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out-of-date and inappropriate for the technical environment and ways in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]
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