Annotated portfolios and other forms of intermediate-level knowledge

Abstract

In a recent issue of this magazine, Bill Gaver and John Bowers address the role of design practice in academic research and provide a concrete suggestion: "We propose the notion of annotated portfolios as a way to communicate design research. In part, we do this to provide an alternative to accounts that suggest for design to become productive as research, it should engage in some sort of theory formation. While what exactly is meant by theory is not always clear, writers usually have in mind some conceptual machinery that can explain and predict" [1].Briefly, the notion of annotated portfolios entails selecting a collection of designs, re-presenting them in an appropriate medium, and combining the design re-presentations with brief textual annotations. Gaver and Bowers characterize their proposal as a methodology for communicating design research, and more specifically, a methodology that is very familiar to designers as well as artists.The idea of annotated portfolios takes its departure from a growing sense of discomfort with the way in which design practice is increasingly misappropriated by "scientistic" notions of academic research: "Rather than [finding ways for design to contribute to HCI] by mutating design to become more like "real" research, however, we believe it is better to grow design's identity as research from its existing practices and reasoning" [1]. This is a very timely proposal, given the increasing debate on design research and its relation to HCI (see also [2] and [3]). Moreover, the idea of annotated portfolios intuitively appears well grounded as well as appealing. However, the slate is not entirely clean-there are some precedent ideas that address similar concerns, and my sense is that they can be fruitfully related to the notion of annotated portfolios. Thus, my hope is to complement the work of Gaver and Bowers by sketching out parts of the scholarly context, and thereby facilitate the ongoing discussion of the role of design practice in academic research. Design Practice, Academic Research, and KnowledgeIn my opinion, the foundational observation to start from is this: The essence of research is to produce knowledge, and the essence of design is to produce artifacts.

Embracing First-Person Perspectives in Soma-Based Design

“…In design work, the first-person perspective has been introduced in works on autobiographical design [35][36][37]. As Neustaedter and Sengers frame it, such a design process "rest(s) on the user's genuine need for the system", which allows for "a much tighter coupling between user input and implementation" [38].…”

“…In RtD, specific design exemplars serve as 'definitions', 'facts' or as a physical hypothesis [55], organized in design research programs (in design studios) [10] or created for paradigms [56], used to extract knowledge in the forms of annotated portfolios [16,57], strong concepts [58], methods, and experiential qualities [37]. None of this work is or can ever be replicable, as design is a creative practice [59].…”

On the significance of making in interaction design research

“…In his own words, "an endless string of design examples is precisely at the core of how design research should operate," and his main point is to argue against the scientistic emphasis on generalized theory (at the expense of the specific artifacts). The argumentation in his case leads to the annotated portfolio approach for knowledge communication in design research; others have followed his lead to identify a scale of knowledge abstraction levels between universal theory and particular artifacts, pointing out a range of intermediate-level knowledge forms residing between the endpoints of the scale (refer to [11] for a survey). What all those knowledge forms have in common is that they are amenable to established criteria for academic quality and can be communicated within the text-oriented boundaries of our scholarly tradition.…”

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“…The bodystorming method proposed here takes an embodied and situated perspective of action and focuses on sketching meaningful embodied interactions through the use of play, movement, and physical and social engagement. This method and our design approach can be classified as intermediate-level knowledge forms (Höök & Löwgren, 2012;Löwgren, 2013), theoretically and methodologically grounded in phenomenology, ethnomethodology, and social psychology, and substantiated by empirical work reported here and elsewhere Márquez Segura, Turmo Vidal et al, 2016).…”