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)

Remembering the motivations of cultural probes

Some extracts from the original text by Gaver et al.

• Probes embodied an approach to design that recognizes and embraces the notion that knowledge has limits. It’s an approach that values uncertainty, play, exploration, and subjective interpretation as ways of dealing with those limits.
• None of these tasks (or any of the others we used) produced returns that were easy to interpret, much less analyze. How could you compare two photographs, even if you knew both were meant to show “the spiritual centre of the home?”
• Our Probe results are impossible to analyze or even interpret clearly because they reflect too many layers of influence and constraint.
• When we finally receive the results it is clear that they are incomplete, unclear, and biased. We do not ask volunteers to explain their responses. Instead, we value the mysterious and elusive qualities of the uncommented returns themselves. Far from revealing an “objective” view on the situation, the Probes dramatize the difficulties of communicating with strangers.
• We are forced into a situation that calls for our own subjective interpretations. We have to see our volunteers in terms of our own experiences, understanding their responses empathetically, not intellectually.
• Rather than producing lists of facts about our volunteers, the Probes encourage us to tell stories about them, much as we tell stories about the people we know in daily life. They give us a feel for people, mingling observable facts with emotional reactions.
• the returns are layered with influence, ambiguity and indirection, demanding that we see the volunteers through ourselves to make any sense. This tension creates exactly the situation we believe is valuable for design, providing new perspectives that can constrain and open design ideas, while explicitly maintaining room for our own interests, understandings, and preferences.

• Asking unambiguous questions tends to give you what you already know, at least to the extent of reifying the ontology behind the questions. Posing open or absurd tasks, in contrast, ensures that the results will be surprising. 
• Summarizing returns tends to produce an “average” picture that may not reflect any individual well, and that filters out the unusual items that can be most inspiring. 
• Analyses are often used as mediating representations for raw data; they blunt the contact that designers can have with users through Probe returns. 
• Seeking for justifiable accounts of Probe returns constrains the imaginative engagement and story-telling which can be most useful for design.

We like this analogy. If Probes are collections of materials posing tasks to which people respond over time, then “probology” is an approach that uses Probes to encourage subjective engagement, empathetic interpretation, and a pervasive sense of uncertainty as positive values for design. We accept that Probes, the technique, may be appropriated for a variety of different ends. We hope, however, that other researchers and designers will embrace “probology” as well as Probes in pursuing design for everyday pleasure.

Opening Spaces of Possibility - The Enactive as a Qualitative Research Approach

Extracts from the original text by Johnna Haskell, Warren Linds & John Ippolito

"The world that is enacted is inseparable from how we act in it" (VARELA et al., 1991, p.140).

This approach implies that knowing emerges collectively through engagement in shared action. Embodied action brings forth an awareness of inquiry which is not attached to any one event or concept but is, rather, an un-grounding, as knowing is shaped by our actions with/in the world. Groundlessness is an exciting "space" where possibility arises for how we think about knowledge, cognition, and experience.

If knowledge and learning are not located in a body, but in the shifting movement of experiencing, new possibilities emerge for how researchers perceive, interpret, research, and interact within the world. We cannot imagine ourselves just "operating in" research settings, and then leaving the cultures of which we are part. Nor can we ignore the ethics of research, since research is also the site of an ongoing ethical event implicating all those involved.

If we take our partiality as researchers, the fact that we always influence the direction of our work, indeed, that our work is in many ways an expression of who we are and who we are becoming, we can interact with our connection to the research not as a liability to be guarded against, but as an opportunity to make the research more meaningful by more fully appreciating our part, as researchers, in it. [2]

When one lets go of objectivity as an unattainable and constraining icon then we begin to see our connection to the research as an asset. In what ways are the researcher, the research participants, and the research setting shaping each other? Are they distinct entities, or only possible in relation? How do we understand their mutual interaction? As research? As knowing? As experiencing? [3]

They refer to the "enactive view that cognition has no ultimate foundation or ground beyond its history of embodiment" (VARELA et al., 1991, p.xx). [4]

The enactive approach is best expressed as "the growing conviction that cognition is not the representation of a pregiven world by a pregiven mind but is rather the enactment of a world and a mind on the basis of history of the variety of actions that a being in the world performs" (VARELA et al., 1991, p.9). [5]

