Relying on Failures in
Design Research
Nicolas Nova

Lift Lab | [e-mail]
[ 1] Latour, B. Aramis, or
the Love of Technology.
Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1996.

[ 2] Gaver, W., Bowers, J., Kerridge, T., Boucher, A. and Jarvis, N. “Anatomy of a Failure: How We Knew When our Design Went Wrong, and What We Learned From It.” In: Proceedings of ACM CHI 2009 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 2213–2222.

case of an automatic door opening, these observations show that previous encounters with non-automatic doors shape our expectations of what a door is and how it should work. Noticing these problems can also lead to understanding how the sensor calibration should be tuned or that the presence of the sensors should be made apparent in a more visible way.

 

[ 3] Simon, H. A. The Sciences of the Artificial. Cambridge: MI T Press, 1969.

September + October 2010

[ 4] Norman, D. and
Draper, S. eds.
User Centered
System Design: New
Perspectives on Human-
computer Interaction.
Hillsdale, New Jersey:
Lawrence Erlbaum
Associates, 1986.

[ 5] Gaver, B., Dunne, T. and Pacenti, E. “Cultural Probes.” interactions 6, 1 (1999): 21–29.

interactions

Sitting next to the automatic door between train coaches in Switzerland provides a fantastic opportunity to observe the range of behaviors when people interact with a very basic instance of ubiquitous computing. Interestingly, most Swiss trains have sensors located in the upper part of the doorway. Experienced travelers know they have to wait for their presence to be detected, while nervous commuters wave their hand at the sensor to open the door. However, a longer period of observation reveals plenty of less-than-fluid usage: Elderly travelers try to find an (absent) handle; some people in a rush bang their head against the door because the sensor did not have time to detect them; angry knowledge workers (who know how the sensor works) wave their arm, but the door fails to open because of some momentary flaw with the sensor. Meanwhile, kids, luggage, or even the combination of both lead to even more complex situations.

Observing frustration with the automatic door is an example of how the investigation of accidents within a larger process can be inspiring from a design viewpoint. Surfacing people’s problematic reactions when confronted with invisible pieces of technologies highlights their mental model and eventually has implications for design. In the

From Observing Failures to
Provoking them

I am interested in how users appropriate technology, especially product failures and prototype flops. As a user experience researcher, failures of all sorts intrigue me. User mistakes, errors, and accidents (as in the example above) are pertinent because of their design implications.

Curiously, as pointed out by various authors [ 1, 2], there is little field research about design flops and failures. This is surprising, given that design has a long-time interest in avoiding or fixing failures, as in Herbert Simon’s famous quote: “Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones” [ 3]. To some extent, we can consider that preferring one solution over another is a matter of preventing accidents and mistakes.

Furthermore, the idea that design can be inspired and fueled by people’s practices is now more common with the establishment of approaches such as user-centered design. We observe users and investigate their needs and interests or we try to understand consumers’ motivations to do something and then turn them into insights and design concepts. But as we saw in the automatic-door example, failures and mistakes are important too because they are implicit signs of a need or problem that requires a solution. The examination of failures reveals what is commonly referred to in HCI as the “gulf of execution,” i.e., the difference between the user’s expected actions to achieve a goal and the actual required actions [ 4].

However, my quirky mind-set left me wondering about the role of failure in design research: If problems and mistakes are so interesting and insightful, why not be a bit more bold and enlist them as a design tactic? I am suggesting the conscious design of “ questionable” prototypes to investigate user experience. Drawing on the “probe” metaphor [ 5], the approach here is to use “ anti-probes”—a failed embodiment of technology that can be shown to people in order to engage them in open-ended ways.