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Interaction, new materials & computing – Beyond the disappearing computer, towards material interactions
Materials and Design 90 (2016) 1200–1206
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Interaction, new materials & computing – Beyond the disappearing computer, towards material interactions Mikael Wiberg Department of Informatics, Umeå University, 901 87 Umeå, Sweden
a r t i c l e
i n f o
Article history: Received 17 November 2014 Received in revised form 12 May 2015 Accepted 16 May 2015 Available online 20 May 2015 Keywords: Design Experiences Interaction Interaction design Materials Materiality
a b s t r a c t This paper offers new design and theoretical insights into the materiality of interaction. With a point of departure taken in “the material turn” in HCI this work identifies how this has played out in our field as six interlinked approaches – from interaction design with new materials, via craft-based approaches to CHI, to notions that treats the computer as a material and the materiality of computing. This paper takes stock of our community’s reconceptualization of computing through the material turn and then advocate a return to interaction rather than a continued concern for the material status of the computer. In this paper I argue that doing so has fundamental implications for HCI design and research. By articulating a “materiality of interaction” perspective, this paper offers ways of moving forward by developing (1) A unique form-giving practice, (2) An artistic and research-driven explorative account, and (3) the growth of systematic knowledge in our field. I view this focus on the articulation of “the materiality of interaction” as an important contribution to this special issue. In particular since a focus on how interaction is increasingly realized through computational re-activation of traditional (analogue) materials, such as paper or wood, might be key for understanding emerging material experiences. © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction By 2010 it became clear that a “material turn” was taking place in human–computer interaction (HCI) [38]. The field was shifting away from a focus on the virtual, immaterial, abstract, or representational qualities of information and towards physical, substantive, concrete, and formal properties of the computer itself. In the past four years this trend has only accelerated and [12] has described this in terms of a “material move”. To this date the ACM Digital Library contains more than 100 papers (not including workshops and panels) explicitly focused on the computer as material. At least one major HCI journal, Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, has published a special issue on materiality [51], and one might argue that the entire Tangible, Embedded and Embodied Interaction (TEI) conference is effectively devoted to this cause. Few papers about computers as materials existed a decade ago (notably [32,20]). Most were written in the past five years – including not only proof-of-concept but also more theoretical development of frameworks for analyzing and designing for material experiences [see e.g. 15].
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.matdes.2015.05.032 0261-3069/© 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
This trend is by no means unique to HCI; a veritable frenzy for the material is sweeping the academy. Disciplines as diverse as English, Computer Science, Media Studies, Classics, and Music, abound with conferences, symposia, book series, journals, and lectures devoted to the topic. Perhaps this trend constitutes a critical response to broader cultural anxieties about information capital and immaterial labor, or perhaps a nostalgic yearning for “things” and “making” has taken root. Whatever the cultural tendencies and forces driving this frenzy for the material, the field of human–computer interaction will play an important role. HCI operates at the intersection of analysis and invention – it is where understanding and intervention into the relationship between people and information technologies takes place. How we proceed will determine just how the most ubiquitous of resources – computing – will interact with every physical and social dimension of our material conditions and everyday lives. This paper takes stock of our community’s reconceptualization of computing through the material turn, and in a growing interest in our community to understand the links between emerging materials and material experiences (see e.g. [15] for a broad overview of this growing interest in material experiences in the area of HCI). Based on a synthesis of the literature, I characterize six approaches taken within the material turn. These approaches demonstrate at least two distinct epistemic commitments – to design and the social sciences – whose agendas offer, at times complementary, and at other
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times contradictory guidance for the development of the field. With a point of departure taken in these approaches this paper suggests that moving forward requires reframing the material turn so that both agendas place less emphasis on the status of the computer itself and more emphasis on the materiality of interaction. In this paper this focus on the articulation of “the materiality of interaction” adds an important contribution to this special issue. In particular since a focus on how interaction is increasingly realized through computational re-activation of traditional (analogue) materials, such as paper or wood, might be key for understanding emerging material experiences. Further on, interaction works as a mediating structure between materials and humans. Accordingly, and in order to deepen our understanding of how emerging materials and material technologies shape our daily experiences with products, we need to understand the materiality of interaction. This paper is an account for advancing this understanding, and as such it contributes to this special issue with a paper that highlights how the material turn in HCI has led to new ways of relating to, experiencing, and interacting with new forms of computing(materials). 2. Six approaches to the material turn While the “material turn” has clearly been a generative development for researchers and designers alike, it has been executed less like a lockstep pivot guided by a unitary vision and more like a collection of approaches oriented in a reasonably common way. Based on a review of literature published over the last twenty years, this paper characterizes the interests captured under the rubric of the “material turn” as follows: • • • • • •
New materials. Computational expressivity. Analogies to craft. New evaluation methods. Computer as material. Materiality. (1) New materials: From water drops [3] and soap bubbles [13,9], to conductive fabrics [32,33] thermochromic inks [37], bioplastics [39] and artificial grass [30], there is no shortage of proposed expansions to the material catalogue for interaction design. This explosion of interest in digital–physical substrates is a testament to the extraordinary success of ubiquitous computing; computing has moved out of “the box” and into the world [1]. As the interface relocates from the glowing screen to the physical substrate new visions for the future of HCI are being proposed. For example, Ishii’s “radical atoms” imagines a future in which all digital interactions are conducted through material substrates and thus human–computer interaction gives way to human–material interaction [21]. (2) Computational Expressivity: With the proliferation of digital– physical substrates e.g. [8], designers are re-examining the terms by which interfaces are regarded as proper, or good. Questions of aesthetics rather than utility increasingly guide research, bringing HCI into tighter alignment with the arts. Interactive architecture projects [7] “spectacle computing” [25], and form-driven interaction design [17,23,24] all approach the alliance between the computer and physical substrate as a means of re-imagining the interface through expressive dimensions. Here, the material turn has been a means whereby designers advocate the evocative and pleasurable as core to the experience of computation as it has long been core in other arts. (3) Analogies to craft: Knitting, bookbinding, and musical performance are just a few domains that have recently become sites for HCI inquiry [40,41,6]. Fifteen years ago, these inquiries would have been unthinkable. Computers were associated with
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work in the information economy and any connection to craft, and pre-industrial labor would have been unimaginable. HCI has a well-established interest in design [28,42], but analogies between handiwork and digital technologies complicate this line of research. By explicitly focusing on craft, researchers are using a material lens to challenge assumptions about what constitutes design and who indeed performs this practice, see e.g. [27]. Looking to knitters, bookbinders, and scrapbookers shows a growing alliance with the folk and vernacular rather than the avant-garde. In the process, researchers displace computing from the status of an exceptional medium that stands apart from all others to one that can be aligned with more traditional arts. (4) New evaluation methods: Traditional HCI evaluations have been concerned with task analysis, usability, and product adoption and efficiency measures. These evaluations involve assessing how well people understand the representations and metaphors communicated via the interface. The material turn means new forms and compositions that rely less on depiction and more on qualities like texture, shape, and feel. Orienting the field around these new computational objects requires new methodologies for assessing what constitutes a “good” design. Studies of form, which have long been common in industrial design, have begun to appear in HCI [9,22,36,52] These works push designers to evaluate information technologies as devices and artifacts whose form (and not only content) must embed elegantly in daily patterns of use. (5) Computer as material: Our assumptions about computers have been turned on their heads. Computers have traditionally been categorized as information technologies. They are abstract, symbolic, context free; computing is about bits, not atoms. By granting this machine the exceptional status of immateriality, we believed we had freed it from any necessary structure or form. HCI was the project of building representations that interfaced between information abstractions and everyday human needs. Treating computers “as just another material” operating “on the same level as paper cardboard, and other materials found in design shops” [4], shifts the research agenda for interaction design. Instead of asking how should it work and look?, we might now find ourselves asking, what kind of material is it?
