The Design Enterprise: Rethinking the HCI Education Paradigm

What I read

In this text, the author proposes an evolution of the existing HCI curriculum; this new model, called Design Enterprise, includes, among other things, more focus on the business context in which design is ultimately placed.

First, the author describes that HCI education, traditionally focused on usability, needs to evolve into “knowledge management.” This takes the form of systems thinking, and also on placing focus on what people can do; it looks at HCI from a person’s perspective, rather than a machine’s perspective. He emphasizes that this is a large shift, and requires a “major rethinking” of what to teach. This is reinforced by work from Winograd, Kapor, and Norman, who have elevated the role of design into more strategic and thoughtful aspects of software development.

Next, the author indicates that he needs to define design before discussing a new way of teaching it and thinking about it. He extends the idea of design into spaces of imagined futures, and “design becomes the convergence of knowledge, innovation, and the hope that a concept will be realized.” He concludes that HCI educators need to understand the “enterprise of design,” and continues to expand the definition of design to include reflecting on design itself, and managing the design, which implies that it is a social process.

The author then presents the paper’s central contribution—a proposed model of thinking about design, and teaching it, called the Design Enterprise Model. This is a “novel pedagogical framework for building, organizing, and managing design knowledge,” and it extends HCI by using design as a way of managing knowledge domains. These are the social science, design, business, and computing. Design, in this context, is a “means of administrating the enterprise of knowledge acquisition and modeling to facilitate product creation.” This elevates design from an applied focus on usability, and instead positions it as a larger part of product development.

The social domain requires a broader understanding of the social sciences, emphasizing things like sociology more than the cognitive sciences. One form of this is through ethnographic studies, which “enables designers to do what traditional usability methods… cannot”—acting in a form of co-creation with users. The design domain is separated into interface design and interaction design, and are elevated, along with the process of design, into an HCI curriculum. The third domain, “business,” introduces the value of design into a context of business constraints, and providing students with the ability to link design to revenue. The last domain is computing, which is “narrowly defined as the theory and application of building and testing interactive products.” The author describes how this new model has been applied in existing graduate studies at Purdue. He provides two short examples of projects that emerge from this way of thinking and working.

The author concludes by indicating that traditional HCI theory and methods, while foundational, aren’t providing students with the knowledge they need for future trends.

What I learned and what I think

It’s helpful for me to think about this in the context of when it was written. It was published in the summer of 2007, so likely written in late 2006. The iPhone was released in mid 2007. There was a building push towards realizing the value of design, and it sort of culminated and “unlocked” as a result of the iphone launch. The ideas presented here are somewhat established now, and weren’t entirely unique then, but I remember the difficulty in pushing a lot of this through the academic community (CHI, specifically). The design track was rough, and this was one of the reasons why I ended up in the IxDA world. When I ran Boulder in 2008 (?), the people it attracted were very much doing all of these things, but were calling it interaction design instead of HCI or the author’s Design Enterprise Model. Names aside, his call for curricular overhaul was right on, but maybe too late (at least from a vocational-placement space).

I wonder about the weird dynamic between HCI and design, and how much of it in academia is (was? still is…) a turf issue. When a school has both programs, they need a way to distinguish between each other, but the fields have largely collided in practice. I can’t think of the last time anyone I know was hired for, or was hired as, an “HCI professional,” but they probably learned just as much about product design from a program like that as they did in a design school.

Except for the point about moment-in-time, and the observation that we seem to continually define design and reconsider our curriculum, I’m not pulling a lot from this.