"Beautiful Seams"

Abstract

This paper tracks a debate that occurred, first, within the field of Ubiquitous Computing but quickly spread to CHI and beyond, in which design scholars argued that seamlessness had long been an implicit and privileged design virtue, often at the expense of seamfulness. Seamless design emphasizes clarity, simplicity, ease of use, and consistency to facilitate technological interaction. Seamful design emphasizes configurability, user appropriation, and revelation of complexity, ambiguity or inconsistency. Here we review these literatures together and argue that, rather than rival approaches, seamful and seamless design are complements, each emphasizing different aspects of downstream user agency. Ultimately, we situate this debate within the larger, perennial discussion about the strategic revelation and concealment of human and technological operations and therein the role of design. CCS CONCEPTS • Human-centered computing → HCI theory, concepts and models.

Infrastructural Speculations: Tactics for Designing and Interrogating Lifeworlds

“…In conversation with "seamless" visions of ubiquitous technology [100] might focus on the "seams" of infrastructures [17,23,42]. Rather than envisioning a world in which technologies' operations are hidden away, a seamful lens draws attention to its limits (in functionality, interoperability, or infrastructural reach), asking users and other stakeholders to engage with systems at these points of visibility and asking developers to recognize them as opportunities for design.…”

Towards a seamful ethics of Covid-19 contact tracing apps?

“…It is of course important to acknowledge the affordances of approaches that go beyond the technical and ethical limitations of Bluetooth and GPS discussed in the previous section. However, we contend that by emphasizing the efficiencies for implementation and the possible behavioral and informational shortcomings that QR code-based systems present, QR infrastructures are measured against an implicit standard of seamlessness, which has historically devalued more seamful approaches (Inman and Ribes 2019). In an effort to move past evaluations which are biased toward seamlessness, our aim in this section is thus to resituate QR codes as an instance of 'seamful design,' which we contrast with the more 'seamless' Bluetooth and GPS-based systems discussed in the previous section.…”

“…In our view, this funneling of concern and critique risks overlooking the equally consequential work of designing mobile health technologies. Drawing on the discourses of seamlessness and seamfulness (Inman and Ribes 2019), our aim has been to provide a more granular account for the designerly normativities that developers embed in their contact tracing tools, and the socio-material means by which these apps reveal particular ethical-political seams.…”

Intersecting Imaginaries

“…Indeed, the success of autonomous technology is often measured in terms of augmenting what humans already do [112]. In this paper, I define "autonomous systems" as systems that are designed such that some decisions are delegated to technology, which is often, but not always, designed to appear "seamless" [58]. Note: I am not arguing that autonomous technology does not have "humans-in-the-loop" or that AI is never designed to simply assist human decision-making, but rather that the purpose of such technology is often to appear seamless.…”