Lowgren and Stolterman conclude that computers are “materials without properties” [28]. They point out that since computers allow for the assembly of an unlimited number of distinct systems, the material enforces so few constraints that it is effectively without limiting properties. Hallnäs and Redström, by contrast, point to computers as materials with properties like “temporal structure” (expressed through the execution of programs) and a need to be combined with materials exhibiting “spatial structure” to exhibit physical form [18]. Vallgårda and Redström further develop the position that computers are materials through the concept of a “computational composite” [48]. If computing requires combination with other substrates, then the designer’s task is to generate the catalogue of combines capable of exhibiting key properties of both original substrates. Reclassifying the computer as material has prompted a series of investigations into “immaterial” forces like electricity, radio waves, and Bluetooth [5,31,34,35,45]. These studies suggesting that designers need knowledge about the properties of digital services so that they can work with information technologies as though physical things. Treating computers as material carries profound, though generally unrecognized, stakes. By seeing computers as things that can be resolved in material terms, designers and researchers are pushing back on theories of information that have long defined the broadest contours
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of the field. Information has generally been regarded as that which can be abstracted from form. To shift the computer from the status of information to material, therefore, is an ontological move and we have yet to thoroughly explore the consequences of this philosophical transformation. (6) Materiality: “Materiality” is a relatively recent entry in HCI discourse and few terms compete with it in popularity or ambiguity; what is materiality anyway? Is it a gesture to the poetics of form, or a metaphorical relationship between the digital and physical? Is materiality a literal concern with the physical substrate and the technical properties of thing-ness, or is it a cultural construct more aligned with meaning? Is it technology and use taken together? Is it an orientation towards the artifact? Is it more, or less, than an affordance? At a 2012 CHI Panel on “Material Interactions” the range of possible interpretations was remarkably apparent. At one extreme was Hiroshi Ishii envisioning the rise of dynamic substrates, or “radical atoms”, and an era of technological development where the physical becomes computational. At the other extreme was Paul Dourish arguing that, “Materials are irrelevant. Materiality matters” [53]. Dourish’s remark communicates an epistemic commitment distinct from (and perhaps at odds with) those expressed in the other five approaches. Whereas developing new computational materials complements the move to reclassify the computer as material, Dourish’s expression of disregard for material specificity signals quite another matter. Rather than centering on design-driven concerns like form and form-giving, materiality signals a concern with questions of culture, media [11] and meaning. It emerges from the tradition of the social sciences rather than design and the arts. Researchers have long pointed out that the material details of technologies – the stubborn persistence of paper in information work [29, 43,54], or the windows metaphor as an “object to think with” about our status as decentered, multiple, postmodern selves [46] – are key sites for understanding user experiences of interactive products [15] and from which to read the politics of the social world. Here, the form of computing is a communication resource. Others, e.g. [14] has discussed materiality in relation to media, whereas others, e.g. [49] has looked at it from the viewpoint of a research program oriented towards explorations of the material properties of computers and computing. However, if leaving the technology-centered approaches behind and instead focus on approaching the material turn through the lens of social and cultural analysis opens a different kind of agenda. Rather than moving the field towards new links with arts or material sciences, it opens new connections to science and technology studies, feminist standpoint theories, infrastructure studies, media history and archaeology, and organizational studies. Clearly, these approaches have complementary and conflicting potentials for guiding new knowledge production. That commitment to design and the social sciences lay claim to the “material” signals a professional politics within the field that may deserve explicit attention. At a minimum, the recognition of these differences begs questions like, why are differing epistemic commitments moving, in tandem, through a material turn?, and what kind(s) of knowledge is/are produced through the material lens? In other words, where are we going?
like automobiles, running shoes, refrigerators, watches, notebooks, and water bottles have been developed; information has never appeared in such a diversity of forms. Computers have undeniably changed. The material turn constitutes a stream of research navigating these changes and even aiming to direct their flow. As such, this stream inherits an intellectual legacy from within HCI that has been calling into question the status of representation for more than a quarter century. For decades, the dominant interaction paradigm between people and computers consisted of the windows-icon-mouse-pointer (WIMP) ensemble, represented through the graphical user interface (GUI). Computers came in boxes and they all looked just the same.1 Thus, surface representations of information architectures rather than physical forms of the machine received an overwhelming amount of attention and concern. By the 1990s, however, a set of influential critiques began calling into question the centrality of the GUI. “Ubiquitous computing”, a technical vision of “the disappearing computer” developed at Xerox PARC and articulated most famously by Mark Weiser, pushed back against the “personal computing” paradigm. Weiser argued that the very success of personal computing only underscored its paradigmatic flaw: ““more than 50 million personal computers have been sold, nonetheless the computer remains largely in a world of its own” [50]. The approach would never allow computers to become “an integral, invisible part of the way people live their lives”, which he regarded as “the real potential of information technology” [50]. In the late 1990s, the Tangible Media Group at the MIT Media Lab began developing systems that integrated computational resources with the physical world. They made the digital graspable, and the world the interface [20]. These “tangible interactions” were stark reminders that humans are physical beings that live in a physical world. They demonstrated the potential of drawing information into that embodied relationship rather than ceding tacit knowledge to the demands of abstract symbols on an interface. Concurrently, a movement was underway at sites like Xerox Research Center Europe to draw the body back into the interaction loop. “Embodied interaction”, articulated prominently by Paul Dourish, drew upon both phenomenological (philosophical) and ethnomethodological (anthropological) resources to push back on the long-standing alliance between computer science and cognitive science. By locating the body as a key site for meaning, this strand of research pushed interaction designers to abandon abstract mental models in favor of pragmatic engagements with objects in use [10].2 By 2012, ubiquitous computing had arrived [1], tangible computing was a dominant area for interaction design research, and a whole range of products had been developed to bring information into embodied interactions within the social world. In other words, we are living in a post-representational era of HCI. The material turn carries forward this legacy of critique. It does so, however, in ways that requires scrutiny because contradictions and complications are beginning to emerge. While an insistence that representations were simply too thin to describe the richness of interactions in the world was quite valid, we now risk over-privileging the authenticity of the non-computational world. At times, materiality seems to give license to a fetishization of atoms over bits, as though somehow they are more “real”. The result has
3. The computer is dead: the material turn as critique It is no coincidence that the material turn corresponds to a moment when computers are undergoing such radical transformations in their material reliance. Data is everywhere and accessible from every device; information has never seemed so free. At the same time, a whole range of computationally-enhanced everyday objects
1 For a design history on the ubiquity of the gray box see Atkinson, P. (2000). The (In)Difference engine: explaining the disappearance of diversity in the design of the personal computer. Journal of Design History, 13 (1), 59–72. 2 We acknowledge that our cursory narration participates in a “great man” history, all too common in technical domains. Unfortunately, the scholarly work that complicates and nuances such accounts is still largely undone.
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been those versions of material orientation that wax poetic about the qualities of cloth, paper, glue, and the handmade. Ironically, these ecstatic raptures over the non-digital only mirror the logics of 1980s fantasies about the disembodied and immaterial bliss of coding and the virtual that characterized descriptions of “console cowboys” and “jacking in” [16,47]. Moreover, the move to re-classify the computer as material transfers the critique of representation to the metaphysical terrain. If the rationale for turning from representation to form is that information is material after all then we may ultimately be on unstable ground. After all, computers have already transformed in fundamental ways many times in the past hundred years and with quantum computing on the horizon, this trend is sure to continue. Ultimately, debating the ontology of computers might raise interesting philosophical questions – is computing bound to or freed from physical instantiation as a precondition of its existence? – but it leaves us in a philosophical lurch. The ontic status of the machine tells us very little about what computers do in relation to humans.3 It distracts us from key questions about interaction and design. Turning to the materials also risks abandoning some of the intellectual gains made through earlier critiques of representation. Our community is undeniably generating new digital–physical objects and substrates at an impressive rate. However, we have been less attentive to the ways in which these material explorations implicate core concepts in the field. The aim of a critique of representation was never about the particularities of a technological approach. Thus we should be wary of aims to establish a world filled with dynamic substrates, or “radical atoms”. Rather than concern ourselves with “smart materials”, perhaps we should recall that the really compelling aspects of earlier critiques were that they promised that by reshaping computers we were reshaping practices, contexts, behaviors, and experiences of the world. The central problematic was never the machine. It was always about the status of interaction.
