This paper discusses two studies - the one in a business context, the other in a university context - carried out with expert educational designers. The studies aimed to determine the priorities experts claim to employ when designing competence-based learning environments. Designers in both contexts agree almost completely on principles they feel are important. Both groups emphasized that one should start a design enterprise from the needs of the learners, instead of the content structure of the learning domain. However, unlike business designers, university designers find it extremely important to consider alternative solutions during the whole design process. University designers also say that they focus more on project plan and desired characteristics of the instructional blueprint whereas business designers report being more client-oriented, stressing the importance of "buying in" the client early in the process.
Academic design research often fails to contribute to design practice. This dissertation explores how design research collaborations can provide knowledge that design professionals will use in practice. The research shows that design professionals are not addressed as an important audience between the many audiences of collaborative research projects. The research provides insight in the learning process by design professionals in design research collaborations and it identifies opportunities for even more learning. It shows that design professionals can learn about more than designing, but also about application domains or project organization.
The gap between research and design practice has long been a concern for the HCI community. In this article, we explore how different translations of HCI knowledge might bridge this gap. A literature review characterizes the gap as having two key dimensions - one between general theory and particular artefacts and a second between academic HCI research and professional UX design practice. We report on a 5-year engagement between HCI researchers and a major media company to explore how a particular piece of HCI research, the trajectories conceptual framework, might be translated for and with UX practitioners. We present various translations of this framework and fit them into the gap we previously identified. This leads us to refine the idea of translations, suggesting that they may be led by researchers, by practitioners or co-produced by both as boundary objects. We consider the benefits of each approach.
MULTIFILE
