In this paper, we argue for framing the crafting and studying of research products as doing philosophy through things. We do this by creating an annotated portfolio of such Research through Design (RtD) artifact inquiries as postphenomenological inquiries. In our annotated portfolio, we first provide an account of the postphenomenological commitments of 1) taking empirical work as the basis of the inquiry, 2) analyzing structures of human-technology relations and 3) studying technological mediation. Secondly, we trace these commitments across six RtD artifact inquiries. We conclude with a discussion on how research products can be seen as an experimental way of doing postphenomenology and how HCI design researchers can work with that. As a result, the presented philosophical framing can be leveraged in HCI research to form a deeper and more dimensional understanding of the human-technology relations we craft and study. This also adds a methodological path to moving beyond foci of use, utility, interaction, and human-centeredness.
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Applying a thing-centered, material speculation approach we designed the Morse Things to acknowledge and inquire into the gap between things and us. The Morse Things are sets of ceramic bowls and cups networked together to independently communicate through Morse code in an Internet of Things (IoT). We deployed the Morse Things in the households of six interaction design practitioners and researchers for six weeks. Following the deployment, we conducted a workshop to discuss the role of the Morse Things and ultimately the gap between things and people. We reflect on the nature of living with IoT things and discuss insights into the gap between things and humans that led to the idea of a new type of thing in the home that is neither human-centered technology nor non-digital artifacts.
In this paper we present Videos of Things: videos that portray the mediated, lived world of computational artifacts informed by postphenomenology. In a postphenomenological understanding, things and us are interdependent in that they mutually shape each other. And as a whole, technology or designed things mediate the relations between our world and us. This can be a challenge for designers. Through the making of design videos, we explored narrative strategies for creating stories featuring technological mediation. These include humanness, patterns in time, and non-human ensembles. We reflect on how the videos at different stages of the design process have helped to a) speculate on technological mediated relationships, b) synthesize and reflect on qualitative data on technological mediation and c) anticipate technological mediation. The paper contributes different narrative strategies for design videos and the role these videos can play within a design process aimed at elaborating the mediated qualities of technologies.
Morse Things are Internet connected ceramic cups and bowls that communicate with each other in Morse Code. This ongoing research iteratively asks thing-centered questions of things and technology. A premise of the Morse Things is that any understanding of a thing or technology is unstable and arguably fragile. In this pictorial, we reflect on how we as researchers, in the course of doing research with the Morse Things, unexpectedly found ourselves literally entangled in the conceptual and physical fragility of the research. This pictorial describes our growing awareness of this instability, beginning with a kintsugi repair of a broken Morse Thing, our false confidence in our package design for shipping, and the difficulties to conceptualize the machine learning world that we ourselves created. We reflect on these experiences, and now see these as reminders of the inevitable fragility and instability of research on thing-perspectives.
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