Looking and leaping
Bill Gaver · 2000
Having come to design from a background in experimental psychology, I get a mischievous thrill from the way research through design can usefully break all the rules of science. Clearly articulated theories and analyses form the conceptual backbone of science - designers also draw inspiration from the popular press, contemporary art, and eccentric observations. Controlled, or at least accountable, empirical studies are science's route to understanding people; designers improvise, provoke, and take extreme, even imaginary, individuals as an audience. Science lends empirical methods to test the success of new systems; as designers we hope that our examples will seduce and stimulate those who experience them.Design methods based on imagination and personal engagement may seem frivolous or gratuitously provocative, but they are based on a long tradition that allows us to question aesthetic, emotional, and cultural aspects of the artefacts and systems we develop. These issues seem to fall in sciences blindspot: difficult to theorize, analyze, or study empirically, they tend to be ignored by approaches to technology built on the scientific approach. This is a dangerous situation, because if left unexamined new technologies will tend to spread the aesthetics and values of the workplace throughout our lives. In this talk, I describe recent projects that suggest new ways that technology might enter our everyday lives, in order to illustrate the strengths and the blindspots of the design approach to research.Bill Gaver is a Senior Research Fellow at the Royal College of Art, currently focusing on design approaches to research, and technologies that promote the value of diversion and insight. His career has spanned experimental psychology and cognitive science, human computer interaction, and design. His early work on everyday listening and auditory interfaces influenced the ways sounds are used in interfaces such as the MacOS; later work extended the