Understanding the role of interaction designers’ personal experiences in interaction design practice

Using designers’ personal experiences in interaction design practice is usually considered as a questionable approach by rationalist in HCI. Perhaps for this reason, little work has been conducted to investigate how designers’ personal experiences can contribute to technology design. Yet it’s undeniable designers have applied their personal experiences into design practice and also benefited from such experiences. This thesis reports on a multiple case study that looks at how interaction designers worked with their personal experiences in three industrial interaction design projects, thus calling for the need to explicitly recognize the legitimacy of using designers’ personal experiences in interaction design practice. In this study, a designer’s personal experiences refer to the collections of his/her individual experiences that derived from his/her direct observation or participation in past real-life events and activities as well as his/her interaction with design artifacts and systems whether digital or not in professional and personal contexts.