4. Long live interaction – three aims for HCI In 1960 Licklider [26] published a paper entitled “Man-Computer Symbiosis” that proposed a curiously organic vision for the future of computing: The fig tree is pollinated only by the insect Blastophaga grossorun. The larva of the insect lives in the ovary of the fig tree, and there it gets its food. The tree and the insect are thus heavily interdependent: the tree cannot reproduce wit bout the insect; the insect cannot eat wit bout the tree; together, they constitute not only a viable but a productive and thriving partnership. This cooperative “living together in intimate association, or even close union, of two dissimilar organisms” is called symbiosis.” With human and machine cast as “dissimilar organisms” in “intimate association”, knowledge work became a problem of ecology and computing became a symbiotic task. The goal was neither the technical capacity of the human or machine, but rather a way of bringing both into tight cycles of real-time interaction with the belief that their differences might be so complementary as to make them inseparable partners in the production of new knowledge. Licklider’s vision of “man-computer symbiosis” was an influential statement of the computing vision and his model of entanglement
3 The “Computers as Social Actors” paradigm has demonstrated that the ontology of the machine has little, if anything, to do with the relationship between computer and user. Rather, it is the social cues transmitted between them that determine their patterns of interaction, see Reeves, B., & Nass, C. (1996). The Media Equation: How People Treat Computers, Television, and New Media Like Real People and Places. CSLI.
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between human and machine has long echoed throughout the history of HCI. Today we worry less about whether people and computers are ontologically similar or dissimilar and more about whether computers and wood are ontologically similar or dissimilar. In either case, the solution seems very much the same. The metaphysics of computers matter far less than the “symbiosis” that we are striving to achieve. If the material turn has advanced the vision of human–computer symbiosis then it has done so by drawing our attention to just how diverse and rich the range of computational forms can be. Doing so grounds the longer standing critiques of representation. Together, they call into question any model of computing that narrowly constructs the relationship to the user through the graphical interface. Moreover, this movement has prompted closer regard and care for the specificity of form and implementation involved in the construction of any interaction loop. In so doing, however, it has called into question the centrality of the computer as the object of analysis. If the computer is not exceptional and if design is primarily concerned with form, then perhaps Dourish is right to claim that it is not about materials after all. I would like to propose that by stepping back to take stock, we as a research community can reconsider what is at stake in the material turn. Ultimately, the metaphysics of computers seems to matter far less than the materiality of interaction, or the unique interplay of engaged capabilities (whether human or non-human, digital or physical) that have long been the domain of HCI. Focusing on the materiality of interaction can provide a means of building on both the commitments to design and the social sciences. From this vantage, we as a research community might pursue three kinds of aims: the development of (1) unique form-giving practices, (2) artistic and research-driven accounts of interaction, and (3) systematic knowledge production. 4.1. Unique form-giving practices Both the development of new materials and the rise of alternative user interfaces aimed at computational expressivity signal the strong desire within HCI to develop unique form-giving practices. Traditionally, form-giving practices have developed in close conversation with the properties and qualities that limit and constrain a substrate – e.g. woodwork, plastic arts, painting, or ceramics. Over time, it is the negotiation with these substrates that drives a formal, aesthetic conversation within the community of practitioners and critics. For HCI practitioners, interaction has been a complex, seemingly intangible object. It has been subjected to formal conversations through terms like “user experience”, or “look and feel”. The more recent literalism inherent in treating the computer as material might seem to relieve the tensions associated with intangibility or low material constraint. However, I would like to suggest that there is already a form-giving practice unique to interaction design and thus relieving this tension is unnecessary. It is the act of combining computational and non-computational matters to serve particular interactional logics. Consider a simple example like a touch screen. The interaction is formed through the composition of understandings about the human – from the moisture level of our fingertips to what constitutes a “natural” hand gesture (that is, what is conventionally, symbolically, ergonomically, and anatomically possible to perform) and the technology. Whether the screen operates by tap, multi-touch, or gesture has less to do with the nature of the computer than with a keen sensibility for composing interaction loops. By strengthening our awareness that HCI already has unique formgiving practices, we can shed our anxieties about the ontological status of the computer. By focusing on how we give form to interactions we can move beyond the need for categorical distinctions between materials (physical vs. digital, analogue vs. digital, virtual vs. real, atoms vs. bits, and so on). Any material may potentially be part of an interaction loop. As we become more adept at imagining interaction, we will come
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to see the world as already filled with material preconditions for acts of computing to take place. One of my favorite mundane examples of this interaction-driven approach to form-giving is the Evernote/Moleskine notebook. At first glance, the object appears to be a traditional paper notebook. It contains no microprocessor, nor sensors, nor bits. The texture of its pages is perfectly recognizable to the note-taker, who need never change their writing process to accommodate a digital world. However, the notebook can be linked through mobile application to the online service Evernote. The pages can be photographed for digital archiving. Evernote software can perform some degree of optical character recognition on the handwritten pages. Small stickers can be affixed to passages to designate tags for later sorting and searching. Even the bright green string that serves as a place-marker serves double duty. It signals to the camera whether or not to capture images in portrait or landscape orientation (see Fig. 1). The notebook is always already interactable. It gives form to traditional note-taking practices and scaffolds these practices through the potential for digital archiving. The designers have incorporated the materialities of interaction already present in the long cultural tradition of writing. They have simultaneously reframed this tradition as the material preconditions for a symbiotic relationship between man and machine. Yet this notebook needs no computational power at all. As interaction designers we could perform the same sort of trick with any number of non-computational substrates or objects – the molecular state of water in a lake, leaves falling from trees on an autumn day in New York City, or books neatly filed on the shelves of an industrious academic. This perspective may differ rather sharply from proposals to build “radical atoms” [21] or “electric materialities” [34,35]. There is no insistence on developing speculative materials that are dynamic or computational. CPUs, memory, power supplies, and networks are not the core concerns. Rather, just about anything, at any scale, is a potential material that becomes “interactable” depending on how it is arranged.
4.2. Artistic, research-driven accounts Returning to interaction through a material lens comes with a set of methodological implications for pushing the field forward. The strong interest in artistic and craft-based approaches to design makes evident that researchers are extremely motivated to find methods for working with the computer in new ways. By focusing on the materiality of interaction I would suggest that we can interrogate the assumptions about what, precisely, can be brought into interaction across a range of material conditions, aesthetic regimes, and historical contexts. It may be productive to turn to methods like the “cultural probe” as inspiration. Probes have been extremely successful means of repurposing objects to study culture. They are highly suggestive of the potential involved in repurposing materials to learn about forms of interaction. Material probes might be more closely related to “critical design” [2] than to “computational composites” [48]. The aim would be to use design as a means of interrogating, problematizing, and generating alternative formulations for the material conditions under which we presume interaction might take place. We might envision a whole new set of subfields and modes of expertise prepared to give accounts of the social world that we have not yet seen. Interaction historians might help us understand how, precisely, computing became a thinkable technology for re-framing military action and how it then became a necessary part of certain kinds of work and how, yet again, the materiality of interaction generated new models of play and leisure. Interaction archaeologists may revisit old technological arrangements to tell us that some were computers after all, and others, which we believed to be so, were not. So too, critical interactionists might reveal to us the politics in our contemporary imagination about what parts of the social world are available to computing and which might never be.
Fig. 1. Evernote/Moleskine notebook.
