Eun-Jong Lee, a visiting professor from the School of Industrial & Media Design at Handong Global University, gave the final talk of the season (PDF) for our HCI Design group. The topic was design language, a focus relevant to a gap in communication between design researchers and practioners.
Lee, a Korean professor with over a decade of teaching, programming and mock-up experience, began by comparing some cultural differences he observed while in the United States. He said that here people follow the rules, specifically at traffic intersections. Lee comes from the city with the most traffic accidents in the country with the most traffic accidents, and haphazard decision-making where streets cross in Korea is a big reason why. Second, America largely practices praise-based education. In Korea, it is “blame-based education, where faculty are called directors instead of advisors. Finally, there is a wide range of professional quality in the U.S., while in Korea specialist training and certification ensures a relatively high quality of service. Lee’s examples were getting a haircut here in town — his stylist apparently liked the bowl method — and drivers with a new license breaking in the card on the freeway (“two laps around the track doesn’t mean you can drive”).
I believe all of this was to illustrate a gap in experience, in this case cultural, that has an impact on expectations and meeting needs. Lee doesn’t think to shop around for a better haircut because the expectation is that anyone in the biz will have quality skills. An American student heading into the Korean academic environment should be aware that mistakes aren’t tolerated. Understanding issues that surface with such a gap is critical to effective communication.
Another gap is the one between design practitioner and design researcher. In order to address that problem, a clarification is needed about who can be called a “design practitioner?” For the purpose of his talk, Lee seemed to consider pracitioners those who apply the general insights of a researcher to specific design problems.
Design practice and design research are cyclic, although only the communication path from research to practitioner is explored. Pracitioners want new inspiration, support and knowledge for design … but there are conflicting mindsets present. Researchers build knowledge from a discipline-centered, rational perspective. It is about idealistic design and explicit experiences. Practitioners, on the other hand, are responding to motives of profit with market-centered design. They are intuitive and rely on implicit and tacit experience to embody design ideas. Lee’s example of this disconnection is a refrigerator with a “personal bar” in the door, providing easy acces to the beverage rack. The company manufacturing that product noted how popular the doors were on the fridge side and added a simlar one to the freezer side. No research. No justifications from user needs. But a profit increase of 8 percent followed. For the researcher, this is frustrating because his work isn’t needed or otherwise used. For the practitioner, this is frustrating because they don’t know how to use the abstractions provided by research.
Lee offered up a pyramid diagram that attempted to illustrate the relationship between the decreasing distance of a design activity to embodiment and the growing constraints of knowledge and practicality. The base of this pyramid is Research Data, which includes fact-gathering, identifying problems and generating directives. At the top is the Soultion Data, where concepts become manufacturing requirements and, ultimately, an end product. In between is the place where general directives need to be made specific and useable for the practitioner. Innovation might fall outside of the pyramid (i.e. beyond the constraints of the practitioner) but practitioners are looking more for inspiration than innovation.
To bridge this gap and make research usable, Lee argues for a design language. Such a language would need to:
- Support design judgments to back up embodiment decisions
- Explain suggestions in design terms
- Let designers be creative
- Include invisible factors (process, interaction style) as well as appearance factors
- Stay within practical constraints
As evidenced by the discussion that followed (and interrupted) the presentation, design communication is itself a design problem. It is meta-design, but one that is essentially the same problem a bioinformaticist would face trying to bridge the gap between technologist and biologist. In this case, the context was specific to Lee’s experiences in Korean industry, where roles are assigned and little overlaps. At this point, the work describes the language of the practitioner, as spoken by the researcher. Without asking the question of what the researcher needs from the practitioner, the responsibility is placed on the researchers to communicate data in a way it can be used.
