Thesis Proposal: James Pierce
When
-
Where
GHC 4405
Description
THESIS PROPOSAL
The Design of Enabling Limitations: Studies in Interactive Absence, Restriction and Negation
James Pierce
COMMITTEE
Eric Paulos (Chair), HCI Institute
Jodi Forlizzi (Member), HCI Institute
Chris Harrison (Member), HCI Institute
Phoebe Sengers (External Member), Information Science, Cornell University
DOCUMENTS
http://jamesjpierce.com/publications/pierce%20-%20enabling%20limitation…
ABSTRACT
Designing any technology requires working within constraints. Rather than something to be resolved by design, however, constraints can also be conceptualized as positive, enabling features. Going a step further, constraints can be inverted to form the basis for new types of products and experiences.
In recent years, the HCI community has begun to acknowledge that digital technologies may be implicated in morally ambiguous or even harmful social, cultural and material conditions. Two key areas of concern that have been raised within the HCI community are environmental sustainability and pace of life issues. Concerns with overload, distraction, boredom and privacy are just a sample of the many other issues being raised in HCI and adjacent areas that suggest the importance of designing more limited and more limiting technologies. Using the communicative language and material interaction of design and objects, critical and speculative design works have confronted a range of related issues. Yet there is currently no overarching conceptual framework in place for designing enabling limitations and analyzing them theoretically.
This thesis proposes two primary contributions. First, it presents “enabling limitations” as a conceptual focus for HCI and Design. This concept is proposed as both a lens for interpreting design artifacts and for designing new ones. As a conceptual lens, enabling limitations presents a view in which all technologies can be understood to function via a normatively neutral structure of enablement/disablement or limitation/possibility. As a conceptual design space and approach, thinking in terms of enabling limitation encourages and facilitates designerly exploration of new digital possibilities that are counterintuitively based on digital limitations.
The second contribution will be to present a collection of design artifacts that engage with and help to articulate the concept of enabling limitations. These artifacts and studies present new knowledge of how limitations can enable new interaction, experiences and practices in different contexts and to different ends. These individual design studies will articulate more specific knowledge relevant to particular application domains pertinent to HCI and Design, including sustainable consumption, home energy monitoring, critical design, busyness and overwork, consumer electronics and experience design.
The third underlying contribution of this dissertation is methodological in nature. It involves verbally articulating the roles of design artifacts in relation to knowledge production and research practice in HCI. To do this, I will take a step back and reflect on how the HCI and Design research communities are presenting and producing design artifacts. This will include reflecting on my own dissertation work and the interplay between the two contributions outlined previously—that is, the interplay between broader conceptual discourses and particular design artifacts.