4.3. Systematic knowledge production Finally, the materiality of interaction provides a focus for conceptualizing HCI, as a field, in new ways. Rather than focusing on materials as a way of rejecting theoretical distance – an approach that risks generating prototypes but not concepts – I suggest that we can take our interest in materiality as a theoretical maneuver, a way of using computing to do philosophy and social theory. In 1936 Alan Turing wrote a classic paper on the computable real numbers. It marked an epistemological break between idealism and materialism in mathematics. Prior to Turing it was hard to get away from the idea that through mathematical reason, the human mind gained access to a higher domain of Platonic truths. Turing’s first proposal for a universal computing machine is based on an implicit rejection of this view. Turing turned to the materials to understand something seemingly immaterial, mathematics. Making this shift to the materials truths of arithmetic implied predictions about the behavior of actual physical calculating systems. In short, a focus on material matters helped move mathematics forward intellectually. I suggest that a similar maneuver might be possible by re-examining interaction through a material lens. We can benefit from a similar closeness to the materials as we strive to generate new knowledge in our field and I see opportunities for how this can play out on multiple levels. The turn to materiality can be a return to interaction. This return to interaction can both unify multiple streams of research currently underway and can draw these streams into longer-term conversation with fundamental concerns that have helped give rise to HCI as a distinctive endeavor. Our field has long argued that we are transdisciplinary in approach. Our work stretches from the hard sciences of engineering and physics to the social sciences, and increasingly to the humanities. We do this from necessity. To both analyze and intervene in interaction loops requires that methods, concepts, and analytical frameworks from multiple disciplines be brought into conversation. We are a community of analysts and practitioners, formalists and functionalists, humanists, social scientists, designers and engineers. This said, what saves the field from being an eclectic hodge-podge of borrowed works is that we have traditionally centered upon neither the human nor the computer but rather the highly specific material entanglement that arises in-between. Our expertise is interaction, the tight turn-taking practices that bind humans and machines. While HCI needs transdisciplinary concerns it must also take care to generate strong original concepts that can be contributed to theorizing in HCI and interaction design research and to other domains. For a
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more in-depth discussion on how we can work with strong-concepts and concept-driven approaches to interaction design research see: [19] and [44]. Focusing on the status of interaction, even as we execute a material turn, allows us to maintain such unique conceptual contributions. That way, even if the physical manifestations of computing transform many times we will endure and even advance our inquiry. In the process of writing this paper it occurred to me that perhaps it is time to open a new section of HCI or interaction design research. In an effort to recognize the range of epistemic commitments and disciplinary backgrounds unified in the interrogation of the concept of interaction, perhaps it is time to add a section on the History and Philosophy of Computer Human Interaction. In the same way as Turinǵs philosophy of computing in the 30s helped re-shaping the practical approach to the very same material we see opportunities in accepting that theory is indeed part of practice and we should set aside space for concerted debate. There may be opportunities to give rise of interaction historians alongside interaction designers. Perhaps we as a research community should ask ourselves if HCI is the place that can shelter such a nascent vision and make space for its shaping as a new mode of profession in the coming years? If the material turn did not happen in 2010, but in fact culminated at this time in the history of HCI its historical traces are important to understand to move forward in an informed manner. Already the capacities of this new perspective are apparent, in the ways that people attend to traditional crafts in order to divine new inspirations for a digital age but what I am advocating here needs no separation, rather simply a tracing of connections that were always already there.
5. Conclusion In this paper I have stepped back from the material turn to recognize six interlinked approaches to research and design. In doing so I have suggested that the diversity apparent within these approaches demonstrated a further need to understand the goals and potential contradictions within the material turn. By situating these approaches as part of a longer critique of representation within HCI, I have positioned the turn as a grounded means of rejecting models of computing that rely strictly upon abstract symbols and depictions via the interface. However, I also cautioned that in taking up a critique of representation, scholars and designers that participate in the material turn have also tended to become bound up in metaphysical debates about the ontological status of the machine, or to privilege the status of non-computational materials as somehow more authentic, or real.
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By pushing back on the centrality of the computer within these conversations, I then proposed that the real matter at hand within the material turn is an acknowledgment that computing has radically changed forms and will continue to do so. From this vantage, the most stable perspective is to focus on the concept of interaction. Doing so will allow the material turn to become a resource for specific investigations into the cultural, aesthetic, and technological conditions whereby we presume objects and people to entangle through interaction loops. In relation to this special issue on emerging material experiences I view this focus on interaction as a key component for understanding the relation between emerging materials and materials technologies and how these materials will shape our daily experiences with products around us. In particular, and in relation to this special issue I have in this paper pinpointed at least three ways that HCI might benefit from concerted attention to the materiality of interaction. It would allow us to focus on the field’s capacity to contribute unique form-giving practices to the arts. It would foster the development of artistic, research driven accounts (which may give rise to whole new professional subfields). And finally, the materiality of interaction may help drive 3) systematic knowledge production within our field. Accordingly, and as illustrated in Fig. 2 I have in this paper illustrated six different approaches taken in our field to “the material turn”. Based on these different accounts and approaches I have then suggested that a “turn to interaction”, away from the computer in its traditional form (“the box”) and towards a deeper understanding of how interaction (re-imagined in relation to new materials and combinations of analogue and digital materials) might not just enable new experiences of computational power, but might also enable HCI to move forward as a unique form-giving practice, as a foundation for artistic and research driven accounts to interaction design, and how a focus on interaction will allow for long-term systematic knowledge production in our field (no matter in which form computing is realized). In wrapping up this paper I think that it is important to acknowledge that smart materials are constantly being invented. There are infinite ways to combine the digital and physical, the “atoms” and the “bits”. In the next few years we will see computing in many new forms. Buzzwords such as the development of the Internet of Things is just one indication of this trend. While these computational combinations certainly bring new opportunities to design, in the long term, creating new knowledge about the materiality of interaction may be what matters most. To understand emerging material experiences we most understand what interaction with and through these materials is about. Imagine, if you will, what it would mean for our field to trace its intellectual history to the most foundational academic projects within the liberal arts. As Romans considered quadrivium, or the study of matter, basic preparatory work for the serious study of philosophy, we too might see the close attention to computation as a way to think about eternal questions of nature and the social world. The difference might be that we prepare our scholars and practitioners to intervene in philosophy in order to imagine and then arrange new material conditions, interactions with these material compositions, and experiences of these configurations in the world. In the words of Tom Robbins, “To achieve the impossible, it is precisely the unthinkable that must be thought”. The computer is dead. Long live interaction! Acknowledgments I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and the chairs for this special issue for their constructive feedback and comments on earlier versions of this paper. References
Fig. 2. Moving from the material turn to the materiality of interaction.
