Why Research-oriented Design Isn’t
Design-oriented Research
Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) is the discipline
concerned with the design, evaluation, and
implementation of interactive computing systems.
Typically, HCI researchers do not primarily study
existing technologies, styles of interaction, or
interface solutions. On the contrary, one of the core
activities in contemporary HCI is to design new
technologies—prototypes—that act as vehicles
through which the researchers’ ideas for novel and
alternative solutions materialize and take on concrete
shape.
Despite this situation, there is very little discussion in
the field on HCI as design discipline and what the role
of design is as an activity in the research process. This
paper is specifically about the element of design as
currently manifest in HCI research. We dig deeper
into HCI as a design discipline by suggesting,
analyzing, and discussing what appears to be two
competing traditions in the relationship between
design and research; that of design-oriented research
and research-oriented design.

Daniel Fallman
Umeå Institute of Design, Umeå University
daniel.fallman@dh.umu.se

INTRODUCTION
Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) is the research discipline
concerned with the design, evaluation, and implementation of
interactive computing systems—and in particular the
phenomena that surround human use and experience of such
technology. HCI grew out of the part of computer science and
computer graphics that had to deal with what was generally
regarded among programmers to be the most rickety of
computer interfaces; the computer to human interface. It
established itself as a research discipline during the late 1970s
and early 1980s
As HCI has evolved, several disciplines have come to give
their contribution to the field, each with different emphases and
traditions. The pioneers of HCI, in computer science and
computer graphics, brought with them application design and
an engineering tradition. Quite early, parts of cognitive
psychology showed interest in the new field and stressed the
application of theories of cognitive processes when designing
the user interface. The influence from cognitive science also
brought a science attitude and a tradition of empirically
studying human behavior to HCI. During the 1990s, sociology
and anthropology gained methodological grounds in the field,
establishing a culture of user-centered design and an increasing
interest in broadening the scope of HCI to not only consider the
meeting between human and computer but also to reveal the
larger interactions that take place between technology, work,
groups, and organizations. More recently, industrial design has
come to influence the field [3], which again has contributed to
a broadening of HCI’s focus where user experience, virtual and
physical form, and design methodology are now high fashion.
Contemporary HCI is hence interdisciplinary to its nature.
Today, its typical conferences and journals encapsulate such
diverse areas as two- and three-dimensional interaction,
interaction with and use of mobile devices, embedded systems,
ubiquitous computing, virtual worlds, group interfaces,
tangible interaction, social interaction, and augmented reality.
Is HCI a Design Discipline?
What one realizes when digging into contemporary HCI
research is that it is very much a field oriented towards design,
in the sense that most projects end up bringing forth new
interactive systems. HCI research today is hence not directed to
the study of existing technologies, styles of interaction, or
interface solutions. On the contrary, one of the core activities
in contemporary HCI is to design new technologies—
prototypes—through which a researcher’s ideas for novel and
alternative solutions materialize and take on concrete shape.
These new technologies may try to answer directly to
experienced problems revealed in for instance a user-centered
field study, but they can also be the result of pure innovation
on the part of the researchers that are involved in the process.
This design-orientation is vivid in the field to such an extent
that it makes more sense to regard HCI as a design discipline
rather than as a more traditional academic research discipline.

