9 - Engineering Approach and Framework for HCI Research

Summary

The chapter presents the specific engineering approach to HCI research, including an illustration from the literature. The latter advances contrasting views of engineering as the servant of design, which identifies user needs outside its process and as HCI comprising iterative software development life cycles.The chapter then presents the specific engineering framework for HCI research comprising engineering as discipline, general problem, particular scope, research, knowledge and practices. The specific engineering framework is followed by the engineering design research exemplar as the engineering design cycle and the engineering design research cycle. The lower-level engineering framework comprises the engineering application, the engineering interactive system, and the engineering interactive system performance. Both the exemplar and the lower-level framework are applied to the same illustration of the engineering approach taken from the literature, which contrasts engineering as the servant of design and as HCI comprising iterative software development life cycles.