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What I was thinking of (for point 1) was that as researchers we often do close & situated studies with users - something which it seems to me often feels unattractive to industrial developers since they would much rather have a short check-list to tick off to see if their thing is accessible/useable. As a researcher I would say that to truly check usability/accessibility you need to do user tests (in real situations as well) - while it seems to me there is a strong movement for simplification in more industrial settings - one want personas, checklists etc....or if tests are done these are done in the limited sett ing of a lab... I agree 100% with your argument that one should check for problems as early as possible. But I'm not sure how widely this is recognized:-). I know of course that some companies do - but it is obvious that quite a lot don't (at least from observing their output:-). Or what do your say? Best wishes! /Charlotte Charlotte Magnusson Assistant Professor Certec, Division of Rehabilitation Engineering Research Department of Design Sciences Lund University Lund Sweden tel +46 46 222 4097 fax +46 46 222 4431 -----Original Message----- From: PhD-Design - This list is for discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Stephen Brown Sent: den 15 oktober 2007 19:22 To: [log in to unmask] Subject: Re: Bridges -- and gaps -- between research and practice Hi Charlotte, I think you are right in saying that accessibility/usability is often considered too late and that it is not generally a sales argument, even though it could and should be. But Im not sure that your first guess about mismatch between research methods and industrial requirements is valid. All products are usability/accessibility tested, but this may not happen until after the product has been launched and the public start to try to use it, at which point the product might fail completely or may at least do less well than if it had been designed for usability. This is expensive in terms of reputation, lost sales and potentially re-design and manufacture costs. Sometimes usability problems are discovered before launch but after significant manufacturing set up costs have been incurred. This is also very expensive and potentially time-consuming to fix. Generally speaking, the earlier usability testing is carried out the quicker and more cheaply it can be done. Also frequent testing reduces rather than increases development time, by eliminating the amount of time required to make extensive and costly design changes late on in the development cycle. For a very readable approach to lightweight (ie fast and cheap but effective) user testing, see Krug, S. (2000)Don't Make Me Think. Indianapolis: New Riders. Its written in the context of web design but the concepts apply to product deign more generally. Another common cause of inaccessible design is unthinking application of not very well thought out guidelines and standards. For example, the Web accessibility initiative Web content accessibility guidelines http://www.w3.org/TR/WAI-WEBCONTENT/ are widely acknowledged to be out-of-date and inappropriate for the technical environment and ways in which the Web is used today. Yet the British government has recently proposed to mandate WCAG AA for all government Web sites, with failure to do so resulting in a loss of the .gov.uk domain. I and others have argued (Kelly, B., Brown, S., Sloan, D., Petrie, H., Lauke, P., Ball, S., Seale, S. 2007 'Accessibility 2.0: People, Policy and Processes' Web 2.0 and the Semantic Web: Hindrance or Opportunity?, The 4th International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility, 7-8 May 2007, Banff, Canada. http://www.w4a.info/2007/prog/15-kelly.pdf )that design for accessibility needs to reflect the context of usage, including the aims of a service (informational, educational, cultural, etc.), the users' and the services providers' environment and that a 'one size fits all' standards based approach is demonstrably impractical and inappropriate. In other words, unthinking adherence to standards is a poor substitute for genuine user centred design. Regards Stephen -----Original Message----- From: PhD-Design - This list is for discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Charlotte Magnusson Sent: 15 October 2007 12:13 To: [log in to unmask] Subject: Re: Bridges -- and gaps -- between research and practice Hi all, I'm not a very active person on this list (sorry) but this is a problem which I have recently had reason to think about in a slightly different context. My problem concerns accessibility/usability and why the well known methods for making stuff more accessible (and useable) are not used.... So far I have some guesses (apart from plain lack of awareness): 1) The research methods are often not well adapted to industrial development processes - a researcher often has a lot of time and can afford to explore, while out in the industry things need to be done fast (and in a linear fashon) 2) Acessibility is not generally a sales agrument - many things that are supposedly "cool" are designed for the young white male who can dangle from a finger on mount everest;-) - it does not really "sell" to say that the device is easier to use for people with disabilities (or old people).... 3) Accessibility/usability is considered too late in the process and thus leads to "ad hoc" solutions which complicate matters (making them expensive and/or ugly) Would be interesting to hear the thoughts of more people on this issue..:-) Best wishes! /Charlotte Charlotte Magnusson Assistant Professor Certec, Division of Rehabilitation Engineering Research Department of Design Sciences Lund University Lund Sweden tel +46 46 222 4097 fax +46 46 222 4431 -----Original Message----- From: PhD-Design - This list is for discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Ken Friedman Sent: den 13 oktober 2007 19:27 To: [log in to unmask] Subject: Bridges -- and gaps -- between research and practice Dear Eun-jong, Been thinking about your post. These issues affect kinds of research that all fields of professional practice. A recent book explores this issue with proposals for ways to make research more effective in the world of professional practice. This is Andrew van de Ven's (2007) Engaged Scholarship. A few years back, Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton (1999) wrote on this in The Knowing-Doing Gap. These are management scholars, but the issues and problems are the same, and different fields of design research can use many of van de Ven's proposals exactly as they are. (While he teaches in a business school, van de Ven's field is information systems, a subject that might be taught in any other number of schools, design schools among them.) But the problem here is double-sided. Much research goes unused because practicing professionals simply don't want to use it. They know what they like, they've built a world of professional practice in which they are comfortable, and they learn their profession in the highly conservative guild tradition that guides much of the culture in art and design. Buckminster