Paper Overview
This paper is about the element of design as currently manifest
in HCI research. The main argument which will be made is that
there seems to be a major difference—or rather, two different
traditions or cultures—in the way both researchers and
practitioners in HCI seem to relate to design, but that this
difference is not currently fully acknowledged in the field.
First, it will be discussed how and why the element of design
as such has been made implicit in HCI conduct both
theoretically and methodologically. Second, it will be shown
and discussed how overlooking design as a key element of HCI
might limit the way in which the field understands and deals
with itself. By shedding light on design in HCI, we suggest and
argue for a distinction between what appears to be two partly
different kinds of traditions or cultures taking place within
HCI—namely between the traditions of design-oriented
research and that of research-oriented design—but which at
the moment are often seen and treated as one.
DESIGN AND RESEARCH
‘Design’ is one of those terms that are intrinsically difficult to
define, as it can denote many different things to different
people: including design as a profession, as an activity, and—
when design is used as a noun—as an artifact. Attempts to
define design hence typically become too broad or too narrow.
The definition used in this paper is inclusive rather than
exclusive, and it emphasizes design as a process in which
something is created—working out the form of something new,
creating something which was not previously there [3, 7].
This process of giving form to something calls for a certain
level of participation and commitment on behalf of the people
that are involved in the design process. This metaphorically
resembles the way carpenters in a direct way must be involved
with the materials of carpentry; its physical tools, techniques,
and materials. Without this direct involvement, something new
cannot be brought into being, whether a baker, a software
engineer, or an industrial designer. To design is hence about
getting oneself involved in a conscious aim to create and give
form to previously nonexistent artifacts, i.e. to make things
work in the real world [1, 3, 5, 7].
What is Research?
‘Research’—here used in a similar open fashion as a common
name for all kinds of academic research activities—is yet
another of those terms intrinsically difficult to define. A wide
variety of activities take place at a typical research university,
all of which operate under the name of research or science.
Few—if any—theoretical and methodological foundations are
shared across all institutional borders. It is even so that within a
university, proponents of one discipline might not even
recognize another discipline as scientific. So, rather than to
define science and research in terms of use of specific
methodological techniques, it makes more sense to concentrate
on what it is both research and science in its most basic form
tries to achieve: to produce knowledge and to seek the truth.
A BASIC DISTINCTION OF THE ROLE OF DESIGN IN
HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION
Design, as defined above, is an activity which seems to be
involved in many different kinds of conducts, including HCI.
In relation to HCI as research, as an academic discipline,
design appears to be a quite special kind of activity difficult to
compare to other available scientific methods and techniques.
In this section, we will try to more specifically address design
and its role in HCI by pointing out what we see as two different
kinds of conducts in HCI. We will argue that there is a
difference between design-oriented research and research-
oriented design when it comes to the role, aim, and scope of
design. And likewise, we argue, so is the role that research
plays in these different conducts.
To briefly introduce these two notions, one can see design-
oriented research—where research is the area and design the
means—as a conduct which seeks to produce new knowledge
by involving design activities in the research process. Here,
design is used to drive and propel research.

Figure 1: Design-oriented Research, i.e. research driven by
design
In research-oriented design however—where design is the area
and research the means—the creation of products, and in that
process answering to the problems and real-world obstacles
that are faced in that process, is the primary objective [3].
Here, research is used to drive and propel design.

Figure 2: Research-oriented Design, or design that is driven by
research
A first source of misconception with regard to these two
concepts could be that one fails to recognize that design-
oriented research and research-oriented design are in fact both
conducts in which the researchers and/or designers as a part of
what they do are involved in actual design activities
themselves—the bringing forth of a new artifact. Studying
designers at work (i.e. doing design studies as a by-stander) is
hence something which is captured by neither of these two
terms and an area of concern not treated here.
It is easy to object to the definition of these two terms given
above on one level, because they appear to express more or
less the same thing. This argument would have it that if
research is used to propel a new design (research-oriented
design) that particular design simultaneously propels further
research (design-oriented research) and so on. Hence, design
and research seem to fuel each other ad infinitum. Because of
this, design-oriented research and research-oriented design are
not dichotomies or even two separable conducts at all but
rather two intertwined processes in support of each other. Or at
least— which is another slightly more defensive objection—
they might be seen as two conducts but they are often
overlapping, and within a single project there may be people
that see one’s current project as a research project and those
that think of it first and foremost as a design project.
While these are compelling arguments, one should however
realize that this distinction—although presented as two
separate conducts—forms a continuum along which it becomes
possible to pin-point many current HCI projects. Talking about
Larger Design Process
Research [Other
input]
[Other
input]
Larger Research Process
Design [Other
input]
[Other
input]

