Scientific Results


An excellent quote from a paper I’m reading:

“A final thought before moving on. Science has one methodology, art and design have another. Are we surprised that art and design are remarkable for their creativity and innovation? While we pride our rigorous stance, we also bemoan the lack of design and innovation. Could there be a correlation between methodology and results?”

Greenberg, S. and Buxton, B. 2008. Usability evaluation considered harmful (some of the time). In Proceeding of the Twenty-Sixth Annual SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Florence, Italy, April 05 – 10, 2008). CHI ’08.


One response to “Scientific Results”

  1. Isn’t the methodology of science to discover how and why something exist or acts the way it does? While, art, and potentially design too, is to provide a way to communicate one’s own ideas and what that individual views as important?

    We should praise and except that science lacks the ability to be innovated, since innovation implies there is something that needs to be fixed. If you build it right the first time, you don’t need to remake it.

    Lastly, to answer his question simply, yes. The more rigid the system, the harder it becomes to get results that will provide an enlightenment to its researchers. It is through this rigid structure that we can be satisfied not only with our results, but also, have justifiable reasons for them. If we didn’t have this rigidness within our system, we would be no better than those that believe we are made in the appearance of a god.