Interactions - March/April 2008

Telecom Web has a major role to play: online presence, information, and commerce for everyone. For better impact, the two webs will have to leverage each other. It should become possible for the websites to be accessible from the Telecom Web, and the Voicesites to be accessible from the World Wide Web. Excuse me, I hear my Voicesite calling!

INTERACTIONS CAFE

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ABOUT THE AUTHORS Sheetal Agarwal is a technical staff member at IBM India Research Lab. She did her master’s in computer science at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Her research interests include pervasive and ubiquitous computing, mobile applications, and, more recently, information and communication technologies for emerging economies. Arun Kumar is a research staff member at IBM Research, India. He obtained a master’s degree in computer science engineering in 1999 and is currently pursuing a Ph.D. from IIT Madras, India. He served on the program committee for ACM SAC 2008 and 2007 and has been published in reputed international conferences and journals. His research interests include IC T for developing regions, service oriented computing, object oriented programming, semantic Web services, and distributed systems. Sougata Mukherjea is a research staff member and manager of the Telecom Research Innovation Center at the IBM India Research Lab. He received his bachelor’s from Jadavpur University, Calcutta, a master’s from Northeastern University, and a Ph.D. from Georgia Institute of Technology (all in computer science). Before IBM, he held research and software architect positions at NEC USA, Inktomi, and BEA Systems. His research interests include middleware technologies and its applications to telecom, data analysis, information retrieval, and visualization. Amit Anil Nanavati is a research staff member at IBM India Research Lab. He has a Ph.D. in computer science from Louisiana State University. Prior to IBM Research, he worked for Netscape Communications. His recent research focus has been on telecom solutions, especially for emerging economies. He is also interested in applications of graph theory in various domains. Before completing his Ph.D., he spent a summer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Caltech, NASA. Nitendra Rajput has been working as a researcher at the IBM India Research Lab, New Delhi since March 1998. His areas of interest include speech processing, image processing, and dialog management. He has done projects on audio-visual speech recognition, Hindi speech recognition, and conversational systems for pervasive devices. His current work involves application of speech technology interfaces for developing countries. Prior to joining IBM Research, he completed master’s from IIT Bombay in communications.

it becomes thoughtful only when it stops being objective.

I’ve recently had a number of conversations with professional designers who are all, generally, coming to the same set of conclusions: User research is much, much less important than “worldly research,” or “human research.” Instead of researching for a specific project, they find more value in forcing themselves to constantly observe, consider, and question the everyday world around them.

Richard: In this issue Hugh Dubberly and colleagues argue for creating explicit models so as to not gloss over the synthesis you reference. And I agree that such synthesis too often gets short shrift.

However, I don’t reject the value of applying some form of the concept of “correctness” to such synthesis, in consideration of its goals and the context in which it is performed. And while I agree that ongoing “worldly research” is of great value, I urge designers not to mistake the inadequacy of such synthesis for the unimportance of the focused research that feeds or should feed it.

Design itself isn’t magic. It can be taught; it can be learned. It might resist understanding and, hence, prompt fear and marginalization among many. But it comprises, in part, the development and consideration of rationale.

I don’t think the work of Tom Moran years ago on design rationale was so completely divorced from the nature of design and abductive thinking. And as Bill Buxton describes in his 2007 book, Sketching User Experiences: Getting the Design Right and the Right Design, being explicit about design rationale helps guide the design process away from decision by bullying or seniority and makes it easier and safer to determine whether a design decision should be changed after something new happens or is learned.

In short, what I’m saying is that—borrowing terminology from Jan Borchers—designers need to seek out “the sweet spot” between emotion and logic in order to reach “the sweet spot” in design and in influence within a business.

—Richard Anderson and Jon Kolko

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