them as two different conducts or traditions rather than as a
continuum has rhetorical value however, in that a dichotomy is
clear, easy to understand, provocative, and at least indirectly
proposes that one has to make a choice. Presenting design-
oriented research and research-oriented design as separate
traditions is thus in some sense a reaction against the
‘anything-goes’ tendency in contemporary HCI.
But more importantly, this paper tries to look at the role of
design in HCI on a level deeper than that (without aiming at
offering a complete understanding of these issues, obviously).
We will suggest what appear to be some inherent differences in
perspective and tradition between the two conducts of design
and research, which seem to render the idea of such trouble-
free exchange between research and design problematic at a
deeper level. This will also lead us to propose that the center of
the continuum, i.e. in between design-oriented research and
research-oriented design, is not a good or optimal position.
Yet another stumbling block for understanding these two
terms, and an important one as well, is of course built into the
way one chooses to define and think about research as well as
design. If we take research for instance, the development of
new theories, methods, techniques, research papers and even
single lines of thought could be encompassed by a far-reaching
definition of design—as they are also artifacts and products.
So, according to this view, all research is design. On the other
hand, designers make use of as well as produce a lot of new
knowledge when they are involved in what Schön [9] describes
as the dialogue with the design situation. Hence, it seems that if
researchers are designers, then designers are researchers. Or are
they?
There are at least three things to say in relation to this
argument. First, we simplify this discussion in this paper by
restricting ourselves to talking about design in the context of
HCI as the activity of bringing forth artifacts such as sketches,
mock-ups, prototypes, and other computational artifacts of
some kind. Second, it is important to understand that this paper
is not about whether or not it is a good thing to have trained
industrial designers taking part in a HCI project. It probably is,
but it is not the topic of this paper—what we do here is instead
to look at the role of design in HCI, as a specific kind of
activity that can be carried out by trained designers as well as
by other people.
Third, a more fundamental problem with this line of reasoning
that this work also attempts to tackle is that while it is correct
on one level—that the designer and the researcher indeed both
need to use and produce new knowledge and that they are both
involved in a process where things take on concrete forms
(along with bakers, philosophers, stay at home dads, pirates,
just about anyone really)—it becomes a too broad and
inclusive definition for our purposes up to the point where it
looses meaning. Everything becomes design and everything
becomes research too, at the same time. Design and research
becomes intertwined; the same thing.
We argue that when looking into the issue of the role of design
as a process in research, from a methodological and
philosophical standpoint, one must dig deeper into some of the
fundamental ideas of research as well as design to understand
that they, why they, and how they differ. The main disparity
between research and design from this perspective is hence not
primarily that design only produces artifacts and research only
produces knowledge, but rather that designers and researchers
are part of two different traditions or cultures. At this slightly
deeper level, we find that embodied within these two cultures
there appear to be some quite incommensurable basic starting
points and beliefs. In the following sections, we will look at
some of these.
DESIGN-ORIENTED RESEARCH
Design-oriented research, what could be seen as the praxis and
profession of many academic researchers in HCI, must
ultimately have truth, the revealing of new knowledge of some
sort, as its main objective. This is especially the case if this
knowledge is of a kind that would not have been attainable if
design—the bringing forth of an artifact (e.g. a research
prototype)—had not been a vital part of the research process.
In some ways, this resembles the way natural scientists may
only be able to test a theory by first designing the tools or
instruments with which to study a proposed phenomena [3, 4,
6]. At times, the design of a new instrument also gives rise to
new, wholly unexpected discoveries. But it is important to
realize that design-oriented research in HCI also differs from
natural science in several respects, not least in that the
developed artifacts are typically placed in the life-world where
they become used by people [1, 2].
People have a tendency to use artifacts in ways which were not
intended and are not controlled by the designer. Mixing
artifacts with people also brings the phenomenon of ‘now’ into
play. This is to say that while natural scientists develop
instruments to be used in a lab setting, consciously abstracting
away much of the gore of the real world, the design-oriented
HCI researcher’s instruments become used by real people—
which inevitably carry with them meanings, presumptions,
cultural and societal values and beliefs, and so on. Hence, in
this respect design-oriented HCI research is more of a social
sciences discipline—relating to work in ethnography,
phenomenology, and sociology—than it is related to the natural
sciences. Design-oriented HCI research hence inevitably means
dealing with issues of people, which entails also dealing with
issues of organization, culture, and society; i.e. dealing with the
‘now’, the volitions, structures of power, structures of gender,
meanings, assumptions, presumptions, beliefs, and worldviews,
with which a natural scientist usually does not deal. Studying
an artifact to gain some new knowledge is hence as much a
question of understanding people, context, and ‘now’—i.e.
looking into and trying to grasp the complex interplay between
people, technologies, and society and how this ‘now’ changes
when a new artifact is introduced—as it is to develop and study
technology.
In design-oriented research, the knowledge that comes from
studying the designed artifact in use or from the process of
bringing the product into being should be seen as the main
contribution—the ‘result’—while the artifact that has been
developed becomes more of a means than an end.
Typically, this implies that the artifact that is developed does
not need to encompass all services, functions, and level of
completeness that a final ‘product’ would need to embrace.
The design-oriented researcher hence works with sketches and
prototypes of different kinds, depending on what aspects are
investigated. Hence, sometimes a brick could be used to sketch
a mobile phone; a piece of paper may be used as a screen; and
a wholly faked interface may be controlled not by an
application but by an experimenter hiding behind a curtain.
This implies that the artifact takes on a philosophically
interesting role as a kind of middle ground between a thought
experiment and a real thing. Many of the sketches and
prototypes that researchers develop are too anything but
convincing products. They may be wholly or partly fake; if
implemented, they may be unstable and lack some expected
functionality; as well as they in the area of HCI are often, to
put it mildly, modestly aesthetically pleasing. Notwithstanding,
they need to be neither of these, as they are not products per
se—they are means to get at knowledge. This is possible
because in design-oriented research, it is the knowledge that
comes from studying user behavior and user experience that

