Design Implications
What can we learn from the way HCI researchers translate their work to designers, practitioners, and policymakers?
One of the common elements of an HCI paper published in venues like CHI or CSCW is the “design implications” section, where authors describe how their research could be taken up by designers, engineers, or other types of practitioners. HCI papers are widely cited in patents, used in StackOverflow discussions, read by designers, and touch on topics with significant practical impact for many diverse publics.
From a science communication perspective, these implications sections represent the most explicit communication of research results into actionable recommendations for other researchers, for practitioners, and for the media. Design implications are thus a potentially important site of translation between empirical research results and practice.
How do researchers at CHI engage with evidence in making these suggestions? How are empirical validity, theoretical validity, and generalizability currently being considered in these sections? What types of recommendations are even being made in the first place? Given concerns that any recommendations based on individual papers may be premature, how are HCI recommendations being validated, contextualized, and supported by outside literature?
In this project, we want to answer these questions, to a) better understand the current practice of research implications in HCI, and b) to identify ways of improving these sections both as sites for more nuanced inference, and for more impactful suggestions.
People
Our lab members working on this project:
Spencer Williams
Lab director
Amy Wang
Scholar
Fan (Krystal) Yang
Scholar
Nigel Herbert
Contributor