Collective action, which can be none other than embodied action, is yet an awareness which is not attached to any one body or event or concept but is, rather, an un-grounding that VARELA, et al., refer to as "groundlessness." Groundlessness is an exciting "space" where possibility arises for how we think about knowledge, cognition, and experience. [7]

how, by engaging in our research in situated and concrete contexts, opportunities arise through shared, relational, and embodied interpretation practices. [9]

Enactive Approach:
We need to embrace the unpredictable and unexpected moments, the unfolding we are immersed with/in yet not graspable, in that they are constantly arising through action and not located in a self. If knowledge and learning are not located in the body or self but located in the shifting movement of experiencing, then this opens new possibilities for how we perceive, interpret and represent research.

Enactive inquiry is not some position, or set of questions, but a way of being "present" or open to the non-concrete. The best way to "record," relay, or interpret such spaces of inquiry is through our embodied listening, storying through photographs, and story telling or writing images (interactions) as they arise. [16]

"The role of the qualitative researcher, much like the artist/dancer's role, demands total involvement and commitment in a way that requires a total immersion of the senses in the experience. ... The researcher is connected to the participants in a most profound way, and that is how trust is established, which in turn allows for greater access to sources and which ensures an involvement on the part of participants that enables them to tell their respective stories. ...

The challenge is how to bring forth such experiencing in such a way that it continues to be enactive and not set in a step by step process.

Dewey:
"Thinking is a process of inquiry ... all thinking is research, and all research is native, original, with [whomever] carries it on, even if everyone else in the world already is sure of what [he/she] is still looking for. It also follows that all thinking involves risk. Certainty cannot be guaranteed in advance. The invasion of the unknown is of the nature of an adventure; we cannot be sure in advance" (p.148).

Theatre of the Oppressed is a popular theatre approach which proposes that knowledge emerging aesthetically through a series of theatre exercises and games is already in itself the beginning of a transformation.

My work involves enabling groups of people to create short plays together. Warmup or tune-up exercises are used to develop a sense of community and trust. These activities are also performative as they both develop, and carry, the relationship I have with participants as active sites of knowing and understanding.

"What we do is what we know, and ours is but one of many possible worlds. It is not a mirroring of the world, but a laying down of the world" (VARELA, 1987, p.62). In this process the researcher/facilitator becomes an adventurer, an experimenter, and a catalyst who invites, encourages and dares exploration with others. The participant is also a researcher as, both individually and collectively, they explore through their bodies the themes that emerge.

How can such an enactive7 view assist us in creating conditions where research continually takes into account the emerging networks of relationships that continually grow, change and respond to challenges? [38] I will explore in this essay the implications for inter-subjective forms of qualitative research of how the shaping of a dramatic structure is intertwined with our play within it as knowing emerges through a variety of forms of actions which are simultaneously the medium, subject and re-presentation of research.As facilitator/researcher I am capable of occupying many positions in the work,and don't rest with any. I am continuously learning with/in the workshop environment; I am not just directing participants on what to do. Rather, I am co-implicated in an exploration process and co-evolving alongside the participants in the process. Although I am a facilitator, and they are participants, I am co-implicated with them as a participant. I must be able to shift back and forth—facilitator as participant, participant as facilitator. The work is shaped by me and Iam shaped by it in a circular process.

Judith PIPPEN (1997)'s approach. "the dynamic inter-relationship of our bodyhood and its multidimensional relational space" (p.72), which overcomes bodymind, voice/movement splits in human relationships.

How can we help others learn reflective and mindful awareness that empowers them to access their intuitive and embodied abilities, as well as fuel their interpretive and imaginative powers in their research practice?

As in this exercise, research is a dialogical and social process. Things happen spontaneously as people play and inter-play with each other, finding and filling spaces for dialogue and interaction. Can we also play with the idea that these spaces are also spaces of the possible, enlarged through our interactions?

Complicity—being implicated in/with—moves us as researchers from managing a simplistic system of designed input-outcome-based inquiry towards one of dynamic engagement and interaction. This requires an attentiveness to our participation through events, engaging in knowingbeingdoing in a complex and forever unfolding world.

