Having seen some academic responses to the UX-HCI survey I performed, I thought a number of clarifications might help to unpack the assumptions and purposes of the survey that I had while constructing it, or have realised afterwards.
Doing a survey as a reflective tool
My research practices don’t involve doing surveys. Surveys are one of the most abused research instruments; they entail an enormous range of dangers. As such, I’m not really interested in the survey-as-a-survey for the purposes of traditional modes of ‘data collection’. For me the purpose of the UX-HCI survey was about making some attempt at an initial engagement with UX professionals (via social media, etc.) in ways that were very low cost.
The way the survey was written was naturally oriented towards what I thought their attitudes might be. Of course, the survey is read by some in UX professionals terms of a set of easily-discerned 'academic’ attitudes: that it would produce such a response is useful for reflecting upon how I oriented to 'what UX professionals are like’.
The survey necessarily glosses lots of pertinent issues: What is a 'practitioner’? What 'counts’ as 'academic’? The survey necessarily sets up a particular and very much assumed relationship between the nature of academic work and the work of professionals. It also pragmatically creates a division between these worlds.
Hence, the work of setting up a survey and conducting it therefore becomes a revealing activity in and of itself: its work is about making things practically visible for us as academics (particularly in deconstructing my own ignorance). This practical 'visibility’ is achieved (for me) through doing the 'routine’ work of survey construction and administration. By reflecting on this I can then better understand what the various glosses, assumptions and elisons might even be.
At the same time, academics HCI researchers themselves responding to the survey and its provocations also make certain topics about this area visible for me. These might be reflections on how HCI itself has been configured (e.g., with its promises to practice and practitioners), or how HCI researchers themselves conceptualise their work’s relationship to the Fellowship’s topics (e.g., being challenged by it or defining their work as 'doing something else’).
Why assume academia should serve industry?
It is interesting and notable that the very idea of investigating relations between UX (and allied practices) and HCI would suggest to some a position of instrumental reasoning being applied to that relationship. In other words, the idea of the survey can provoke the question: Why assume academia should serve industry?
The answer to this is that this is about taking HCI rhetoric at its word. Personally I’m not really interested in the 'should’ of the question; I’m more interested in how HCI has already been configured. At the moment it seems that there is a lot of talk at academic HCI venues like CHI around 'the practitioners’ and offering things for them. 'The practitioners’ as they are conceived are a bit like 'the users’ of times before HCI existed: they are present in our discussions but we don’t give weight to considering the relevance of their perspectives. Thus the obvious investigation to do is start filling out that picture of 'the practitioners’ with real people and real practices. We might find that actually 'the practitioners’ as we mythologise them are not the people HCI is actually interested in serving and uncover very good reasons why not (and therefore what HCI 'should’ be doing). Or we might find we are indeed 'serving’ them but in ways we didn’t understand. And so on…