- All right, so I'm Gary Dickson.
I'm currently a Visiting Professor at Indiana University
in the Graphic Design program while I simultaneously,
I'm trying to work on, towards my PhD in HCI.
So, as Erick said, this is paper that he and I worked on,
came out of some research that we've been conducting
over the last couple of years.
So, I want to just start out, sort of addressing why,
why this interest in methods
and why this sort of, why I'm here (laughs).
So, I started a long time ago as a designer,
in the late-'80s in fact.
So, being a design practitioner,
I did that for many years
and arguably did it well at some point.
Finished my, so, I transitioned slowly then
from being a practitioner into being a deign educator
and that transition is,
feels like it's still sort of ongoing.
So, from practitioner to educator
and hopefully more and more of a researcher,
as I move forward.
So, I have this deep abiding interest
in the methods that designers use.
I care about how they use them,
why they use them and all these sorts of things.
So, I begin by talking a little bit about the study
that we conducted that resulted in this paper.
We did sort of snowball sampling
to find subjects to interview,
acquaintances of acquaintances.
We gathered about 11 subjects
that were open to being interviewed.
We examined the methods that they developed.
And then, we conducted interviews
with those that were open to that
and others preferred to respond in writing
in form of a survey.
And then, we would follow up with them
and we created a sort of an ongoing dialogue
where they would send us additional information,
we would talk with them about their concerns and what not
and that's how the study proceeded.
Now, for the purposes of this paper,
we had to sort of define what methods are
and what a successful method is
and, pretty much, what Colin outlined
as a definition of a method is the same definition
that we are operating by.
It's a technique or a framework for thinking
that supports the design process
of a professional designer.
As far as success, that's a harder one to identify.
Rather than trying to quantify what a good method is
to produce a good design,
we define success as methods
that are spread broadly amongst practitioners,
so a method that is picked up by practitioners
and that spreads through, sort of, the industry.
So, as we did this, we thought that we would interview
some academics that developed methods
and some practitioners that developed methods,
but what we found, as we interviewed them,
that really to very many of them identified themselves
purely as an academic or as a practitioner,
but rather, they all sort of fell within this continuum
between academic and practitioner.
There were a few that were situated
sort of right in the middle,
with one foot in both worlds
and those were actually some
of the more interesting conversations that we had.
So, I'm just going to kind of go through
some of the conversations that we had with our subjects.
Several of them spoke about sort of the origins
of where their, where methods come from,
the trends in methods and, again, as Colin talked about,
this sort of explosion of books and encyclopedias
that are out there.
And, this particular subject commented that they felt
that all these different methods were actually
just founded on a few existing methods
that people had taken and combined in unique ways.
Some of our subjects spoke
about why they develop new methods
and in, so from both ends of the scale,
in academia and in practice,
in practice, most of the people
that were developing methods were doing so
just because they're in the trenches,
trying to get their work done,
trying to do good work for their clients.
On the other hand, in academia,
sometimes methods are developed purely
as sort of a touchpoint for research.
And then, we talked with some of them
and some of them spoke
about what a successful method looks like.
And, comments were made,
like if people were having fun using the methods,
then they're successful
or if it's efficient and effective and enjoyable.
And then, many of them spoke about
what the methods are sort of made up of,
what are the elements that go into creating a new method.
And, most of them talked about this way that they, you know,
they'll see a method over here and a method over here
and they see sort of an interesting way
of combining different methods
or even combining different technologies
to use in their, in the methods that they develop.
So, the upshot of all of this,
sort of our contribution,
is that is seems that a lot the people that we talked with
were not necessarily carrying out method development
as a user-centered design process
even though most of those people would advocate
a user-centered process in design work.
So, we feel that maybe (laughs),
maybe, method design could benefit
from adopting more core characteristics
from user-centered design,
that is, you know, it's rigorous extensive expert testing
and doing that testing in actual context of use.
One of our subjects very aptly stated that,
"method development is a meta-design process."
In other words, thinking about developing new methods
should be thought of as a method is designed
by a designer, for designers to design with.
And, just one last note,
I think the term method development
is not, maybe, the best term.
I really, as I was going through all of this,
it struck me very, very strongly
that rather than set using method development,
if we instead think of, say, method design
because that's really what creating a new method is,
is we're designing something for designers to use.
That's it. (audience applauding)
- [Announcer] Okay, the time for some questions, anyone?