Fritjhof CAPRA's (1998) contrast of designed structures with emergent ones. Designed structures are formal structures and content, while emergent ones are the informal network of relationships that "continually grows, changes, and adapts to new situations" (p.47). An emergent structure incorporates a different form of relationship than that of a designed structure. Whereas a designed structure is based on rules and procedures, an emergent one facilitates the continual emergence of new structures by encouraging questioning and rewarding innovation. This fits in more with the idea of complicity which I have outlined whereby facilitating emergence requires us to pay attention to how the system operates in order to continually create conditions for it to flourish.

Research informed by and respectful of the complex worlds of these settings are not just "interventions" but instances of complicity whereby our research unfolds with communities-in-the-making through partnerships and interrelationships.

Thus, research means becoming attuned to such complicity, to be able to improvise within it and to realize that control doesn't reside with the researcher all the time, but is distributed amongst the participants from moment to moment. We have a responsibility to embody awareness of the intentions, values and beliefs emerging through such partnerships.

Creating the conditions for interactive inquiry in this light means that research is not the "finding" of some passive knowledge, preconceived, believed to be known in advance, "believed to be (exclusively) a given" (FELMAN, 1995, p.56). Research then becomes an "open space through which thing-flows are distributed rather than plotting out a close space for linear and solid things" (DELEUZE & GUATTARI, 1988, p.361). Such spaces are always emerging, but we must be aware of them when they do, attending "closely to my nonverbal experiences of the shifting landscape that surrounds me" (ABRAM, 1996, pp.59-60). [

I offer suggestions for actions as I guide the group. Not only do these actions bring forth an awareness of feelings in the group, they also bring me into contact with my own senses as the ripples of group action echo back to me.

Our research method is intertwined with the content of our research. This is a phenomenological approach to research method, not as a series of steps but one where I must listen (in an embodied way) to the content or focus of my research and the appropriate method will emerge through my interaction with the research I engage in. Isn't the traditional approach that your research question determines your method. I think what we are suggesting is a much more interactive and holistic process.

Performance theorist Peggy PHELAN explains performance as "honoring the idea that a limited number of people in a specific time/space can have an experience of value which leaves no visible trace afterwards"

So, rather than having the research question determine the method, my interaction with teachers and students informs my approach and specifies my direction.

This brings us back to the origins of the word research. One root of the French word (rechercher) is the old (1080) word "recerchier", meaning "parcourir en cherchant" ("to travel while searching"). Research as such a journey into knowing means, as John puts it, there are no fixed start or ending points—we are always in the middle of something.

Workshop 3 exercises

Extracted from Really, Really Small: The Palpability of the Invisible by Thecla Schiphorst

Augusto Boal [4] terms these types of experiential exercise de-specialization. He states that in our every day lives “the senses suffer. And we start to feel very little of what we touch, to listen to very little of what we hear, and to see very little of what we look at. We feel, listen and see according to our specialty. The adaptation is [both] atrophy and hypertrophy. In order for the body to be able to send out and receive all possible messages, it has to be reharmonized [through] exercises and games that focus on despecialization.” Boal’s goals in theatre are to create imaginative, social and political agency. His work is premised on the notion that agency at the bodily level (agency of the self) enables agency at the social and political level. Many exercises in Somatics and performance focus on this idea of retraining attention in order to increase awareness and agency through the body, and can be applied to many levels of awareness that extend beyond the personal.

By depriving the body of its external hearing it can become aware of the internal sound otherwise made invisible by the louder external sounds. We are removed from our own ears, but not from our hearing. In performance, artists like Pauline Oliveros and Augusto Boal have created practices such as “deep listening”, and “listening to what we hear”, which probe and access these very same questions of experience. The responses to the very simple question on the cards: What did you hear? focus on access to this level or resolution of experience. Responses indicated the participants’ discovery of the internal soundscape.

At the beginning of the workshop, the participants were asked to move in slow motion, as slowly as possible. They were then left to move very slowly for 10 minutes without speaking.

In Dance practices such as Butoh, this technique is utilized to enable the body to shift its attention to an immersive state in relation to its environment, what Csikszentmihalyi would term ‘flow’, where attention is intensified, and sensory details are sharpened. In neurophysiology and psychology [41] experimental studies show that the slowing or stopping of movement changes the conscious states we normally have and allows for observing the constant shifts of thought, sensation, or expands the ability to observe characteristics of basic experiencing [20].

