Designing for Coping

Abstract

Being in the world is to flow with the currents of life, of change and contingency. We perceive what is relevant to our situation and appropriately respond to attain a more desirable state. This basic phenomenon of coping plays out continuously at multiple scales of our activity and has been argued as the fundamental way in which we engage with the world. Coping skilfully is to be able to perceive and act in a nuanced manner, attuned to the situation and able to act smoothly and with minimal conscious effort. If coping underpins activity, what are the implications for interaction design, which involves the design of activity? This article explores this question, showing how coping provides a novel perspective on the core phenomena of interaction design. We suggest a framework, consisting of four lenses, for situating the concerns of coping in interaction design: malleability, direct manipulability, meta manipulability and social manipulability. In our discussion we argue why coping is novel and relevant for interaction design, and how it expands upon existing perspectives on situated, resourceful action and challenges notion of rich action and coupling. Research HighlightsThis paper is intended for scholars of interaction design and humancomputer interaction. It is not a practical or empirical contribution meant to provide a ready route for solving design problems. Rather, it is a set of 'glasses' providing a novel perspective on the how we engage with artifacts in our everyday activity and what this might mean for their design. The contributions are 1) introducing a specific philosophical notion which has received only marginal attention in our field; 2) a framework to ground this notion in the design of interactive artifacts; and 3) a critique of existing theory to show how coping offers new insight.