Keynotes Speaker

Tim Ingold’s notion of ‘meshworks’ has been highly influential across disciplines with a focus on material culture. It is one of many contemporary posthumanist theories of ‘assembling’ that direct our attention to both human and non-human agents and the fluid and dynamic relationships that form, endure, or disappear between them. Such theories include Assemblage Theory and Actor-Network Theory, and similar approaches that stress the entanglement within “things” that results over time from everyday interactions between people, places, and non-humans.

There are important differences between these theories and approaches, however. For Ingold, some fail “to answer the question of how … entities [i.e., people, places or non-humans] … actually fasten to each other”. This is also true of Human-Centred Design process models such as ISO9241-210, with its development phases and their co-products such as personas, applicable design guidance, low-fidelity prototypes, and usability-test reports. These co-products were added with other examples in the 2019 revision of this ISO standard. However, there are no documented methods that systematically transform a phase’s inputs into its outputs. For example, we know that a usability-test report will result from user testing of a low-fidelity prototype, but the test study’s design will draw on a range of project inputs and professional knowledge and experience. There is no way that a prototype and associated scenarios of use alone can be systematically translated into a usability-test report. Test study design is a creative knowledge-based practice. Implementing tests requires fine tuning and adaptation in response to the unexpected (which will happen). For both the design and implementation of user testing, fluid dynamic relationships form, endure, or fade between a project’s co-products and other vital resources such as the project team’s professional knowledge and expertise, human test participants, and the physical test set up and its instrumentation.

We need to pay explicit attention in Interaction Design to how connections are made between available resources that pre-exist or are created within development projects. Design work can be framed as forming a mesh of connections between a project’s resources. Good design avoids waste by forming effective explicit connections between resources. Each connection can be thought of as a hypothesis that may or may not emerge in usage. Human interactions with computers and the resulting user experiences are also meshworks in Ingold’s sense (HCI theories also frame these as fluid assemblages or entanglements). Successful design work results in worthwhile meshworks in use. 

In this talk I will show how concurrent progressions in Interaction Design can support modes of connection between resources within and across design arenas. Modes span a continuum from implicit to explicit to accommodate a range of creative, rational and hybrid practices. Concurrent design arenas replace linear development phases, but with similar content to such phases, e.g., those in ISO 9241-210. Rather than hoping to translate phase inputs to outputs in some scheduled systematic fashion, connections between two or more design arenas can be formed and reformed whenever resources make this possible and worthwhile. Longstanding HCI problems with connections, such as the Implications for Design of contextual research and the Downstream Utility of evaluation can be better addressed within concurrent progressions that continuously integrate through work that forms meshes across design arenas.