Translations / De-scriptions in Workshop1

Inscribing Sensitivities into Design

This is the title of my next paper. Here is the abstract:

This research aims to develop an approach to design in order to support relational nature of human capacity for action. Supporting relationality asks for a different approach or sensitivity to the ways we perform design practice. Rather than trying to control, predict or prescribe actions and relations of users, designers may design for actions more emergent and relations more fluid. Moreover, designers need to consider the performative aspects of design that require a broader notion of design process, which extends the scope of design to include design-in-use. In this broader landscape of design, designers also need to revisit their roles and the traditional boundaries between designers and users. The study follows a research through design approach and synthesizes various perspectives and approaches from feminist Science and Technology Studies, Participatory Design, Seamful Design and Actor-Network Theory. In the paper, we introduce an analysis of previous design cases and approaches that demonstrate different ways of addressing the relational character of human capacity for action. As a result of our analysis, we suggest six qualities to sensitize design: visibility, multiplicity, relationality, accountability, duality and configurability. Finally, we discuss some strategies to inscribe these qualities into design process. Our analysis involves design cases only from interaction design field, but we see a broader relevance to other design domains.

Opening up to possibilities rather than probabilities: A relational constructionist approach

Extracts from Hosking and Pluut's original text:
(Re)constructing Reflexivity: A Relational Constructionist Approach

relational constructionist perspective which radically re-conceptualizes reflexivity:
(a) as a local and co-constructed process oriented towards the question
(b) how are we ‘going on’ together, and therefore paying attention to
(c) the realities and relations we are co-creating during the research process and so
(d) is concerned with local pragmatic and ethical issues (Gergen & Hosking, 2006; McNamee, 1994) rather than with the quality of truth claims.

 

• Our relational constructionist meta-theory implies that the processes that some call “research” are processes in which the identities of researcher, research object and related realities are in ongoing re-construction.
•  The centring of construction invites a view of research as intervention, the centring of relating implies that ethics and responsibility be re-constructed and centred e.g., through reflexive dialogues, and talk of multiple forms of life invites attention to multiple local ways of knowing and “power to.”
• Research as intervention:
• our relational premises imply that participating in inquiry inevitably (re)constructs peoples' lives in some degree (McNamee, 1994) and imply that all participants – including scientific researchers – construct and reconstruct their local (community-based) knowledges, identities and relations. From this it follows that research may be practised in ways that construct researchers as copractitioners and practitioners as co-researchers (Cunliffe & Shotter, 2006). Viewing research (or, as we prefer to call it, inquiry) as intervention, and shifting reflexive attention to the research process itself, enables a relational conception of ethics and responsibility.

• Relational ethics/ Relation responsibility
• our relational premises imply that inquiry is intervention.
• Sheila McNamee speaks of this as a matter of relational (rather than individual) responsibility (McNamee, 2004) – relational responsibility for the research process – and the kinds of people and worlds it (re)produces.

• Ongoing Reflexive Dialogues Directed at the Research Process
• Gergen outlined three important "overtures to innovation."
• deconstruction - “wherein all presumptions of the true, the rational, and the good are open to suspicion” (Gergen, 1994, p. 62).
• democratization or "relational responsibility",
• reconstruction – “wherein new realities and practices are fashioned for cultural transformation” (Gergen, 1994, p. 63).

• Reflexive dialogues are a way of putting these "overtures" to work in research. This can be done by inviting communal reflection (Gergen & Gergen, 1991) throughout the inquiry.

• Reporting strategies:
• Meta-theoretical assumptions offer a different view – the process is the product (Brown & Hosking, 1986)
• Alternatively, the style, form and content of the reporting strategy can be more open and, for example, oriented towards processes, possibilities and generative theorising.
• Another possibility is that full and equal participation is attempted in the
  writing of the report. Participative research practices can be extended to include "cogenerated reports" (Allard-Poesi, 2005)
• Notions of symmetry: all research participants to share responsibility for learning.
• Instead it becomes an ongoing relational process of “turning back” on the construction
  of the ”inquiry.” Reflexive dialogues, directed at the research process, can open up
  new ways of going on together by mobilizing local knowledges and communally
  reflecting on research identities and relations.
• These dialogues can all be considered attempts to construct soft self-other differentiation. In this way reflexivity is not a slide into infinite regress, but an opening up to multiple local forms of life and to possibilities rather than probabilities (Gergen, 1994; Hosking, 2008).