one is after, not the artifact itself. And in this conduct, it is
from the knowledge that is generated that one may commence
on building new artifacts, even products, not from the sketch or
the prototype in itself. This knowledge should, ideally, be if not
universal at least general enough to say something about a
range of phenomena.
One should also stress that design-oriented research typically
includes what Schön [8, 9] talks about as ‘problem setting’ as
an important part, i.e. the possibility of exploring possibilities
outside of current paradigms; whether these are paradigm of
style, technology, or economical boundaries. Design-oriented
research hence strives to question the initially recognized
limitations of a problem description. It is able to do this
because the guarantor of the design effort—its ‘client’ in
design language—is the research project in which it is situated,
it is not a paying third party, nor in fact even one’s end users.
RESEARCH-ORIENTED DESIGN
In contrast, research-oriented design is a term that is believed
to better illustrate the relationship that consultants, applied
researchers, and designers from industry typically hold in
relation to design in HCI.
In Research-oriented design, the artifact is the product or
primary outcome; it is regarded as the ‘result’ of their efforts.
Obviously—which is an expected critique to this distinction—
this conduct also generates knowledge of various kinds. The
argument is neither that this conduct would not generate
knowledge; it is rather that it is not what is emphasized and
that the difference in purpose of the design activity generates
different kind of knowledge. This knowledge is not universal
or generalizable to a broad range of phenomena. Rather, this
knowledge is particular to its character.
In research-oriented design, the artifact also takes on a much
clearer and explicit role in what the designers stress as their
contribution. Another sign of research-oriented design is the
level of completeness and styling of the resulting artifact. Here,
the artifacts often come in the shape of final ‘products’, rather
than as sketches and prototypes.
Yet another quite important difference between these conducts
is that research-oriented design most often has problem solving
within some area as a characterizing component, i.e. that this
conduct is often carried out within a fixed and known
paradigm. This is because in the world of research-oriented
design, the designer’s main guarantor, or customer, is typically
a third party that puts up restrictions of different kinds and
expects certain results (not to mention certain sales). While
research-oriented design may relate to, seek influence in, and
even contribute to research (i.e. the generation of knowledge)
in different ways, it has the production of new artifacts as its
main motivation and goal.
DISCUSSION
From the distinction between research-oriented design and
design-oriented research, it is possible to regard most work
carried out within HCI as having a position along a single
continuum:
Design Research

Research-oriented Design Design-oriented Research
Real True

While the continuum’s left end, design practice’s, main
concern is to create and change, i.e. to make things work, it
needs to be real. Design practice—or research-oriented
design—must take into account all aspects of life that may
interfere with the goals of creating and changing. It needs to
deal with ‘real’ things such as commercial aspects, cost, time
to market, sales figures, political interest, user preference, etc.
Design-oriented research on the other hand, should by means
of design seek to understand and explain the truth, which is not
necessarily real.
A simple example may enlighten this very important difference
in perspective of these two conducts. Computer keyboards
have used the QWERTY layout ever since the days of the early
typewriters, where the layout was designed to separate
frequently used keys to prevent mechanical jams rather than to
provide efficient user input of text. Research (which seeks the
truth) shows that many other layout models for keyboards,
such as the Dvorak layout, significantly increases typing speed.
Alternative layout models for keyboards have done very badly
in the market however, so designers of keyboards (which need
to be real) keep the QWERTY layout. The main point here is
that it is not negligence on the part of keyboard designers nor is
it a matter of not knowing the facts that is the cause. Rather,
the difference is one of fundamental perspective. While science
seeks the truth (alternative keyboard layouts provide more
efficient input), design needs to be involved with the real
(QWERTY keyboards are what sells).
According to the basic continuum provided above and using it
as a basic model for further exploring the relationship between
science and design, it seems possible to further distinguish
some characterizing aspects that differentiate the two conducts.
Design Research

Research-oriented Design Design-oriented Research
Real
Judgment and intuition
Client
True
Analysis and logic
Academic peers