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[29] W.E. Mackay, Is Paper Safer? the role of paper flight strips in air traffic control, ACM/ Trans. Comput. Human Int. 6 (4) (2000) 311–340. [30] A. Minuto, A. Nijholt, Growing grass: a smart material interactive display, design and construction history, SMI, 2012. [31] K. Nordby, Conceptual designing and technology: short-range RFID as design material, Int. J. Des. 4 (2010) 1. [32] M. Orth, R. Post, E. Cooper, Fabric computing interfaces. CHI 98, pp. 331–332. [33] H. Perner-Wilson, L. Buechley, M. Satomi, Handcrafting textile interfaces from a kitof-no-parts, TEI 2011 (2011) 61–67. [34] J. Pierce, E. Paulos, Materializing energy, DIS 2010 (2010) 113–122. [35] J. Pierce, E. Paulos, Electric materialities and interactive technology. In Proc. CHI‘13, New York, New York, USA 2013, pp. 119–128. [36] J. Redström, Aesthetic concerns, in: G. Giaglis, P. Kourouthanassis (Eds.), Pervasive Information Systems, 2007, pp. 197–209. [37] A. Ritter, Smart Materials in Architecture, Interior Architecture and Design, Birkhauser, Basel, Switzerland, 2007. [38] E. Robles, M. Wiberg, Texturing the material turn, TEI (2010) 137–144. [39] V. Rognoli, G. Salvia, M. Levi, The aesthetic of interaction with materials for design: the bioplastics’ identity. DPPI, 2011. [40] D. Rosner, K. Ryokai, Reflections on craft: probing the creative process of everyday knitters, C & C, 2009, pp. 195–204. [41] D. Rosner, A. Taylor, Antiquarian answers: book restoration as a resource for design, CHI (2011) 2665–2668. [42] D. Schon, The reflective practitioner: How Professionals Think In Action, Basic Books, 1984. [43] A. Sellen, R. Harper, The Myth of the Paperless Office, MIT Press, 2001. [44] E. Stolterman, M. Wiberg, Concept-driven interaction design research, HCI 25 (2) (2010) 95–118. [45] P. Sundström, A. Taylor, K. O’Hara, Sketching in software and hardware: Bluetooth as a design material, MobileHCI 2011 (2011) 405–414. [46] S. Turkle, Life on the Screen, Simon & Schuster, 1995. [47] E. Ullman, Close to the machine: Technophilia and its discontents. City Lights. Close to the Machine, 2001 [48] A. Vallgårda, J. Redström, Computational composites, in: Proc. of CHÍ07, 2007, pp. 513–522. [49] A. Vallgårda, T. Sokoler, A material strategy: exploring the material properties of computers, Int. J. Des. 4 (3) (2010) 1–14. [50] M. Weiser, The computer of the 21st century, Sci. Am. 265 (3) (1991) 94–101. [51] M. Wiberg, J. Kaye, P. Thomas, PUC theme issue: material interactions, Pers. Ubiquit. Comput. (2013)http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00779-013-0683-x. [52] M. Wiberg, Methodology for materiality: interaction design research through a material lens, Pers. Ubiquit. Comput. (2013) 1–12. [53] M. Wiberg, H. Ishii, P. Dourish, A. Vallgårda, T. Kerridge, P. Sundström, D. Rosner, M. Rolston, Materiality matters: experience materials, Interactions (2013) 54–57 (March + April 2013). [54] S. Zuboff, In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power. Basic Books, 1989.
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Materials and Design journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jmad
Interaction, new materials & computing – Beyond the disappearing computer, towards material interactions Mikael Wiberg Department of Informatics, Umeå University, 901 87 Umeå, Sweden
a r t i c l e
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Article history: Received 17 November 2014 Received in revised form 12 May 2015 Accepted 16 May 2015 Available online 20 May 2015 Keywords: Design Experiences Interaction Interaction design Materials Materiality
a b s t r a c t This paper offers new design and theoretical insights into the materiality of interaction. With a point of departure taken in “the material turn” in HCI this work identifies how this has played out in our field as six interlinked approaches – from interaction design with new materials, via craft-based approaches to CHI, to notions that treats the computer as a material and the materiality of computing. This paper takes stock of our community’s reconceptualization of computing through the material turn and then advocate a return to interaction rather than a continued concern for the material status of the computer. In this paper I argue that doing so has fundamental implications for HCI design and research. By articulating a “materiality of interaction” perspective, this paper offers ways of moving forward by developing (1) A unique form-giving practice, (2) An artistic and research-driven explorative account, and (3) the growth of systematic knowledge in our field. I view this focus on the articulation of “the materiality of interaction” as an important contribution to this special issue. In particular since a focus on how interaction is increasingly realized through computational re-activation of traditional (analogue) materials, such as paper or wood, might be key for understanding emerging material experiences. © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction By 2010 it became clear that a “material turn” was taking place in human–computer interaction (HCI) [38]. The field was shifting away from a focus on the virtual, immaterial, abstract, or representational qualities of information and towards physical, substantive, concrete, and formal properties of the computer itself. In the past four years this trend has only accelerated and [12] has described this in terms of a “material move”. To this date the ACM Digital Library contains more than 100 papers (not including workshops and panels) explicitly focused on the computer as material. At least one major HCI journal, Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, has published a special issue on materiality [51], and one might argue that the entire Tangible, Embedded and Embodied Interaction (TEI) conference is effectively devoted to this cause. Few papers about computers as materials existed a decade ago (notably [32,20]). Most were written in the past five years – including not only proof-of-concept but also more theoretical development of frameworks for analyzing and designing for material experiences [see e.g. 15].
E-mail address: [email protected].
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.matdes.2015.05.032 0261-3069/© 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
This trend is by no means unique to HCI; a veritable frenzy for the material is sweeping the academy. Disciplines as diverse as English, Computer Science, Media Studies, Classics, and Music, abound with conferences, symposia, book series, journals, and lectures devoted to the topic. Perhaps this trend constitutes a critical response to broader cultural anxieties about information capital and immaterial labor, or perhaps a nostalgic yearning for “things” and “making” has taken root. Whatever the cultural tendencies and forces driving this frenzy for the material, the field of human–computer interaction will play an important role. HCI operates at the intersection of analysis and invention – it is where understanding and intervention into the relationship between people and information technologies takes place. How we proceed will determine just how the most ubiquitous of resources – computing – will interact with every physical and social dimension of our material conditions and everyday lives. This paper takes stock of our community’s reconceptualization of computing through the material turn, and in a growing interest in our community to understand the links between emerging materials and material experiences (see e.g. [15] for a broad overview of this growing interest in material experiences in the area of HCI). Based on a synthesis of the literature, I characterize six approaches taken within the material turn. These approaches demonstrate at least two distinct epistemic commitments – to design and the social sciences – whose agendas offer, at times complementary, and at other
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times contradictory guidance for the development of the field. With a point of departure taken in these approaches this paper suggests that moving forward requires reframing the material turn so that both agendas place less emphasis on the status of the computer itself and more emphasis on the materiality of interaction. In this paper this focus on the articulation of “the materiality of interaction” adds an important contribution to this special issue. In particular since a focus on how interaction is increasingly realized through computational re-activation of traditional (analogue) materials, such as paper or wood, might be key for understanding emerging material experiences. Further on, interaction works as a mediating structure between materials and humans. Accordingly, and in order to deepen our understanding of how emerging materials and material technologies shape our daily experiences with products, we need to understand the materiality of interaction. This paper is an account for advancing this understanding, and as such it contributes to this special issue with a paper that highlights how the material turn in HCI has led to new ways of relating to, experiencing, and interacting with new forms of computing(materials). 2. Six approaches to the material turn While the “material turn” has clearly been a generative development for researchers and designers alike, it has been executed less like a lockstep pivot guided by a unitary vision and more like a collection of approaches oriented in a reasonably common way. Based on a review of literature published over the last twenty years, this paper characterizes the interests captured under the rubric of the “material turn” as follows: • • • • • •
New materials. Computational expressivity. Analogies to craft. New evaluation methods. Computer as material. Materiality. (1) New materials: From water drops [3] and soap bubbles [13,9], to conductive fabrics [32,33] thermochromic inks [37], bioplastics [39] and artificial grass [30], there is no shortage of proposed expansions to the material catalogue for interaction design. This explosion of interest in digital–physical substrates is a testament to the extraordinary success of ubiquitous computing; computing has moved out of “the box” and into the world [1]. As the interface relocates from the glowing screen to the physical substrate new visions for the future of HCI are being proposed. For example, Ishii’s “radical atoms” imagines a future in which all digital interactions are conducted through material substrates and thus human–computer interaction gives way to human–material interaction [21]. (2) Computational Expressivity: With the proliferation of digital– physical substrates e.g. [8], designers are re-examining the terms by which interfaces are regarded as proper, or good. Questions of aesthetics rather than utility increasingly guide research, bringing HCI into tighter alignment with the arts. Interactive architecture projects [7] “spectacle computing” [25], and form-driven interaction design [17,23,24] all approach the alliance between the computer and physical substrate as a means of re-imagining the interface through expressive dimensions. Here, the material turn has been a means whereby designers advocate the evocative and pleasurable as core to the experience of computation as it has long been core in other arts. (3) Analogies to craft: Knitting, bookbinding, and musical performance are just a few domains that have recently become sites for HCI inquiry [40,41,6]. Fifteen years ago, these inquiries would have been unthinkable. Computers were associated with
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work in the information economy and any connection to craft, and pre-industrial labor would have been unimaginable. HCI has a well-established interest in design [28,42], but analogies between handiwork and digital technologies complicate this line of research. By explicitly focusing on craft, researchers are using a material lens to challenge assumptions about what constitutes design and who indeed performs this practice, see e.g. [27]. Looking to knitters, bookbinders, and scrapbookers shows a growing alliance with the folk and vernacular rather than the avant-garde. In the process, researchers displace computing from the status of an exceptional medium that stands apart from all others to one that can be aligned with more traditional arts. (4) New evaluation methods: Traditional HCI evaluations have been concerned with task analysis, usability, and product adoption and efficiency measures. These evaluations involve assessing how well people understand the representations and metaphors communicated via the interface. The material turn means new forms and compositions that rely less on depiction and more on qualities like texture, shape, and feel. Orienting the field around these new computational objects requires new methodologies for assessing what constitutes a “good” design. Studies of form, which have long been common in industrial design, have begun to appear in HCI [9,22,36,52] These works push designers to evaluate information technologies as devices and artifacts whose form (and not only content) must embed elegantly in daily patterns of use. (5) Computer as material: Our assumptions about computers have been turned on their heads. Computers have traditionally been categorized as information technologies. They are abstract, symbolic, context free; computing is about bits, not atoms. By granting this machine the exceptional status of immateriality, we believed we had freed it from any necessary structure or form. HCI was the project of building representations that interfaced between information abstractions and everyday human needs. Treating computers “as just another material” operating “on the same level as paper cardboard, and other materials found in design shops” [4], shifts the research agenda for interaction design. Instead of asking how should it work and look?, we might now find ourselves asking, what kind of material is it?
