Following current developments on the scene of design and research practice for HCI, we have augmented the understanding we may have of our roles as prescribed by society. Seeking a pragmatic way of developing our understanding of what it is to design technology, we argue the role of designers to be more than we perceive of ourselves. In particular, we propose envisaging such roles in a broader context concerning how actions relate to a community, to language and to the vocabularies that constitute the role. Our call is for a greater openness to wider communities and a complete abandonment of the fallacy of objectivity. Most importantly, we try to establish hope for a reweaving of beliefs and a move beyond method to free our roles as agents rather than seeing them directed from external imagined sources.

HCI AND SCIENTIFIC METHOD

HCI seems to be in crisis. Not only are technologies changing on a global scale, but habits and meanings of computer use are now so broad that existing paradigms and approaches to the work of HCI seem limited and frustratingly inadequate. Thus, in keeping with the scientific traditions of the field, the apparent crisis requires us to seek and necessarily to find a resolution to our difficulties: a better explanation of our phenomena than the ones we currently draw from. When we locate the path or paths of progress, we will follow it or them tirelessly and with commitment.

We can (with some critical irony) predict this course of action by recognising that one of the central purposes of science is to demonstrate that objective truths discovered through chance or targeted exploration must necessarily be implemented in the name of progress and in the manner prescribed by nature. The implementation and consequent historical appropriation of scientific discoveries are directed towards a future conceived as necessary and inevitable. As a result, the interrelations among such implementations are subject to speculation. Indeed, the somewhat perverse actions of scientists in working to ensure that one discovery is fully justified as a consequence of another as antecedent, can block the possibility for other people who have something to share with a given community, through isolation and neglect (Feyerabend, 1993). In this sense, the roles of all involved in HCI are forced into the glaring light of scrutiny regarding responsibilities towards the wider community. For example, we come to question the responsibilities of authors of papers and textbooks towards students: Compiling, formulating, updating, rewriting and republishing what ultimately become the mantra and mainstay of learnedness in interaction studies, with the promise that such texts somehow embody and contain more accurate truths and more successful methods than those previously available (often in earlier versions of the same texts) to the eagerly awaiting readership. Such pursuit of scientific method has both sustained HCI and provided it structure as a discipline.

Framing progress through the creation of new vocabularies in place of old, success in HCI has been defined in terms of making things that embody the findings of scientific endeavours. Just as more historical approaches in HCI have posited practical solutions for the efficient domination of humans over technologies, newer endeavours like Participatory Design, despite laudable goals of social and cultural inclusion, have fallen prey to the self-imploding belief that we can learn the vocabulary that the universe uses to explain itself and that designers can ultimately find the meaning of a particular behaviour by immersing themselves in the vocabulary of users as ‘others’. Yet understanding others remains the core thread in HCI and represents the main area in which our responsibilities to the wider community are played out. The most pertinent example comes in the form of the emergence, in recent years, of an open debate on user experience which has culminated in tenacious arguments about how to ‘design for-’ or how to ‘design experience’. On one side, is an analytic view of experience with proponents of models and frameworks promising a way of rationalising and controlling such elusive phenomena as ‘experiences with technologies’. On the other, wherein we also have been seeking some common ground with others in the field, is the attempt to describe, at times with less obvious articulations, concepts and ideas which we may have about experience. Commentators of the latter persuasion argue that experience is not engineered into artefacts themselves, but is product of the relations with objects on an individual as well as intersubjective level.

Many such commentators arrive in direct contraposition to the so-called conservative account of creating interfaces which treats design as a scientific endeavor, appropriating method from the natural and mathematical sciences to essentially draw on foundations in rationalism (Fallman, 2003). It is a move to show respect for people as a whole is all their diversity. We have nonetheless in this way, proposed frameworks and models as being more grounded in aesthetics than in the practical realities of everyday living. As such, objectivity has not been a priority; the feelings of an individual, being less objective and more soft, have become more prominent along with his and her values, beliefs and pleasures. But these are apparently distinguished from what? The answers appear to be the hardness of fact of science, the objectivity of a particular language in describing events and phenomena, the truth which we should constantly confront as a matter of fact. But in practice, all these arguments have created difficulties more than opening up a resolute way for a pragmatic understanding of our reality.

