Strange familiarity on the material turn in feminism and HCI

Some extracts from the original text by Anna Croon Fos

the paper focuses on the question concerning how feminism can assist interaction designers with productive ways to generate new insights and influence the design process based on modest witnessing of digital physical blends (Haraway 1997).

Some cornerstone concepts (figures, scripts) that lays the grounds for this text among others; situated knowledges (Haraway 1991), design from somewhere (Suchman 2002), partial translations (Ibid) and modest witness(Haraway 2006), companion species (Haraway 2003), diffraction and agential realism (Barad 2007).

Agential realism is a theory that intra acts with philosophical and ontological questions concerning humans and nonhuman. For instance in agential realism it is affirmed that reality is not only socially constructed, but also materially constructed/configured/figured (Haraway 1997, Barad 2007).

"“Diffraction is the production of difference pattern in the world, not just of the same reflected – displaced -elsewhere.” Donna Haraway 1997, p. 268"

“Particular possibilities for acting exist at every moment, and these changing possibilities entail a responsibility to intervene in the world’s becoming, to contest and rework what matter and what is excluded from mattering.”Karen Barad, 2003, p. 827

feminist generative contributions Bardzell (Ibid) suggest such feminist theories, methods and results can contribute explicitly in decision-making and design processes to generate new design insights and influence the design process tangibly.

Sheridan writes; “Feminist theory is not just about women and gender but, of necessity, it is also about epistemology and ontology.” (Ibid, p. 24)

As such one common concern within the Scandinavian setting has revolved around issues on how to participate in the generative practices that digital designs embody (Mörtberg et al. 2003).

This in turn resembles the strategy advanced by Suchman (2005; 2005b) attending to the specificities of knowing subjects, multiple and differentially positioned, and variously engaged in reiterative and transformative activities of collective world making. Being in a position in-between, transgressing boarders (Mörtberg 1997), sitting on the fence Sefyrin (2010), imploding the inside and outside Elovaara (2004) making visible the invisible Jansson (2007) and/or concerned with the production of different patterns (Alander 2007). The insistence on keeping several heterogeneous and parallel stories alive enable multiple and ambiguous accounts of the relationships between the real and the not-yet existing crucial for exploring alternative ways of becoming human as well as non-human. Hence, throughout the years a readiness to think, feel and account for digital designs has evolved as a majestic strategy of using situatedness (the real) as a resource for transformatory projects (not yet existing).

the material turn redirects the perceived ground for design away from objects themselves, as independent, toward the demand for new conceptual characteristics of wholes that seems necessary in an increasing gathering of digital materials. Therefore HCI in its designerly aspirations needs to move away from finite, fixed objects of interaction and practical use contexts to physical/digital textures co-existing with humans, and non humans and increasingly comprising and redefining our collective and individual environments (Croon Fors and Wiberg 2010).

“The process is nothing less than our way of bringing the familiar [real] to bear on the unfamiliar [not-yet existing], in such a way as to yield new concepts while at the same time retaining as much as possible of the past” Donald Schön 1963, p. ix)