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Yes, deciding what is good design is difficult. Yet, we do it all the time. Otherwise we could not come to any design decisions. But it is indeed context dependent and it is about value judgements. There are however some regularities that always come back. I do not know what they are in graphic design, but I have a fairly good idea about what they are in interaction design.

If you are interested in learning how professional interaction designers reason about design quality you may want to read my upcoming DRS-paper (abstract below).


// Mattias
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MATTIAS ARVOLA, Ph.D. 
Sr. lecturer in Interaction Design. 
Linköping University and Södertörn University. 
www.arvola.se 

ABSTRACT: It is important to be aware of different ways of seeing design quality of interactive artifacts in order
to appreciate the various aspects of a design, but how do professional interaction designers
understand design quality? In theory, one way of approaching design quality of interactive artifacts
has been the Vitruvian principles of commodity, firmness and delight, originally created for
architecture. Such frameworks are, however, seldom directly employed in practice. This paper
investigates what conceptions professional interaction designers have of design quality for
interactive artifacts. Interviews were conducted with ten designers. The analysis disclosed four
conceptions concerning: (a) Constraints & contexts, (b) motivations & purposes, (c) use-qualities of
functions & content, and (d) experiential qualities of form & behaviour. An awareness of these
conceptions may facilitate the appreciation for different aspects and opportunities in a design
situation.

Arvola, M. (2010). Interaction designers' conceptions of design quality for interactive artifacts. In Proceedings of Design Research Society (DRS) 2010, Montreal, July 7-9 2010. http://www.ida.liu.se/~matar/DQ-DRS2010-final.pdf