ACM Interactions

My name is Tek-Jin Nam. I am an associate professor in the Industrial Design Department at KAIST. KAIST is one of the top science and engineering universities in Korea. The Industrial Design Department (we call ourselves IDKAIST) is the smallest department at KAIST. Since 1986, IDKAIST has been a test bed for design education. It was one of a few design departments that started at a science and engineering university. I was the first student at this school. Many design education experiments have been carried out since that time. I also became the first professor from among all KAIST undergraduate alumni. Therefore, I often introduce myself as the lab rat of IDKAIST.

Looking back, I didn’t know exactly what design was. I was trained to memorize the contents of textbooks until high school, but studying design was different. I was not used to learning through doing, making, and experiencing. Through this confusion, I got to know the field of computer-aided design. Learning through computer-based tools was more like typical learning for me. This led me to interests in information technology and human-computer interaction, and it made me become a boundary person. The lab rat became a hybrid “batman” between design and IT.

I like Bryan Lawson and Kees Dorst’s analogy of design [1]. They said that a designer is like a platypus, which appears to belong to more than one species. A designer has to combine the two fundamentally different thinking styles of problem solving and creativity. As a hybrid batman, I also thought that a designer needs a good balance between the two. Many design schools in the world still focus on the professional practice of design. I also had design practitioner training during my undergraduate time, while I grew as a researcher later. Due to this transition, I always had questions about the nature, expertise, and identity of design. 

I studied for my Ph.D. degree at Brunel University in the U.K. in the late 1990s. When I arrived in the U.K., I found that design was understood very differently from what I knew from industrial design. Many engineering, psychology, and social science research papers were considered design research, but I struggled to understand their contents. My questions about design grew further when I completed my Ph.D. in design. 

Although I have studied and taught product design and interaction design for more than 25 years, it is still difficult to answer the identity question about design. I speculate that this may be because design is one of the most complex mental activities. It could also be because the notion of design keeps changing in terms of time and disciplines. One thing for sure is that fewer people now believe that design deals only with aesthetic form. People appreciate design for its human centeredness, creativity, and aesthetics of experience, as well as its form. Meantime, many people, including professional designers, are curious about the nature of design and design research. Some people understand that design research is for practice, while others think that design research is to use design practice for research. Some insist design research is the form of research into design. Although I have many questions, I am most interested in finding answers to what would be the most appropriate model of design expertise, knowledge, and research for a designer-researcher—a boundary person, a hybrid batman and a platypus—like me? 

Many people who are close to me wonder what I really do. Many of them have vague ideas. Some people think I am more like a fashion designer or an artist because I work in the Industrial Design Department. Others think I am an IT specialist because I attend conferences like CHI. What I really do in the Industrial Design Department at KAIST is teach interactive product prototyping and HCI for design students. For my research, I try to find ways to create products, services, and systems that are useful, enjoyable, and meaningful for people. I feel the need to give good answers when people ask me what I do and what I mean by “design.”

I am honored to be a part of the ACM interactions blog. I am not sure if I will do well. I have wanted to keep a record of my random thoughts about design thinking and interaction design for some time, but it is difficult to act by myself. I am a slow writer and getting my ideas out and writing in English is challenging for me. But the reason that I wanted to be a blogger is to share, to discuss, and to reflect on my questions about the nature and the identity of design in relation to human-computer interaction.

In this blog, as a boundary person (between engineer and designer, between practitioner and researcher, and exposed to Western and Asian culture), as a batman, and as a platypus, I want to talk about my ideas about design, creative thinking, interaction design, meaningful interactive products, and systems. I want to ask myself and others what design is, what the relation between design and HCI is, how to collaborate with designers, what makes good design, how to evaluate good design, how to use design as a driver for innovation, and how to teach design. Through blogging, I hope to organize my vague ideas and to increase the depth, the breadth, and the power of my thoughts about design and HCI. I want to serve raw ideas for other people, so some can become food for thought.

References

1. Lawson, B. and Dorst, K. Design Expertise. Architectural Press, 2009.

Tek-Jin Nam