The result has been an explosion in theories and methods in areas such as HCI and systems development: ethnomethodology, ethnography, contextual inquiry, feminist interviews, design fictions, and somaesthetics.

The introduction of these methods has often taken place so swiftly that careful, systematic reflection on how they might relate to each other falls to the wayside. Their differing epistemologies, underlying values, and concrete applications bring a richness, but overlaps, gaps, and discrepancies are as yet not well understood. To be clear: This is not a problem that needs solving. It is not our position that HCI should stop, work it all out, and only then get back to business. Rather, this opens up research opportunities to explore and clarify synergies and productive tensions.

There is, for example, an exciting strand of interaction design research in which design methods are used as research methods. That is, instead of using design methods to create a functional, commercial product, researchers instead use design methods for other purposes, such as to develop responses to research hypotheses and questions, to explore alternatives, and to reconfigure assemblies. What is the nature of virtual possessions? How might we envision the concept of slow computing? How can interaction designers create products intended to be redesigned through use? How might interaction design contribute to new relations between ourselves and our bodies? The practice has many variations: research through design, constructive design, speculative design.

Yet we note that many of the published papers that use such methods are designer-driven, feature minimal meaningful participation, and in many cases deemphasize political conflict (though there are exceptions).

Again, we do not suggest that this is a
problem crying out for a solution. But
we do see opportunities for researchers
and designers to ask difficult questions
and attempt to work out what the
answers might be. Is it possible, for
example, to integrate critical design
with participatory design, when the
former seems elitist and targeted at
high-brow design aficionados, while
the latter is more democratic in both its
design processes and sense-making?

At a more granular level, we have seen an extension of the toolset available to designers, in terms of the methods used to stimulate various aspects of the design process and enhance design practices: Design card decks, toolkits, probes, role-playing exercises, games, mood boards, and other inventive methods have all been extended and explored in novel terrains. Their potential applications in participatory processes are straightfor ward: Most can be easily deployed in participatory design workshops, for example. But these methods should also be changed by their use in PD: Design researchers can work out, for example, what it might mean to democratize mood boards or to meaningfully represent social conflicts in probes.

Another opportunity is for
PD to engage the more overtly
political approaches to design that
have emerged in HCI in recent
years: Feminist HCI, postcolonial
computing, and participatory action
research all come to mind. Each of
these foregrounds social conflict as
a condition of computing, and each
features sophisticated theories
of power, participation, and
intervention. Yet none of them have
as yet been developed specifically as
design methodologies.

In the special issue, Shaowen Bardzell [ 9] proposes that political approaches to HCI and PD can support each other: Political theory can strengthen PD’s commitments to engaging social conflict, while PD offers mature design methods, often lacking in feminist and postcolonial theory. In this way, political approaches to systems development would gain tactics of intervention that are both accepted in industry and also well suited to sociotechnical infrastructures and processes of development, while PD would be enriched by new developments in critical and political theory, helping it adapt to new situations.

I M A G E F R O M S H U T T E R S T O C K . C O M