Lowgren and Stolterman conclude that computers are “materials without properties” [28]. They point out that since computers allow for the assembly of an unlimited number of distinct systems, the material enforces so few constraints that it is effectively without limiting properties. Hallnäs and Redström, by contrast, point to computers as materials with properties like “temporal structure” (expressed through the execution of programs) and a need to be combined with materials exhibiting “spatial structure” to exhibit physical form [18]. Vallgårda and Redström further develop the position that computers are materials through the concept of a “computational composite” [48]. If computing requires combination with other substrates, then the designer’s task is to generate the catalogue of combines capable of exhibiting key properties of both original substrates. Reclassifying the computer as material has prompted a series of investigations into “immaterial” forces like electricity, radio waves, and Bluetooth [5,31,34,35,45]. These studies suggesting that designers need knowledge about the properties of digital services so that they can work with information technologies as though physical things. Treating computers as material carries profound, though generally unrecognized, stakes. By seeing computers as things that can be resolved in material terms, designers and researchers are pushing back on theories of information that have long defined the broadest contours
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of the field. Information has generally been regarded as that which can be abstracted from form. To shift the computer from the status of information to material, therefore, is an ontological move and we have yet to thoroughly explore the consequences of this philosophical transformation. (6) Materiality: “Materiality” is a relatively recent entry in HCI discourse and few terms compete with it in popularity or ambiguity; what is materiality anyway? Is it a gesture to the poetics of form, or a metaphorical relationship between the digital and physical? Is materiality a literal concern with the physical substrate and the technical properties of thing-ness, or is it a cultural construct more aligned with meaning? Is it technology and use taken together? Is it an orientation towards the artifact? Is it more, or less, than an affordance? At a 2012 CHI Panel on “Material Interactions” the range of possible interpretations was remarkably apparent. At one extreme was Hiroshi Ishii envisioning the rise of dynamic substrates, or “radical atoms”, and an era of technological development where the physical becomes computational. At the other extreme was Paul Dourish arguing that, “Materials are irrelevant. Materiality matters” [53]. Dourish’s remark communicates an epistemic commitment distinct from (and perhaps at odds with) those expressed in the other five approaches. Whereas developing new computational materials complements the move to reclassify the computer as material, Dourish’s expression of disregard for material specificity signals quite another matter. Rather than centering on design-driven concerns like form and form-giving, materiality signals a concern with questions of culture, media [11] and meaning. It emerges from the tradition of the social sciences rather than design and the arts. Researchers have long pointed out that the material details of technologies – the stubborn persistence of paper in information work [29, 43,54], or the windows metaphor as an “object to think with” about our status as decentered, multiple, postmodern selves [46] – are key sites for understanding user experiences of interactive products [15] and from which to read the politics of the social world. Here, the form of computing is a communication resource. Others, e.g. [14] has discussed materiality in relation to media, whereas others, e.g. [49] has looked at it from the viewpoint of a research program oriented towards explorations of the material properties of computers and computing. However, if leaving the technology-centered approaches behind and instead focus on approaching the material turn through the lens of social and cultural analysis opens a different kind of agenda. Rather than moving the field towards new links with arts or material sciences, it opens new connections to science and technology studies, feminist standpoint theories, infrastructure studies, media history and archaeology, and organizational studies. Clearly, these approaches have complementary and conflicting potentials for guiding new knowledge production. That commitment to design and the social sciences lay claim to the “material” signals a professional politics within the field that may deserve explicit attention. At a minimum, the recognition of these differences begs questions like, why are differing epistemic commitments moving, in tandem, through a material turn?, and what kind(s) of knowledge is/are produced through the material lens? In other words, where are we going?
like automobiles, running shoes, refrigerators, watches, notebooks, and water bottles have been developed; information has never appeared in such a diversity of forms. Computers have undeniably changed. The material turn constitutes a stream of research navigating these changes and even aiming to direct their flow. As such, this stream inherits an intellectual legacy from within HCI that has been calling into question the status of representation for more than a quarter century. For decades, the dominant interaction paradigm between people and computers consisted of the windows-icon-mouse-pointer (WIMP) ensemble, represented through the graphical user interface (GUI). Computers came in boxes and they all looked just the same.1 Thus, surface representations of information architectures rather than physical forms of the machine received an overwhelming amount of attention and concern. By the 1990s, however, a set of influential critiques began calling into question the centrality of the GUI. “Ubiquitous computing”, a technical vision of “the disappearing computer” developed at Xerox PARC and articulated most famously by Mark Weiser, pushed back against the “personal computing” paradigm. Weiser argued that the very success of personal computing only underscored its paradigmatic flaw: ““more than 50 million personal computers have been sold, nonetheless the computer remains largely in a world of its own” [50]. The approach would never allow computers to become “an integral, invisible part of the way people live their lives”, which he regarded as “the real potential of information technology” [50]. In the late 1990s, the Tangible Media Group at the MIT Media Lab began developing systems that integrated computational resources with the physical world. They made the digital graspable, and the world the interface [20]. These “tangible interactions” were stark reminders that humans are physical beings that live in a physical world. They demonstrated the potential of drawing information into that embodied relationship rather than ceding tacit knowledge to the demands of abstract symbols on an interface. Concurrently, a movement was underway at sites like Xerox Research Center Europe to draw the body back into the interaction loop. “Embodied interaction”, articulated prominently by Paul Dourish, drew upon both phenomenological (philosophical) and ethnomethodological (anthropological) resources to push back on the long-standing alliance between computer science and cognitive science. By locating the body as a key site for meaning, this strand of research pushed interaction designers to abandon abstract mental models in favor of pragmatic engagements with objects in use [10].2 By 2012, ubiquitous computing had arrived [1], tangible computing was a dominant area for interaction design research, and a whole range of products had been developed to bring information into embodied interactions within the social world. In other words, we are living in a post-representational era of HCI. The material turn carries forward this legacy of critique. It does so, however, in ways that requires scrutiny because contradictions and complications are beginning to emerge. While an insistence that representations were simply too thin to describe the richness of interactions in the world was quite valid, we now risk over-privileging the authenticity of the non-computational world. At times, materiality seems to give license to a fetishization of atoms over bits, as though somehow they are more “real”. The result has
3. The computer is dead: the material turn as critique It is no coincidence that the material turn corresponds to a moment when computers are undergoing such radical transformations in their material reliance. Data is everywhere and accessible from every device; information has never seemed so free. At the same time, a whole range of computationally-enhanced everyday objects
1 For a design history on the ubiquity of the gray box see Atkinson, P. (2000). The (In)Difference engine: explaining the disappearance of diversity in the design of the personal computer. Journal of Design History, 13 (1), 59–72. 2 We acknowledge that our cursory narration participates in a “great man” history, all too common in technical domains. Unfortunately, the scholarly work that complicates and nuances such accounts is still largely undone.
