Designing the technology vs Designing the design process

I need to be clear on what the next workshop series will be about.

• Is it a design/research project for developing a technology for supporting different forms of "togetherness" ? or

• Is it a design/research project for exploring designing for relational agency?

the focus might be on designing the design process for the emergence and negotiation of different forms of "relations" between humans and technology.
or
how to design for relations?

exploring the ways the design process might support relationality of agency and its diversity in production and use of technologies.

Critical point: embodying agency-sensitive qualities in a successful way may not necessarily lead to have technologies that are agency-sensitive (i.e modular, open, flexible, configurable??) so do we need to add another design phase to tune the outcomes of the participatory design sessions? or should we assume that if the process involves agency-sensitive qualities, this will lead to agency-sensitive technologies, which may be in many different forms according to the cases? or may agency-sensitive products have some more general properties or may they have particular properties for every case? may be this is also part of the research...

Three Paradigms of HCI

A very good article by Harrison et al 2006

Harrison, S., Tatar, D., and Sengers, P. The three paradigms of HCI. In Alt. chi, Proc CHI '07. ACM Press (2006). 

My research is situated in Paradigm 3. I think I can structure my discussions on approach according to these three paradigms.

 

An updated, extended and refined version of Harrison et al's article has been published at Interacting with Computers Journal: Making epistemological trouble: Third-paradigm HCI as successor science.

C&C Paper

• How might a relational view of agency help fostering improvised and emergent actions, non-prescriptive ways of knowing and relating?
• Distributed cognition
• Extended mind
• ANT
• Feminist STS
• Participatory Design
• How might we design for relational agency? how might we design for relational agency in order to facilitate creativity in design and use phase?
• What might be the qualities needed for designing for agency? how might we sensitize our design process to embody those qualities? towards Agency Sensitive Design...
• What are the examples of existing projects with Agency Sensitive qualities?
• in IXD: 
• Critical Technical Practice- general
• Reflective Design - leisure and museum
• Cultural Probes - inspiration
• Ludic Design - elderly
• Seamful Design- game
• Affector- leisure
• Aanestad's work- medical
• Goodwin's work- medical
• Femtedit-Educational
• more examples from Suchman, Barad, Bardzell and Corina Bath

• in Art:
• Xin Wei
• Schiphorst
• Loke
• Manning
• Jacucci

• not a total solution or absolute formula but some tuning operations in design and use!
• micro adjustments