Just as with all HCI work prior, what we have achieved is only to replace one set of beliefs with another. Perhaps it should be so that the way we have chosen represents a more suitable hypothesis re-describing reality as it is found in the world. Nonetheless, all description requires a vocabulary and we therefore cannot ignore the question: Whose vocabulary is this in such a problematic situation?; that of the audience or that of the writer?

VOCABULARIES

There is no point in believing that one vocabulary is better than another in explaining or talking about a particular phenomenon as though already prescribed. In fact, in replacing one vocabulary with another (e.g. the vocabulary of usability with that of experience; design for experience instead of designing experience; or inclusion versus segregation), we only ensure that the promises of some scientists to have finally discovered the true meaning of a word as better explaining our world as it is in itself, are privileged. In fact: “Vocabularies are useful or useless, good or bad,helpful or misleading, sensitive or coarse, and so on; but they are not ‘more objective’ or ‘less objective’ nor more or less ‘scientific’” (Rorty, 1982, p. 203).

The scientific discourse in HCI, although not necessarily supported in laboratories, is nonetheless protracted in textbooks. It is not astonishing to witness curricula and some courses of study drawn meticulously along the line of the formal structures of methodologies illustrated in textbooks. In fact, textbooks which aim to communicate the language of the contemporary scientific community are popularized by curriculum designers within a language closer to the one students encounter in everyday life. There appears to be a scientific vocabulary, wherein both ideas and practices can be objectively and authoritatively described and judged. In the case of usability for example, it is surely metaphysically comfortless and morally insignificant and therefore supposedly in touch with reality, scientific and enabling designers and users to keep reality under control. Reality almost seems to represent itself in objects that purport to be solutions. The subjective, non-cognitive and confused or irrational elements are filtered out, leaving only the purest of technologies made in ‘nature’s own’ language. Yet some would argue that we have now turned towards a new truth in aesthetic matters. But is our newfound and enthusiastic pursuit for ‘the aesthetic’, actually proof that we have abandoned such cold and rational pursuits for the soft and cosseting beauty of aesthetic objects and experiences? Until we leave behind method and our guiding ahistorical structure of rationality and progress, it is unlikely that our treatment of the aesthetic will result to be tangibly useful for humankind. It requires a mature society to allow those able to exercise their communal and individual agency to ‘cast about’ for a suitable vocabulary which might help us valuably interpret our wider reality.

In seeking to explain our progress towards this revolution we call aesthetic, we are likely only attempting to find some control and develop some predictions about ways ahead. Fundamentally, interaction and design are no better understood in one vocabulary or another. It is only that, in light of a specific purpose, one description is more useful in a preferred vocabulary than in another. Our efforts to explain are simultaneously efforts to control and predict that, in the case of other people at least, would better be conceived from the outset as efforts to sympathize and associate with others as our fellow citizens, as opposed to objects of study as users are so often depicted. In claiming to abandon our traditional notions of objectivity, method and truth, we should also be saying that we no longer need to justify our makings to universal notions of ‘human nature’ or ‘natural’ behaviour. Our success is to be measured not by some tangible connection to the scientific realities of interaction and the ‘nature of things’, but rather by the extent to which we have freed our own way to make the future as we want it to be.

The propositions we draw painfully or effortlessly from our experimenting – the assertions we make about our evergrowing knowledge – are merely suggestions for us about where to go next. Our reason is the result of our ongoing action and because of this we are agents in our own making. Notably, an historical analysis of HCI vocabularies and objects is lacking with little efforts directed to such an end. Perhaps following a Rortyan analysis, it is more therapeutic to see the object of our enquiry as a continuous recontextualisation and re-weaving of our beliefs in light of new desires and ideas about the enjoyment of and fulfilling interaction with and through computers. It is more likely that, if our enquiry is directed towards communicating such beliefs to communities of enquiry instead of looking being a “matter of finding out the nature of something which lies outside the web of belief and desires” (Rorty, 1991, p.96), we may realize that in all the discourse about context and thing contextualised, the dualism object-subject, external-internal can be dropped altogether. That is, to see if we see the object of our enquiry as reweaving beliefs, rather than discovering the ultimate nature of such objects under the microscope of the mind.