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been those versions of material orientation that wax poetic about the qualities of cloth, paper, glue, and the handmade. Ironically, these ecstatic raptures over the non-digital only mirror the logics of 1980s fantasies about the disembodied and immaterial bliss of coding and the virtual that characterized descriptions of “console cowboys” and “jacking in” [16,47]. Moreover, the move to re-classify the computer as material transfers the critique of representation to the metaphysical terrain. If the rationale for turning from representation to form is that information is material after all then we may ultimately be on unstable ground. After all, computers have already transformed in fundamental ways many times in the past hundred years and with quantum computing on the horizon, this trend is sure to continue. Ultimately, debating the ontology of computers might raise interesting philosophical questions – is computing bound to or freed from physical instantiation as a precondition of its existence? – but it leaves us in a philosophical lurch. The ontic status of the machine tells us very little about what computers do in relation to humans.3 It distracts us from key questions about interaction and design. Turning to the materials also risks abandoning some of the intellectual gains made through earlier critiques of representation. Our community is undeniably generating new digital–physical objects and substrates at an impressive rate. However, we have been less attentive to the ways in which these material explorations implicate core concepts in the field. The aim of a critique of representation was never about the particularities of a technological approach. Thus we should be wary of aims to establish a world filled with dynamic substrates, or “radical atoms”. Rather than concern ourselves with “smart materials”, perhaps we should recall that the really compelling aspects of earlier critiques were that they promised that by reshaping computers we were reshaping practices, contexts, behaviors, and experiences of the world. The central problematic was never the machine. It was always about the status of interaction.
4. Long live interaction – three aims for HCI In 1960 Licklider [26] published a paper entitled “Man-Computer Symbiosis” that proposed a curiously organic vision for the future of computing: The fig tree is pollinated only by the insect Blastophaga grossorun. The larva of the insect lives in the ovary of the fig tree, and there it gets its food. The tree and the insect are thus heavily interdependent: the tree cannot reproduce wit bout the insect; the insect cannot eat wit bout the tree; together, they constitute not only a viable but a productive and thriving partnership. This cooperative “living together in intimate association, or even close union, of two dissimilar organisms” is called symbiosis.” With human and machine cast as “dissimilar organisms” in “intimate association”, knowledge work became a problem of ecology and computing became a symbiotic task. The goal was neither the technical capacity of the human or machine, but rather a way of bringing both into tight cycles of real-time interaction with the belief that their differences might be so complementary as to make them inseparable partners in the production of new knowledge. Licklider’s vision of “man-computer symbiosis” was an influential statement of the computing vision and his model of entanglement
3 The “Computers as Social Actors” paradigm has demonstrated that the ontology of the machine has little, if anything, to do with the relationship between computer and user. Rather, it is the social cues transmitted between them that determine their patterns of interaction, see Reeves, B., & Nass, C. (1996). The Media Equation: How People Treat Computers, Television, and New Media Like Real People and Places. CSLI.
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between human and machine has long echoed throughout the history of HCI. Today we worry less about whether people and computers are ontologically similar or dissimilar and more about whether computers and wood are ontologically similar or dissimilar. In either case, the solution seems very much the same. The metaphysics of computers matter far less than the “symbiosis” that we are striving to achieve. If the material turn has advanced the vision of human–computer symbiosis then it has done so by drawing our attention to just how diverse and rich the range of computational forms can be. Doing so grounds the longer standing critiques of representation. Together, they call into question any model of computing that narrowly constructs the relationship to the user through the graphical interface. Moreover, this movement has prompted closer regard and care for the specificity of form and implementation involved in the construction of any interaction loop. In so doing, however, it has called into question the centrality of the computer as the object of analysis. If the computer is not exceptional and if design is primarily concerned with form, then perhaps Dourish is right to claim that it is not about materials after all. I would like to propose that by stepping back to take stock, we as a research community can reconsider what is at stake in the material turn. Ultimately, the metaphysics of computers seems to matter far less than the materiality of interaction, or the unique interplay of engaged capabilities (whether human or non-human, digital or physical) that have long been the domain of HCI. Focusing on the materiality of interaction can provide a means of building on both the commitments to design and the social sciences. From this vantage, we as a research community might pursue three kinds of aims: the development of (1) unique form-giving practices, (2) artistic and research-driven accounts of interaction, and (3) systematic knowledge production. 4.1. Unique form-giving practices Both the development of new materials and the rise of alternative user interfaces aimed at computational expressivity signal the strong desire within HCI to develop unique form-giving practices. Traditionally, form-giving practices have developed in close conversation with the properties and qualities that limit and constrain a substrate – e.g. woodwork, plastic arts, painting, or ceramics. Over time, it is the negotiation with these substrates that drives a formal, aesthetic conversation within the community of practitioners and critics. For HCI practitioners, interaction has been a complex, seemingly intangible object. It has been subjected to formal conversations through terms like “user experience”, or “look and feel”. The more recent literalism inherent in treating the computer as material might seem to relieve the tensions associated with intangibility or low material constraint. However, I would like to suggest that there is already a form-giving practice unique to interaction design and thus relieving this tension is unnecessary. It is the act of combining computational and non-computational matters to serve particular interactional logics. Consider a simple example like a touch screen. The interaction is formed through the composition of understandings about the human – from the moisture level of our fingertips to what constitutes a “natural” hand gesture (that is, what is conventionally, symbolically, ergonomically, and anatomically possible to perform) and the technology. Whether the screen operates by tap, multi-touch, or gesture has less to do with the nature of the computer than with a keen sensibility for composing interaction loops. By strengthening our awareness that HCI already has unique formgiving practices, we can shed our anxieties about the ontological status of the computer. By focusing on how we give form to interactions we can move beyond the need for categorical distinctions between materials (physical vs. digital, analogue vs. digital, virtual vs. real, atoms vs. bits, and so on). Any material may potentially be part of an interaction loop. As we become more adept at imagining interaction, we will come
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to see the world as already filled with material preconditions for acts of computing to take place. One of my favorite mundane examples of this interaction-driven approach to form-giving is the Evernote/Moleskine notebook. At first glance, the object appears to be a traditional paper notebook. It contains no microprocessor, nor sensors, nor bits. The texture of its pages is perfectly recognizable to the note-taker, who need never change their writing process to accommodate a digital world. However, the notebook can be linked through mobile application to the online service Evernote. The pages can be photographed for digital archiving. Evernote software can perform some degree of optical character recognition on the handwritten pages. Small stickers can be affixed to passages to designate tags for later sorting and searching. Even the bright green string that serves as a place-marker serves double duty. It signals to the camera whether or not to capture images in portrait or landscape orientation (see Fig. 1). The notebook is always already interactable. It gives form to traditional note-taking practices and scaffolds these practices through the potential for digital archiving. The designers have incorporated the materialities of interaction already present in the long cultural tradition of writing. They have simultaneously reframed this tradition as the material preconditions for a symbiotic relationship between man and machine. Yet this notebook needs no computational power at all. As interaction designers we could perform the same sort of trick with any number of non-computational substrates or objects – the molecular state of water in a lake, leaves falling from trees on an autumn day in New York City, or books neatly filed on the shelves of an industrious academic. This perspective may differ rather sharply from proposals to build “radical atoms” [21] or “electric materialities” [34,35]. There is no insistence on developing speculative materials that are dynamic or computational. CPUs, memory, power supplies, and networks are not the core concerns. Rather, just about anything, at any scale, is a potential material that becomes “interactable” depending on how it is arranged.
