[ 8]. The point we raise here concerns the tension between the design of things within economic frames that involve ever-increasing consumption and externalities [ 9], and the design of sustainable lifestyles as a cardinal goal of interaction design.

We are not arguing that making things is unimportant; we are arguing that being thoughtful about what to make and the implications of making are central concerns. Indeed, making and thinking are to some degree inseparable. In an ideal world, interaction design students would master the skills and competences associated with each of the four waves.

As a practical matter, programs of study need to work with the faculty, students, and resources at hand to focus on what is practical for the particular circumstances. The two programs we describe above have different faculty foci, different student demographics and class sizes, and especially very different resources to scaffold research and/or production.

TWO SENSES OF SCALE

As we stated at the outset, the ambitious title “Billions of Interaction Designers” refers to an ambition to make design learning a foundational form of learning and mode of being at great scale. The four waves scaffold this notion of scale in terms of intellectual breadth for curricular composition, and this is the sense of the term scale that prompts the title. In this sense, we believe that training interaction designers in broad notions of values-oriented transdisciplinarity, in addition to ethnography, cognition, and technology, yields greater societal benefit, as the designs they create are ontologically engaged in promoting and affording positive lifestyles for everyone.

Insofar as interaction design becomes a foundational form of learning and interaction designs are more and more implicated in our daily lives, we are all interaction designers.

There is another, more common sense of the term scale that is important. What is problematic for interaction design is the relatively small-scale numbers under which design education operates. The question of how to make design education foundational and available

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for larger numbers of students outside of the studio context remains open.

AN INVITATION

Do you direct or teach in an interaction design program? If so, we invite you to contact us to participate in future refinements and augmentations of this framework to describe the actual practices in interaction design programs more broadly and comprehensively. Please write to the authors. We would be delighted to include you and your description of the practices and relations to epistemological underpinnings of your program in future expanded versions of this article. Our approach is not to conduct surveys, but rather to scaffold a broadly based collaborative reporting of experts.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We gratefully acknowledge the many administrators, faculty, students, and other support staff who participate in the programs described in this article.

Endnotes

1. This article extends a paper presented at DesignEd Asia 2013, namely Blevis, E., Chow, K., Koskinen, I., Poggenpohl, S., and Tsin, C. Billions of interaction designers.

Proc. of DesignEd Asia 2013. The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, the Hong Kong Design Institute, and the Hong Kong Design Centre. Hong Kong, 2013.

2. Harrison, S. Tatar, D., and Sengers, P.

The three paradigms of HCI. Proc. of CHI 2007. ACM, New York, 2007.

3. The notion of third-wave HCI owes in our reading to Suzanne Bødker’s work wherein it is more broadly traced and attributed.

See Bødker, S. When second wave HCI meets third wave challenges. In Proc. of the 4th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction: Changing Roles. A. Morch, K.

Morgan, T. Bratteteig, G. Ghosh, and D.

Svanaes, eds. ACM, New York, 2006, 1–8.

4. See: Löwgren, J. and Stolterman, E.

Thoughtful Interaction Design. MI T Press, 2004; Blevis, E. and Stolterman, E. Transcending disciplinary boundaries in interaction design. Interactions 16, 5

(Sept.–Oct. 2009), 48–51.

5. See: (Ethnography) Dourish, P.

Implications for design. Proc. of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, Ne w York, 2006; (Interaction Criticism) Bardzell, J. and Bardzell, S. What is “critical” about critical design? Proc. of the 2013 ACM Annual Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, New York, 2013,

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3297–3306.

6. For notions of transdisciplinarity see: Max-Neef, M. A. Foundations of transdisciplinarity. Ecological Economics

53 (2005), 5–16; Nicolescu, B. Manifesto of Transdisciplinarity. State University of New York Press, 2002.

7. It’s important to mention: We argue that the method here has the aforementioned utility. It is not the only method one can use to understand and assess an interaction design program.

8. See: Winograd, T. and Flores, F.

Understanding Computers and Cognition: A New Foundation for Design. Addison-Wesley Longman, Boston, 1987. See also: Willis, A.M. Ontological designing.

Design Philosophy Papers. #02/2006.

9. See: Friedman, K. Models of design: Envisioning a future design education.

Visible Language 46, 1/2 (2012), 132–154;

Fry, T. A New Design Philosophy: An Introduction to Defuturing. NSWU Press, New South Wales, Australia, 1999;

Papanek, V. Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change (2nd ed.).

Academy Chicago, Chicago, 1985.

Eli Blevis is director of and an associate professor of informatics in the Human-Computer Interaction Design (HCI/d) program in the School of Informatics and Computing at Indiana University, Bloomington. He is also a visiting professor at the Hong Kong Polytechnic School of Design. His scholarship concerns sustainable interaction design, visual thinking, and design education.

Kenny K.N. Chow is an assistant professor of interaction design at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, where he is also the specialism leader for both graduate and undergraduate programs.

His scholarship and expertise include semantics of human-computer interaction, affective user experience, digital media and non-verbal communication, and cognitive and expressive play.

Ilpo Koskinen works as a professor at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Lately, his main interest has been in methodological approaches in design research, especially in research through design. Though he is a sociologist by training, his work merges industrial design and interaction design.

Sharon Poggenpohl focuses on postgraduate design education, both master's and Ph.D., and design research. Taking a human-centered position with regard to design, she teaches to help students humanize technology, to learn to work creatively and collaboratively, and to prepare them to contribute to building a body of design knowledge.

Christine Tsin was trained as a graphic designer. She led design teams serving international clients for more than 20 years before joining the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, where she currently administers the Master of Design programs.