Summary of my User Experience Research-Practice Interaction conversation at the Decipher 2018 conference. My intro slides and notes from the discussion.

4. Research culture
“Publish or perish”
Answers narrow questions
Open sharing
Experimentation
Corporate culture
“Produce or perish”
Wants broad answers
Strategic advantage
Fear of failure
HCI research culture
Publish for researchers
Expanding field
Status within academia
UX practice culture
No time for research
Rapidly evolving practice
Status within corporations

5. Research culture
“Publish or perish”
Answers narrow questions
Open sharing
Experimentation
Corporate culture
“Produce or perish”
Wants broad answers
Strategic advantage
Fear of failure
HCI research culture
Publish for researchers
Expanding field
Status within academia
UX practice culture
No time for research
Rapidly evolving practice
Status within corporations
Education
Position of UX within academia
Amateur professionals
Competing with business for training
Knowledge
No shared knowledge base
Hard to organize research for practical use
Multi-/inter-disciplinary
Communication
Little shared language
Speed-of-operation differences
Finding (time for) each other
Fragmented professional organizations
Mapping “answers” to “questions”

8. http://www.instone.org/uxrpi-connectingdots

9. http://uxpamagazine.org/industry-academic-collaborations/

10. http://uxpamagazine.org/industry-academic-collaborations/

11. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/join-me-decipher-conference-keith-instone/

12. Agenda
• Introductions
• Academia/Research & Industry/Practice
Collaborations
– Examples
– Wish list
– Barriers
• Conference sessions
• Open discussion

14. Open Discussion
• Mindsets around collaboration
– Relationship between researcher, teacher,
student, practitioner
• Mooshiness of “UX”
– Also, importance of evaluation and human factors
(lost in visual design focus)
• Data is listened to but does not explain “why”
• Business model: Industry pays for education

15. Examples
• Get practitioners on campus
– Practitioners teach classes with junior designers as TAs
– Practitioners review portfolios on campus
– Student organization events
• Get professors in industry
– Professors as active practitioners
• Example projects
– Smart home technology, nutrition, machine learning, museum design,
medical portal, …
• Business models & infrastructure
– Companies creating their own schools: train them in exactly what they
want
– Industry sponsored class
– Labs (as physical place where collaboration happens)

16. Wish List
• Assistantships for people without a college
degree
• A way to open doors to students at scale (e.g.,
not swamped with email and one-offs)
• Inter-disciplinary classroom
• Industry experience trajectory from peer
perspective
• Longer term collaboration projects
• Cloning practitioners

17. Barriers
• Logistics & infrastructure: labs, contracts, IP, non-disclosure
agreements
• Time
– Industry too busy for students
– Too much curriculum to cover for collaborative projects
• Mindset (e.g., stereotypical thought processes within universities)
• Communication & shared language
• Relationships
• Definitions and understanding of UX
• Definitions and understanding of research
– Recognition of research within practice AND researcher doing design-
led research

18. Meta-Collaboration
• Thu 2:30pm: Instone, USER EXPERIENCE
PRACTITIONER POV
• Thu 3:30pm: Lane & Tegtmeyer, DESIGN
PROFESSOR POV
• Sat 3pm: Barness & Meija, Cultural change is
needed

19. Examples of Collaboration
• Thu 3pm: Elrod, Performance psychologist
• Thu 3pm: Thomas, Critical race design studies
• Fri 10am: Jacobs, Experiential education
• Fri 2:30pm: Miller & Winter, Government
• Sat 10am: Henriques, Multi-disciplinary

20. Supporting Collaboration?
• Various: Writing (for practitioner readers?)
• Thu 1:30pm: Parker & Barry, Pitching research (to
industry?)
• Thu 1:30pm: Gibson & Owens, Framing research
(for industry?)
• Fri 11am: Coorey, etal, Integrating research into
the classroom (for better practitioners)
• Sat 2pm: Kothandaraman & Ludin, Roadmapping
tool (for practitioner consumption?)

21. “Be a Better Practitioner”
• Thu 1:30pm, Kotwas, IBM
• Fri 10: Siegel & Fath, Biases in Product Teams
• Sat 10am: Pontis, Visualization of field
research data
• Sat 11:30am: Stirling, etal, Teaching non-
designers
• Sat 2pm: Blazo, Participatory design to engage
stakeholders

22. Thanks!
• Colleague discussions: instone@user-
experience.org & @keithinstone & #UXRPI
– Want to be interviewed for our research about
collaboration?
• Business model discussions:
instone@dexterityux.com