Design Issues: Volume 24, Number 3 Summer 2008
4
The Interaction Design Research
Triangle of Design Practice, Design
Studies, and Design Exploration
Daniel Fallman
1. Introduction
Interaction design takes a holistic view of the relationship between
designed artifacts, those that are exposed to these artifacts, and the
social, cultural, and business context in which the meeting takes
place. While there is no commonly agreed definition of interaction
design, its core can be found in an orientation towards shaping
digital artifacts—products, services, and spaces—with particular
attention paid to the qualities of the user experience.
1
To be able to
deal with user experience—including physical, sensual, cognitive,
emotional, and aesthetical issues; the relationship between form,
function, and content; as well as fuzzy concepts such as fun and
playability—a number of recent efforts have been made in the direc-
tion of establishing a better understanding of the role of the user
experience in interactive systems design.
2
Unlike the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) community
for instance, interaction design fully recognizes itself as a “design
discipline” in that its ultimate objective is to create new and change
existing interactive systems for the better.
3
There is a current plethora
of departments, groups, and multidisciplinary labs dealing with
interaction design that have their origins in such diverse places as
computer science, HCI, anthropology, industrial design, informat-
ics, and applied physics and electronics. Adding to the disciplinary
confusion, each group typically also is configured as a multidisci-
plinary team.
Since the field of interaction design currently is growing
rapidly in scope as well as importance,
4
both within academia and
industry, there is an increasing need to also expand, further develop,
and professionalize interaction design research. Refined models of
interaction design research; embracing both what it currently is as
well as pointing toward what it could be, arguably would be very
useful tools in this process.
In this paper, we will introduce a model of interaction
design research that has evolved at the Umeå Institute of Design,
Umeå University, in Sweden in recent years, and which currently
is guiding our interaction design research efforts as well as our
Ph.D. education. Thinking about interaction design research in the
way proposed by the model has helped us to keep up what we see
1 Jonas Löwgren, “How Far beyond
Human-Computer Interaction Is
Interaction Design?” Digital Creativity
13:3 (2002): 186–192; and Terry
Winograd, “From Computing Machinery
to Interaction Design” in Beyond
Calculation: The Next Fifty Years of
Computing, Peter J. Denning and Robert
Metcalfe, eds. (New York: Springer-
Verlag, 1997), 149–162.
2 Lauralee Alben, “Quality of Experience:
Defining the Criteria for Effective
Interaction Design,” Interactions 3:
3 (1996): 11; Jodi Forlizzi and Katja
Battarbee, “Understanding Experience
in Interactive Systems,” Proceedings of
the Conference on Designing Interactive
Systems (2004); and John McCarthy and
Peter Wright, Technology as Experience
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004).
3 Daniel Fallman, “Design-Oriented
Human-Computer Interaction,”
Proceedings of Human Factors in
Computing Systems Conference (2003):
225–132.
4 John Zimmerman, Jodi Forlizzi, and
Shelley Evenson, “Taxonomy for
Extracting Design Knowledge from
Research Conducted during Design
Cases,” Proceedings of Futureground
(2004).
2008 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Design Issues: Volume 24, Number 3 Summer 2008
5
as three vital, external interfaces. First, it leads us to an interface
with industry that has facilitated long-term collaborations and an
exchange of people. Second, an interface with academia has encour-
aged staff and students at the design school—many of whom with
no previous experience as part of a research community—to travel
to conferences, workshops, and similar gatherings to meet others in
the field, thus creating and upholding a network of peers vital to the
school. Third, the model also reminds us of our interface with society
at large, helping us think about interaction design research as having
a voice in societal discussions, and in exploring and shaping possible
futures (i.e., that industrial design is in fact not something that only
concerns the industry).
2. The Model
In its very basic form, the model has the shape of a triangle. This
triangle presents a two-dimensional space for plotting the position
of a design research activity drawn up in between three extremes:
“design practice,” “design studies,” and “design exploration.”
While the actual methods, techniques, and tools being used in
these activities can be quite similar, we argue that they are primarily
different in tradition and perspective. These extremes are three differ-
ent kinds of activities that we believe establish interaction design
research as a discipline when taken together. We argue that combin-
ing these three activities (i.e., the contingency of the interaction
design researcher to take on all three perspectives) distinguishes
interaction design research from other disciplines with related
interests, including Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Computer-
Supporter Collaborative Work (CSCW), Informatics, Computer
Science, Anthropology, Sociology, Philosophy, and so on. The basic
structure of our model is visualized as a triangle.
Commercial design
organizations
Other
disciplines
Philosophy
Idealistic, Societal, and
Subversive
Design critique, Art,
Humanities
Cumulative, Distancing,
and Describing
Context driven,
particular, and synthetic
Design Studies
Design
Exploration
Design Practice
Figure 1
The model of interaction design research
in its most basic form.