Decomposing a Design Space

Resnick, Paul, “Decomposing a Design Space”. In HCI Remixed: Reflections on Works That Have Influenced the HCI Community. Edited by Thomas Erickson and David W. McDonald. MIT Press. 2007.

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Introduction

These days, I often ask PhD students to select a few published papers as models of what they aspire to write—it forces them to try to get beyond looking for a topic that seems interesting and on to thinking about what a research contribution looks like. When I was in grad school, Furnas’ paper on fisheye views is one that I would have selected. It served as a model to which I aspired, not so much for its content which has become justifiably famous, but for its approach to decomposing a design space into a set of independent choice dimensions.