Experience Designers and Their Roles as Researchers and Practitioners in the Academic and Commercial Fields

The employment of hacker/maker and design-based research practices in the academic research setting has afforded the design practitioner a means to participate in cutting-edge research, especially if the research outcome is product or service-oriented. Design research methodologies are sought out, but the acceptance of design-based research findings by the HCI community has only just come to maturity. Conferences such as ACM DIS1 attest to this, as well as design tracks in various conferences such as ACM CHI2 show that design research techniques and methodologies are making headways in the field. Still some believe that expectations from design research techniques should be curbed, yet also embraced for the novelty in approach it brings to problem-solving and interactivity development [1]. [1] W. Gaver, What should we expect from research through design?, in: Proceedings of the 2012 ACM annual conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI ’12, ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2012, pp. 937–946.