SENSIBILITIES

There is interesting scope in examining the question; if we would never have spoken of an ‘aesthetic turn’, assuming anyway that we would have the same systems as today, would the interaction really be different, and would people be happier or more concerned with what was not there already? Undoubtedly, the interaction would be proposed by using the same hardware and software but likely the aesthetic enjoyment would differ as we try to sensitize the subject. As no intrinsic qualities exist in the interaction with computers, meanings ascribed by our communities or sought by our esteemed researchers, become the focus of current developments.

With regard directly to the HCI community, romantic ideas elaborated within the rhetoric of the pursuit of objective truth, are extended within the rhetoric of bringing communities into agreement with other communities by seeking, according to a Rortyan analysis, unforced agreement. In this light, solidarity within a particular community emerges through persuasion through moral virtues absent from any underlying notion of rationality or metaphysical link between human reason and the nature of things. At the same time though, institutions of power can contribute to shape the possibilities for change, with an aye of regard that they do not enter into the practice of social engineering. For example, conferences that propose repeatedly an invariance of students who ultimately become professors and keynote speakers, can support a notion of rational achievement through the administration of powerful institutions. Equally, they can offer opportunities to ‘outsiders’ and non-conformists to develop sensibilities as opposed to rational ideologies. Nonetheless, in the Computer Science and HCI arenas, we have spoken little of sensibility as a phenomenon and devoted virtually no exploration to identifying what we mean by the sensibility of an individual.

While in various recent contributions looking towards the aesthetic, sensibility is ascribed a much greater significance, we are very are from an unforced agreement on how to live with it and design in a way that recognizes and connects with it. We would argue strongly against that any Kantian idea of appreciation through the adoption of a particular sensibility towards a Deweyan understanding of sensibility as individually and intersubjectively constructed. It is then the designer’s own sensibility towards other people and things and their sensitivity towards his or her fellow citizens. It is through reflection that designers develop such sensibilities: being there, knowing in action and recognizing the limits of our vocabulary. Although a number of recent commentators have suggested a virtual panacea to be established through making interaction sensory or felt, we have to face in this the impossibilities of knowing other peoples’ ways of experiencing and describing in a different vocabulary. It is in such endeavors that we need sensibility - a softer way of interpreting - towards things that fall outside our own possible experience. Our relationship to objects, as designers, users, academics, students or entrepreneurs, develop as inextricably tied up with histories and cultures. If we are able to appropriate that history and make meaning of the artefact as more than just a functional thing, we are already on the way to empowering ourselves through mere unlearned sensibility.

CONCLUSIONS

Just as for pragmatism, the aim of aesthetics is to realize, enhance and deepen the values of the arts in actual experience through our aesthetic appreciation of them, for design and HCI generally, aesthetics must not be denigrated to supply definitions and ontological truths about things.
We need to move away from dependency on knowing another person’s experience and towards a recognition of the designer’s vocabulary and way of being as central to developing sensibilities towards others. Contrary to being the limitless source of truth about our world and the different ways we live in it and use technologies, objectivity is a stone in our shoe. While the pain that this stone causes us in trying to walk forward may be valuable in forming awareness of the uneasy constraints scientific method forces us to work with, it is nonetheless a burden that we should gladly cast away. The future of HCI does not need to be about finding the new truth – aesthetic or otherwise – but about retaking charge of the technologies and things we create for the benefit of people generally. And most of all, HCI should be about learning new ways of thinking that release us from the instrumental properties of objects and free us to make ourselves better.

REFERENCES

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