Organizing Metaphors for Design Methods in Intermediate HCI Education

What I read

In this text, the authors conducted interviews with four students to understand their perception of design methods in their emergent learning of design. They conclude that the ways students organize (or describe their organizational way of thinking about) methods impacts the way they practice design.

The authors first describe the way that students build knowledge of process is poorly understood, and broad and largely useless statements like “metamorphosis” are used in existing literature as placeholders for real knowledge. This paper will focus on how students define, think about and mentally organize methods in their emergent understanding of design. As design students experience their studies, they need to learn how to make design moves, how to broaden their perspectives through an understanding of social sciences, and how to develop identity. One way this is presented by educators is through the use of design methods, which the authors define as any “intellectual or practical support that a practitioner might use to support the design process in a positive way.”

The authors describe that their study will focus on method use in advanced UX design students. Interviews were used to explore the way students described their need for methods, how they discovered new methods, and how they used methods. The case studies presented in the paper are limited to those from the third and fourth year students, who had both learned about and practiced methods. The findings are presented as four individual discourses, highlighting the way students perceive and think about methods.

The first student presented methods as a way of keeping a project moving forward and staying on track, but also viewed methods as a fluid way of going about design; the student’s view of their own use of methods showed inconsistency. The second student is described as separating formal methods—those with names, that were explicitly learned in a class—with more personal ways to approach a design problem. Informal methods helped this student present their own identity of an ethics or advocacy focused designer, one that could work with participants in a meaningful instead of manipulative manner. The third participant viewed methods as a way to discuss their work with others, and to prompt self-questioning; this student is described as using methods as communicative tools. The last student viewed methods as a way of playing with a problem, but viewed the playing as awkward or forced.

The authors then describe the findings, and how the way students think of their methods impacts how they use them, and how they think of themselves. As students reflect on methods, they think of them as a frame for their beliefs, not necessarily as how they actually go about completing design work. This may be because design studios often takes an open, pluralistic perspective, while a technical approach found in an HCI/CS program may be more rote or formalized. This implies that methods play a role in how students build their own professional identity, and informs how they think of their relationship with design itself. To inform this, instructors can encourage reflection about the use of methods, both as ways of understanding what to do, but also how and why to do it.

What I learned and what I think

I have not thought about the way my students think of their relationship with methods, outside of “I don’t like it” or “I’m not good at it,” and I’ve never considered the way a method may impact the professional identity a student is establishing (again, outside of those simplistic frames.) I’m trying to play this out with more examples or specificity.

I see students gravitate heavily towards the superficiality of personas. If looked at through this lens of method metaphor as related to self-development, this might be a talent-free way of feeling that they are being empathetic, or user-centered, and that they are becoming a type of person who cares about other people. I would imagine that the more they take to it, and try to enrich the method, the more they first remove the marketing elements (they drive this car!) and then add back in meaningful characteristics, which reinforces the idea of being an “empathy person.” If I really pushed it, it may also be a way in which students learn to be authoritarian: I construct the person I am designing for, instead of observing them; I am a “person who controls a situation.”

I don’t know if you can really separate the talent and effort required to use popular methods, and the way students think about and frame their relationship with the methods. The “method” of “crazy 8 brainstorming!” takes pretty much no real ability, setup, or time, and while it does require extroversion and playfulness, there’s not much else going on there. On the other hand, running a real empirical, quant-based study at scale means understanding basic statistics, planning, recruiting, managing, data cleaning, synthesizing… it’s just objectively harder, and longer. The latter would certainly lead a student to develop a sense of “methods are ways I can show my rigor and ability” or “methods are ways I can separate myself from other students,” my experience tells me that students will actually do everything they can to not do that level of detail work, because it’s hard. So the rejection of the method and the way they consider it is largely going to be about other parts of being a student and learning professionalism.

Methods are so baked into the HCI curriculum, they feel almost inextricable. I don’t question the value of naming the things we do, particularly when a profession like human factors or usability engineering was so ignored or diminished; and learning things by following a step-by-step tutorial is very effective. But even the existence of this body of research sort of reinforces the idea that they have lasting value, and are good ways to go about work. It’s just not true, and the second methods movement reckoning has already happened. It’s increasingly going to be seen as doing a disservice to students, but there’s not a lot of exploration that I’m aware of into how to approach education in other ways. The capstone project is certainly one approach, but that’s almost always a, well, capstone on top of an experience.

We need to go down the “I see a world with no methods!” sort of dream, and let it play out, but not let it fall back into design science. One approach is the master apprentice style, and while there’s a ton of knowing about how that plays out in a design studio, there’s very little, I think, about how that works in an HCI studio. It feels like it would be different.