In a design project, research-oriented or not, decisions are often
based on intuition and judgment [7] For instance, the form
given to a specific element of a logotype is due to the
designer’s judgment in the specific situation—based on his or
her competence, intuition, experience, taste, knowledge of the
context and the client, and so on—in a very complex process
where the designer moves back and forth between considering
details (e.g. exact coloring, specific shapes, and font kerning)
and considering larger wholes (e.g. flow of characters, the
logotype’s whole gestalt, and even very big issues like
branding and corporate identity).
This is quite dissimilar from science, where decisions never
should come out of the researcher’s judgment, intuition, and
taste [7]. Nonetheless, there are probably a lot of decisions
taken in science every day that are partly or fully based on
judgment, intuition, and taste, but in theory these cannot (by
definition) be regarded as scientific.
Moreover, all kinds of design work can be characterized as an
activity which is ‘in service of’ a client [7]. Academic research
which has a similar ‘client’—which is sometimes the case
within medicine particularly—is typically quite controversial.
Some would even argue that research cannot have a client in
the same way as design has, as that would influence and limit
the research process to such an extent that it would cease to be
true and tend to drift into the real. Hence, the role of the
‘guarantor’, i.e. the body guaranteeing the quality and validity
of the work, is typically quite different between design-
oriented research and research-oriented design. Whereas the
letter emphasizes the role of the client in this process, design-
oriented research must lean on scientific peer reviewing for
quality assessment.

Along this continuum, which clearly is a gross simplification
of reality (as any other model), it is possible to come up with a
number of other important differences between research-
oriented design and design-oriented research based on the
discussion above, but for the purposes of this paper the ones
which have been discussed above provides a reasonable cause.
Why Is This Distinction Important?
Given the discussion above, there seems to be at least three
answers to the question of why this distinction is thought
important enough to consider.
First, this distinction was originally made to provoke a
discussion to take place within HCI as to what is the role and
nature of design in the field. This discussion, suggested at CHI
2003 [3], had at that point been largely missing. After the
publication of the original paper, a workshop at CHI 2004 was
dedicated to these issues and another workshop is planned for
INTERACT’05. Hence, in this respect the original purpose has
been at least partially successful.
Second, while research-oriented design and design-oriented-
research appear to be two different ways in which design
shows up in HCI—and likewise, HCI shows up in design—
they are rarely acknowledged as separate types of conduct
within the field. The problem with this black boxing or
anything-goes attitude is that these different conducts among
other things also require quite different kinds of quality
measures and success criteria. Not least is this obvious in the
reviewing process for international conferences and journals.
While design-oriented research projects needs to be valued
according to the quality of the knowledge that has been
generated, and success is when some new knowledge has
indeed been created, research-oriented design projects need on
the contrary be assessed according to some other scheme.
Commercial success or at least such potential is clearly one
alternative, but probably not enough. For help, HCI could turn
to design to seek influence in how it assesses work, in fields
like industrial design, architecture, possibly even art, literature,
and the movie industry.
A straightforward way of dealing with these issues would be to
regard design-oriented research and research-oriented design
project as different contributions categories, with their
reviewing systems. This process has already started with the
introduction of submission categories such as “Design Cases”
to many conferences. For these categories, success criteria may
include commercial real-life (while not necessarily true)
factors, such as increased sales, branding, good-will, and so on.
Third, one of the main arguments with this distinction,
eventually, is that the difference in tradition and basic
perspective between research and design must be recognized
and made explicit, even if both will continue to take place
under the cover of HCI. A contemporary problem in HCI is
that academic researchers at times seem to be more interested
in conducting research-oriented design than in design-oriented
research. While design-oriented research should have the larger
HCI community as its guarantor and peers—i.e. where the
quality of work is judged by peer reviewing—it is easy that the
guarantor of such an effort rather becomes the commercial
organization that may provide one’s funding, and one may find
oneself working for, and not with, these organizations.
It is important to realize that what is suggested is not a general
distinction of value—i.e. that we would suggest design-
oriented research to be a ‘better’ or more ‘elevated’ conduct
than research-oriented design. It is rather a suggestion to
recognize these as different kinds of conducts—with different
kinds of ingoing limitations, possibilities, scopes, intentions,
motivations, and success criteria—that we find in
contemporary HCI.
This is also why we argue that the center of the continuum
between research-oriented design and design-oriented research
is not an optimal position for most HCI projects. It is not so
because it is vital that one is clear about what it is one wants to
do; what kind of conduct one is involved in; what one’s goals,
limitations, and boundaries are; and with what and to whom it
is one wishes to contribute. It might simply be too much to
both do good design, with a happy client—answering to all the
real-world challenges one will face—and good research, with
happy peers, i.e. answering to being true over being real.
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