4.2. Artistic, research-driven accounts Returning to interaction through a material lens comes with a set of methodological implications for pushing the field forward. The strong interest in artistic and craft-based approaches to design makes evident that researchers are extremely motivated to find methods for working with the computer in new ways. By focusing on the materiality of interaction I would suggest that we can interrogate the assumptions about what, precisely, can be brought into interaction across a range of material conditions, aesthetic regimes, and historical contexts. It may be productive to turn to methods like the “cultural probe” as inspiration. Probes have been extremely successful means of repurposing objects to study culture. They are highly suggestive of the potential involved in repurposing materials to learn about forms of interaction. Material probes might be more closely related to “critical design” [2] than to “computational composites” [48]. The aim would be to use design as a means of interrogating, problematizing, and generating alternative formulations for the material conditions under which we presume interaction might take place. We might envision a whole new set of subfields and modes of expertise prepared to give accounts of the social world that we have not yet seen. Interaction historians might help us understand how, precisely, computing became a thinkable technology for re-framing military action and how it then became a necessary part of certain kinds of work and how, yet again, the materiality of interaction generated new models of play and leisure. Interaction archaeologists may revisit old technological arrangements to tell us that some were computers after all, and others, which we believed to be so, were not. So too, critical interactionists might reveal to us the politics in our contemporary imagination about what parts of the social world are available to computing and which might never be.
Fig. 1. Evernote/Moleskine notebook.
4.3. Systematic knowledge production Finally, the materiality of interaction provides a focus for conceptualizing HCI, as a field, in new ways. Rather than focusing on materials as a way of rejecting theoretical distance – an approach that risks generating prototypes but not concepts – I suggest that we can take our interest in materiality as a theoretical maneuver, a way of using computing to do philosophy and social theory. In 1936 Alan Turing wrote a classic paper on the computable real numbers. It marked an epistemological break between idealism and materialism in mathematics. Prior to Turing it was hard to get away from the idea that through mathematical reason, the human mind gained access to a higher domain of Platonic truths. Turing’s first proposal for a universal computing machine is based on an implicit rejection of this view. Turing turned to the materials to understand something seemingly immaterial, mathematics. Making this shift to the materials truths of arithmetic implied predictions about the behavior of actual physical calculating systems. In short, a focus on material matters helped move mathematics forward intellectually. I suggest that a similar maneuver might be possible by re-examining interaction through a material lens. We can benefit from a similar closeness to the materials as we strive to generate new knowledge in our field and I see opportunities for how this can play out on multiple levels. The turn to materiality can be a return to interaction. This return to interaction can both unify multiple streams of research currently underway and can draw these streams into longer-term conversation with fundamental concerns that have helped give rise to HCI as a distinctive endeavor. Our field has long argued that we are transdisciplinary in approach. Our work stretches from the hard sciences of engineering and physics to the social sciences, and increasingly to the humanities. We do this from necessity. To both analyze and intervene in interaction loops requires that methods, concepts, and analytical frameworks from multiple disciplines be brought into conversation. We are a community of analysts and practitioners, formalists and functionalists, humanists, social scientists, designers and engineers. This said, what saves the field from being an eclectic hodge-podge of borrowed works is that we have traditionally centered upon neither the human nor the computer but rather the highly specific material entanglement that arises in-between. Our expertise is interaction, the tight turn-taking practices that bind humans and machines. While HCI needs transdisciplinary concerns it must also take care to generate strong original concepts that can be contributed to theorizing in HCI and interaction design research and to other domains. For a
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more in-depth discussion on how we can work with strong-concepts and concept-driven approaches to interaction design research see: [19] and [44]. Focusing on the status of interaction, even as we execute a material turn, allows us to maintain such unique conceptual contributions. That way, even if the physical manifestations of computing transform many times we will endure and even advance our inquiry. In the process of writing this paper it occurred to me that perhaps it is time to open a new section of HCI or interaction design research. In an effort to recognize the range of epistemic commitments and disciplinary backgrounds unified in the interrogation of the concept of interaction, perhaps it is time to add a section on the History and Philosophy of Computer Human Interaction. In the same way as Turinǵs philosophy of computing in the 30s helped re-shaping the practical approach to the very same material we see opportunities in accepting that theory is indeed part of practice and we should set aside space for concerted debate. There may be opportunities to give rise of interaction historians alongside interaction designers. Perhaps we as a research community should ask ourselves if HCI is the place that can shelter such a nascent vision and make space for its shaping as a new mode of profession in the coming years? If the material turn did not happen in 2010, but in fact culminated at this time in the history of HCI its historical traces are important to understand to move forward in an informed manner. Already the capacities of this new perspective are apparent, in the ways that people attend to traditional crafts in order to divine new inspirations for a digital age but what I am advocating here needs no separation, rather simply a tracing of connections that were always already there.
5. Conclusion In this paper I have stepped back from the material turn to recognize six interlinked approaches to research and design. In doing so I have suggested that the diversity apparent within these approaches demonstrated a further need to understand the goals and potential contradictions within the material turn. By situating these approaches as part of a longer critique of representation within HCI, I have positioned the turn as a grounded means of rejecting models of computing that rely strictly upon abstract symbols and depictions via the interface. However, I also cautioned that in taking up a critique of representation, scholars and designers that participate in the material turn have also tended to become bound up in metaphysical debates about the ontological status of the machine, or to privilege the status of non-computational materials as somehow more authentic, or real.
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By pushing back on the centrality of the computer within these conversations, I then proposed that the real matter at hand within the material turn is an acknowledgment that computing has radically changed forms and will continue to do so. From this vantage, the most stable perspective is to focus on the concept of interaction. Doing so will allow the material turn to become a resource for specific investigations into the cultural, aesthetic, and technological conditions whereby we presume objects and people to entangle through interaction loops. In relation to this special issue on emerging material experiences I view this focus on interaction as a key component for understanding the relation between emerging materials and materials technologies and how these materials will shape our daily experiences with products around us. In particular, and in relation to this special issue I have in this paper pinpointed at least three ways that HCI might benefit from concerted attention to the materiality of interaction. It would allow us to focus on the field’s capacity to contribute unique form-giving practices to the arts. It would foster the development of artistic, research driven accounts (which may give rise to whole new professional subfields). And finally, the materiality of interaction may help drive 3) systematic knowledge production within our field. Accordingly, and as illustrated in Fig. 2 I have in this paper illustrated six different approaches taken in our field to “the material turn”. Based on these different accounts and approaches I have then suggested that a “turn to interaction”, away from the computer in its traditional form (“the box”) and towards a deeper understanding of how interaction (re-imagined in relation to new materials and combinations of analogue and digital materials) might not just enable new experiences of computational power, but might also enable HCI to move forward as a unique form-giving practice, as a foundation for artistic and research driven accounts to interaction design, and how a focus on interaction will allow for long-term systematic knowledge production in our field (no matter in which form computing is realized). In wrapping up this paper I think that it is important to acknowledge that smart materials are constantly being invented. There are infinite ways to combine the digital and physical, the “atoms” and the “bits”. In the next few years we will see computing in many new forms. Buzzwords such as the development of the Internet of Things is just one indication of this trend. While these computational combinations certainly bring new opportunities to design, in the long term, creating new knowledge about the materiality of interaction may be what matters most. To understand emerging material experiences we most understand what interaction with and through these materials is about. Imagine, if you will, what it would mean for our field to trace its intellectual history to the most foundational academic projects within the liberal arts. As Romans considered quadrivium, or the study of matter, basic preparatory work for the serious study of philosophy, we too might see the close attention to computation as a way to think about eternal questions of nature and the social world. The difference might be that we prepare our scholars and practitioners to intervene in philosophy in order to imagine and then arrange new material conditions, interactions with these material compositions, and experiences of these configurations in the world. In the words of Tom Robbins, “To achieve the impossible, it is precisely the unthinkable that must be thought”. The computer is dead. Long live interaction! Acknowledgments I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and the chairs for this special issue for their constructive feedback and comments on earlier versions of this paper. References
Fig. 2. Moving from the material turn to the materiality of interaction.
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