Animistic design: how to reimagine digital interaction between the human and the nonhuman

Abstract

This article puts forward the notion of animistic design as an uncertainty-driven strategy to reimagine human–machine interaction as a milieu of human and nonhuman. Animistic design is suggested as capable of fostering affects, sensibilities and thoughts that capitalize on the uncertain, the unpredictable and the nonlinear, and their capacity to trigger creative pathways. Informed by post-human philosophies, theories of mediation and materiality, as well as by affect, agency and aesthesia, animistic design eschews the anthropomorphic and the cute playfulness often associated with animism. Instead, it proposes a practical–theoretical framework to articulate the nexus of digital innovation, interaction design practices, technical materialities and affective responses already emerging in the digital cohabitation of the human and the nonhuman. Using a ‘research through making’ approach, the article describes in detail a series of animistic design experiments and prototyping methods that explore ways of rethinking interaction as an open-ended and creative enterprise. Animistic design offers an investigative strategy that exploits degrees of collaboratively curated uncertainty and unpredictability to imagine forms of digital interaction, and to engender creative human–nonhuman relationships within a given digital milieu

Browsing with Alexa: Interrogating the impact of voice assistants as web interfaces

“…social vs task oriented) informs the effectiveness of the retrieval of resources and functions from the Web (Chattaraman et al, 2019). Consequently, designers have proposed practical solutions to instil distinctive personality into software and hardware objects as a way to stimulate particular forms of engagements in users (Marenko and Van Allen, 2016) and have pointed to the impact of anthropomorphic features in orienting users' perception and affect (Araujo, 2018;Caudwell and Lacey, 2019).…”

Robot Citizenship: A Design Perspective

“…Discussing robot citizenship, therefore, invites designers to approach the design of HRI from considerations of the community, its values and shared goals, instead of from the individual robot's functional capabilities. Through this conceptual shift, considering robot citizenship may not only contribute to the ongoing discussion about meaningful future partnerships between humans and computational artefacts [29][30][31][32][33], but also contribute to a more holistic view of HRI.…”

“…instead of looking only at what individual entities are 'good at', we suggest considering what they are not good at. As Marenko and van Allen [31] argue, most current approaches to interaction design tend to be task-oriented and efficiency-driven, and therefore tend to produce specific narratives about devices as consistently behaving entities towards which people often build inappropriate expectations. By recognizing limits and coming to terms with unpredictability, and by suggesting narratives of "dumb-smart" [34] entities, designers can free themselves from the idea of designing for perfection and redirect their actions towards "ecologies of things that are mutually responsive and interdependent" [31].…”

Giving Form to Smart Objects: Exploring Intelligence as an Interaction Design Material

“…i.e., motions and behaviors that communicate intentions, emotions and attitudes (Siegman and Feldstein 2014). This allows designers to take advantage of people's ability to perceive inanimate objects as being expressive, comparable to, yet different from, humans and animals (Heider and Simmel 1944;Hoffman et al 2008;Hoffman and Ju 2014;Marenko and van Allen 2016). New design sensitivities and vocabularies are required to design for such perceptions.…”