Fuller -- as designer and architect -- frequently noted the quarter-century gap between developments in research and their application in practice. It affects industry and it affects design practice. It also affects other fields such as medicine. This, in fact, is one of the major challenges to the spread of evidence-based medicine. The Committee on Quality of Health Care in America (2001: 13) found that it usually takes seventeen years for physicians and hospitals to adopt and put into practice the medical advances determined in clinical trials. Even when they do, practical application tends to be uneven. (See also Balas and Boren, 2000). For that matter, some research-based practices STILL find uneven application decades after we have acknowledge them as central to good medical practice. For example, the failure of hospitals and physicians to carefully and rigorously apply basic hand-washing hygiene before EVERY patient contact is a perpetual problem (see, f.ex., Goldmann 2006). We've known about this since Semmelweiss, Lister, and Pasteur pioneered the practice of antiseptic medicine and developed germ theory between the 1840s and 1890s. And here we are looking at this yet again in 2007! We all know this is a problem -- and physicians know this best of all. We all of us, at least those of us on this list, would probably agree that the solution is careful and comprehensive attention to basic antiseptic procedures. Use the URL below to read this short, informative article by Donald Goldmann (2006) if you disagree. You can also follow the links to a few basic articles detailing simple applications based on more than a century and a half of research. My point is that we are looking at a problem where professionals refuse to apply research findings to professional practice even though these findings are not in dispute. Everyone agrees that the research findings are valid and important, and most of us know that fatalities commonly occur because medical staff do not wash their hands before every patient contact. The gap between research and practice does not occur because the research is irrelevant. It occurs because some physicians behave as physicians behaved when they made grand rounds in the 1840s, back when Ignaz Semmelweiss was a medical student. Van de Ven shows us ways to bridge the gap between research and practice by creating relevant research in engaged scholarship. But designers and architects, as well as physicians and rocket scientists all neglect what research suggests or predicts. (Yes, even rocket scientists: remember Richard Feynman and the Challenger?) On the one hand, I'd agree that we ought to consider the need for relevant research. On the other, I'll argue that we face a significant problem in a guild-based profession where -- like medicine, law, and engineering -- people seem to believe that research is irrelevant if it produces findings that they did not learn about in school. In some cases, professional practitioners even seem to neglect research that produced results a century before they were born. In design, of course, we have several intriguing challenges. The first is that there are relatively few things in design that we can determine with the precision of physics or the massive statistical certainty of evidence-based medicine. If there were, however, someone would doubtless argue against it on grounds of personal preference, artistic freedom, or a general appeal to postmodern epistemology. Our second challenge is that a great many people see design practice as an art form: they do not want relevant research precisely because it offers challenges to the practice that they prefer. In communications design, for example, some simple rules of thumb that are based on studies of human physical perception and cognitive capacity should guide certain aspects of professional practice. Despite this fact, I have often observed designers argue about applying these findings to teaching or to work, claiming that the research is irrelevant. Our third challenge is a lack of tolerance for the slow development of knowledge. There is sometimes good reason to examine problems or develop research that does not have immediate relevance. Design is an important field of human discovery and invention, a field that grows increasingly important in a world where daily reality is shaped by human-designed artifacts of all kinds, social, technical, physical, and digital. To exactly the degree that this is so, we require free research of the kind that has helped us to make advances in such fields as rocket science, law, and medicine -- when practitioners choose to apply what researchers have learned. So I'd say that we need to find ways to make research relevant. And I'd say that there are times when it is important to learn things that may not seem relevant when we learn them. Best regards, Ken -- References Balas, E. Andrew, and Suzanne A.Boren. 2000. "Managing Clinical Knowledge for Health Care Improvement." Yearbook of Medical Informatics. Bethesda, MD: National Library of Medicine, pp. 65-70, 2000. Committee on Quality of Health Care in America, Institute of Medicine. 2001. Crossing the Quality Chasm: A New Health System for the 21st Century. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. Goldmann, Donald. 2006. "System Failure versus Personal Accountability -- the Case for Clean Hands." The New England Journal of Medicine, Vol. 355, No. 2, July 13 2006, pp. 121-123. Available online at URL: http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/355/2/121 Pfeffer, Jeffrey and Robert I Sutton. 1999. The Knowing-Doing Gap: How Smart Companies Turn Knowledge into Action. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard Business School Press. Van De Ven, Andrew H. 2007. Engaged Scholarship: A Guide for Organizational and Social Research. Oxford: Oxford University Press. -- Eun-jong Lee wrote: I'm research in bridging between design research and industrial design practice. I have worked with industry for long times and I found that the people in industry skeptical to relate design research and design practice. When I refer to the term 'design practice' it doesn't means all the designers in the industry but I mean the design practitioner who engages in embodiment directly, traditional designer. Most of this kind of designers thinks that design research doesn't effect on them directly and there exist huge chasm between design research and design practice. Actually design researchers don't have much knowledge of design practice. As Schon said, it seems that there is nothing here to guide practitioners who wish to gain a better understanding of the practical uses and limits of research- based knowledge, or to help scholars who wish to take a new view of professional action. Is it really impossible to cross this chasm? If you know any research related to this research or any comment, please let me know. -- -- Ken Friedman Professor Institute for Communication, Culture, and Language Norwegian School of Management Oslo Center for Design Research Denmark's Design School Copenhagen +47 46.41.06.76 Tlf NSM +47 33.40.10.95 Tlf Privat email: [log in to unmask]