Interactions - September/October 2009

“Rigor, openness, and tolerance are the fundamental characteristics of the transdisciplinary attitude and vision. Rigor in argument, taking into account all existing data, is the best defense against possible distortions. Openness involves an acceptance of the unknown, the unexpected, and the unforeseeable. Tolerance implies acknowledging the right to ideas and truths opposed to our own.”

Nicolescu’s and Max-Neef’s accounts of transdisciplinarity distinguish notions of weak and strong transdisciplinarity. Moreover, they account for how transdisciplinarity may be a more rigorous stance than more conventional states, even from a strictly scientific point of view.

Why HCI and Interaction
Design are a Transdiscipline

We’ll argue that HCI and interaction design are particularly suited to adopt the transdisciplinary perspective. Looking over the range of contributions to the annual SIGCHI conferences, for example, one can see the enormous breadth of HCI and the wide range of contributor backgrounds. This is a very good thing. We in HCI can and should begin to think of ourselves as a transdiscipline. We can do so by focusing on the important issues of our day, and with openness and tolerance, without loss of rigor.

Openness—we’re already good at this. There probably isn’t a field that is more open to new ideas and approaches than HCI and interaction design.

Tolerance—we’re pretty good at this, too. There are already a wide range of disciplines represented in HCI, including design, computer science, cognitive science, education, psychology,

ethnography, and critical theory. We need to hone our skills in working together to expose our predispositions about what we take as values, methods, and reasoning and how we relate them to what we take as mind-sets, knowledge sets, skill sets, and tool sets. In addition, we must seek to enhance our understandings of how our work can fit together in the service of significant goals.

Rigor—here’s where our field is most ripe for debate. If you were lucky enough to attend CHI’09 in Boston, you may have been witness to the controversy surrounding Andy Crabtree, Tom Rodden, Peter Tolmie, and Graham Button’s paper “Ethnography Considered Harmful” [ 5]. At the heart of the controversy were differing notions of the connections between rigor and particular methods and knowledge. We don’t want to engage this controversy here per se; rather, we wish to point out to our community that in emphasizing larger societal goals first and individual methods and bodies of knowledge as servants of these larger goals, transdisciplinarity may be—indeed, we believe is—the alternative notion of rigor that serves us best.

While advocating a transdisciplinary approach and also recognizing its potential in our field, we do not want to underestimate the work and effort needed to make transdisciplinarity a well-understood and developed approach. The values of openness, tolerance, and rigor are not just out there in “ready to use” form. It will require an intentional effort from the field to put the goals of our work before our individual and narrow disciplin-

ary norms. HCI and interaction design are in a unique position to make a real change and to address some of the most urgent issues of our time. We can’t let issues of collaboration and disciplinary complications stand in the way of our attempts to serve these societal goals.

Acknowledgements Many thanks to Yvonne Rogers for her discussions with us about transdisciplinarity, to Youn Kyung Lim for her earlier work with us on collaborative profiles, and to Harold Nelson for the notion of disambiguating mind-sets, knowledge sets, skill sets and tool sets.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS Eli Blevis serves on the faculty in the Human-Computer Interaction Design program of the School of Informatics and

Computing, Indiana University, Bloomington. Blevis’ primary area of research, and the one for which he is best known, is sustainable interaction design. This area of research and Blevis’ core expertise are situated within the confluence of human computer interaction as it owes to the computing and cognitive sciences, and design as it owes to the reflection of design criticism and the practice of critical design. Blevis has published more than 50 articles and papers and has given several invited colloquia internationally on sustainable interaction design and the larger context of notions of design

[ 5] Crabtree, A.,
Rodden, T., Tolmie,
P., and Button,
G. “Ethnography
Considered Harmful.” In
Proceedings of the 27th
International Conference
on Human Factors in
Computing Systems
(2009): 879–888.

Erik Stolterman is professor of informatics at the School of Informatics and Computing, Indiana University, Bloomington.

His main work is within interaction design, information technology and society, information systems design, philosophy of design, and philosophy of technology. Stolterman has published articles and several books, including Thoughtful Interaction Design (2004, MIT Press) and The Design Way (2003).