons) Eng, P.G.C.E

School of Design and Art, Curtin University, Western Australia

Psychology and Social Science, Edith Cowan University, Western Australia

Honorary Fellow, IEED, Management School, Lancaster University, UK

 

PO Box 226, Quinns Rocks, Western Australia 6030

 <mailto:[log in to unmask]> [log in to unmask]   +61 (0)4 3497 5848

==