Why Research-Oriented Design Isn’t Design-Oriented Research: On the Tensions Between Design and Research in an Implicit Design Discipline

Human–computer interaction (HCI) is the discipline concerned with the design, evaluation, and implementation of interactive computing systems. Unlike many empirical sciences, HCI researchers do not typically solely study existing technologies, styles of interaction, or interface solutions. On the contrary, one of the core activities in contemporary HCI is to design new technologies – in the form of software and hardware prototypes – that act as vehicles through which HCI researchers’ ideas materialize and take on concrete form. Despite this situation, there is a very modest discussion in the discipline on the role of design as an activity in the research process; whether or not HCI could in fact be better understood as a design discipline than as an empirical science; and if, and if so how, the design element in HCI goes with its empirical claims. This paper is specifically about the element of design as currently manifest in HCI research. We dig deeper into HCI as a design discipline by suggesting, analyzing, and discussing what appear to be tensions between two competing traditions in the relationship between design and research.     

When good theories make bad predictions

Chaos-related obstructions to predictability have been used to challenge accounts of theory validation based on the agreement between theoretical predictions and experimental data (Rueger & Sharp, 1996. The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 47, 93–112; Koperski, 1998. Philosophy of Science, 40, 194–212). These challenges are incomplete in two respects: (a) they do not show that chaotic regimes are unpredictable in principle (i.e., with unbounded resources) and, as a result, that there is something conceptually wrong with idealized expectations of correct predictions from acceptable theories, and (b) they do not explore whether chaos-induced predictive failures of deterministic models can be remedied by stochastic modeling. In this paper we appeal to an asymptotic analysis of state space trajectories and their numerical approximations to show that chaotic regimes are deterministically unpredictable even with unbounded resources. Additionally, we explain why stochastic models of chaotic systems, while predictively successful in some cases, are in general predictively as limited as deterministic ones. We conclude by suggesting that the way in which scientists deal with such principled obstructions to predictability calls for a more comprehensive approach to theory validation, on which experimental testing is augmented by a multifaceted mathematical analysis of theoretical models, capable of identifying chaos-related predictive failures as due to principled limitations which the world itself imposes on any less-than-omniscient epistemic access to some natural systems. We give special thanks to two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments that have substantially contributed to the final version of this paper     

Metacognition and metarepresentation: is a self-directed theory of mind a precondition for metacognition?

Metacognition is often defined as thinking about thinking. It is exemplified in all the activities through which one tries to predict and evaluate one’s own mental dispositions, states and properties for their cognitive adequacy. This article discusses the view that metacognition has metarepresentational structure. Properties such as causal contiguity, epistemic transparency and procedural reflexivity are present in metacognition but missing in metarepresentation, while open-ended recursivity and inferential promiscuity only occur in metarepresentation. It is concluded that, although metarepresentations can redescribe metacognitive contents, metacognition and metarepresentation are functionally distinct.     

Introspection &; remembering

We argue that episodic remembering, understood as the ability to re-experience past events, requires a particular kind of introspective ability and understanding. It requires the understanding that first person experiences can represent actual events. In this respect it differs from the understanding required by the traditional false belief test for children, where a third person attribution (to others or self) of a behavior governing representation is sufficient. The understanding of first person experiences as representations is also required for problem solving with images. In support of this argument we review developmental evidence that children’s episodic remembering is independent of and emerges after mastery of the false belief task but emerges together with the use of imagery for solving visual rotation tasks.     

Understanding Evil Acts

Evil acts strike us, by their very nature, as not only horrifying and reprehensible, but also as deeply puzzling. No doubt for reasons like this, evil has often been seen as mysterious, demonic and beyond our human powers of understanding. The question I examine in this paper is whether or not we can (or would want to) overcome this puzzlement in the face of evil acts. I shall argue that we ought want to (in all cases) and can (in at least most cases) come to understand why people perpetrate evil acts. This is an appealing conclusion as it allows us to take practical steps to both minimise future occurrences of evil and come to terms with its past abominations.

Belief-desire reasoning in the explanation of behavior: do actions speak louder than words?

The mechanisms underwriting our commonsense psychology, or 'theory of mind', have been extensively investigated via reasoning tasks that require participants to predict the action of agents based on information about beliefs and desires. However, relatively few studies have investigated the processes contributing to a central component of 'theory of mind' - our ability to explain the action of agents in terms of underlying beliefs and desires. In two studies, we demonstrate a novel phenomenon in adult belief-desire reasoning, capturing the folk notion that 'actions speak louder than words'. When story characters were described as searching in the wrong place for a target object, adult subjects often endorsed mental state explanations referencing a distracter object, but only when that object was approached. We discuss how this phenomenon, alongside other reasoning "errors" (e.g., hindsight bias; the curse of knowledge) can be used to illuminate the architecture of domain specific belief-desire reasoning processes.     

Factors associated with a positive attitude towards change among employees during the early phase of a downsizing process

Most research on organizational changes in working life, including downsizing, focuses on the negative attitudes and negative consequences of the change. The aim of this study was to evaluate if the employee's previous learning experience and characteristics of the working environment were associated with positive attitudes towards organizational change. The 467 employees (73.5% males) working in a global oil company in the early phases of a downsizing process were asked to answer a questionnaire with demographic variables, perception of the working environment, and attitude to change (93% response rate). Corporate social responsibility (CSR), involvement and participation, team leadership and team effectiveness were important factors related to positive attitudes towards organizational change. Non-leaders and older employees were positive to change. We conclude that employees' perceptions of their psychosocial working environment, in particular the CSR, were highly related to their attitude to organizational change.     

DRM范式中错误记忆的年龄差异及其机制

研究旨在考察老年人错误记忆现象及内在原因,并检验模糊痕迹理论对错误记忆年老化机制的解释。以经典DRM范式为研究起点,对三组被试（年轻人35名、低龄老人28名、高龄老人34名）的记忆成绩进行比较,利用联合再认范式及多项式树型建模的统计手段,分别从现象学和认知加工机制的角度检验错误记忆的年龄差异是否符合模糊痕迹理论的预期。结果发现:（1）正确记忆与错误记忆均存在显著的年龄差异,而这两种记忆在不同年龄阶段的老年人中呈现出不同的增龄效应模式：正确记忆随年龄的增长呈不断下降的趋势,而错误记忆水平呈现倒U型发展趋势,即低龄老年组的虚报率显著高于年轻组和高龄老年组;（2）虚报率的年龄差异主要集中在未学习过但与学习词列有强语义相关的刺激（类型记为R）反应上。对R型刺激的反应模式进行分析发现,低龄老年人相比年轻人成功提取字面痕迹的概率存在显著下降,而提取要点痕迹的概率保持相对稳定;高龄老年人成功提取要点痕迹的概率相比低龄老年人显著下降。本研究的结果支持了模糊痕迹理论对个体记忆一般年老化特点的预期及解释。