Copyright ©Tatar 2006
Question of design, educational or technological, drives the kinds of questions we ask about people differently from those found in the sciences (even social sciences), engineering or the arts. Questions of design lead us to a quest not for absolute, but for formative knowledge. Formative knowledge influences our choices but does not pretend to stand for all time. Formative knowledge is about values.
In recent years, I have written a number of papers relevant to this topic:
Design Tensions is about how to understand the complex interplay of values and design decisions in constructing a novel technology:
Tatar, D. (under review) The Design Tensions Framework. Journal of Human-Computer Interaction.
The Third Paradigm in HCI is about what is central and what is peripheral to different approaches to HCI inquiry:
Harrison, S., Tatar, D., and Sengers, P. (ms.) The Third Paradigm of HCI.
It's Just a Method is about the "method of methods" in design, or the idea that, almost by definition, no one method provides the insight required for design, but a multiplicity of methods allows one to have the perspecive necessary:
Harrison, S., Back, M. and Tatar, D. (June, 2006) "It's Just a Method": A pedagogical experiment in interdisciplinary design. Proceedings of the Design for Interactive Systems 2006 (DIS 2006), June 26-28. Penn State University, State College Pennsylvania, ACM Press.