Strange familiarity : on the material turn in feminism and HCI
Anna Croon Fors · 2011
In this paper a tentative response to the request for new perspectives on research in human-computer interaction (HCI) is formulated (Bodker 2006, Rogers 2004; 2009, Stolterman & Croon Fors 2008). The response is based on the recent interest of feminism within the field of Human-Computer Interaction (Bardzell 2010, Casell 2002) in conjunction with the material turns in both HCI and Feminism. The purpose is to show how the idea of materiality can be grasped, theorized and explored within the field of HCI drawing on contemporary design research (Cross 2007) and feminist technoscience (Haraway 1997). As digitalization becomes embedded in most aspects of our lives HCI as a research discipline has made a material turn in its methods and scope. This turn is, among other things, motivated by movements in ubiquitous computing and the digital and the material blends into new computational composites (Greenfield 2006, Rogers 2009). The turn also acknowledges and explores how physical materials are becoming more dynamic and complex when infused with the digital. The paper departs from the designerly response to the increased need to compose new unities and wholes in the apparent contradictory and disperse intertwining of artifact-user relations in interaction (Bardzell 2009, Croon Fors 2006, Turner 2008). By employing a designerly approach in conjunction with feminist technoscience I make a case of strange familiarity as a sustainable design strategy supporting future explorations of unknown of digital designs. This strategy among other things scaffold our sense of digital materials as open, dynamic, multiperspectival and unfinalizable, rather than as an accidentally given feature of the world (Croon Fors 2006, Bell et al. 2005, Sengers & Gaver 2006).