Mapping Histories to Locate Design.
This studio for postgraduate students at Srishti Institute of Art, Design, & Technology asks: How has the design of digital technological systems evolved to consider and create the ‘human’?
Bill Buxton, playing off the ‘long-tail of innovation’, talks about the ‘long nose of innovation’ to highlight how most digital technological ideas take about 20 years of ‘below-the-radar’ research and development before becoming mainstream. Buxton argues for the importance of history in interaction design education and practice.
Inspired by the brilliant Buxton Collection, and his stance on the history of interaction design, I formulated this course to enable students to visually map how specific digital artefacts have evolved below-the-radar in R&D labs, much before they became mainstream ideas or products. However, previously we stuck to mapping just the artefact and its technological evolution, rather than explore the contexts within which these artefacts were imagined and the politics around such imagination.
Lucy Suchman, talks about the importance of questioning who gets to innovate, and what contexts enable ‘innovation’. What gets termed as ‘centres’ of innovation and what is left as periphery is a question of who has the privilege to imagine and innovate.
A student summarised on the first day of this studio,
“Those who (have the privilege to) create, get to name it”.
A name then decides what role that technology should play; a key understanding one encounters when going through Buxton’s collection. A ‘mouse’, a ‘lap-top’,a ‘smart’-phone. They were imagined and named by particular people under very specific circumstances and the names and what they are supposed to mean continues to shape the way we engage and use them across the world.
Lucy Suchman in her book Human-Machine Reconfigurations, writes,
In the case of the human, the prevailing figuration in Euro-American imaginaries is one of autonomous, rational agency, and projects of artificial intelligence reiterate that culturally specific imaginary. At stake, then, is the question of what other possible conceptions of humanness there might be, and how those might challenge current regimes of research and development in the sciences of the artificial, in which specifically located individuals conceive technologies made in their own image, while figuring the latter as universal.
It is important then to the cause of decolonizing design and technology to foreground different conceptions of humanness. So as to embrace them in design of digital technology that is non-monolithic and hegemonic. However, I believe one way to begin doing so is to unpack and make visible the conception of human that the ‘mainstream’ and trending technological ideas and artefacts hold and perpetuate.
In this studio we map histories of technological artefacts as a way to unpack the contexts of their design as well as the assumptions they render about human ‘users’. What sort of humanness the designers imagined when imagining the artefact?
How to read this publication?
The publication is structured in three stages, each one documenting the three assignments of the 10-day studio (spread over 12 weeks).
The first assignment explores how does human -computer interaction and relations figure in our regional literature, both fiction and non-fiction. Working in pairs the students find and analyse texts in their regional languages, and present their analysis along the following two lines:
- How are humans, computing tech, and their relationship conceptualised and talked about?
- Speculate on the role of the regional language in shaping this conceptualisation.
The second assignment is a visual history of a particular technological artefact that a student group has chosen. The visual history maps not only the evolution of the artefact, but also the context within which it was imagined and designed. Through sourcing any publicly available written material — such as use case scenarios from tech.magazines, patent documents, research papers, etc —the maps are followed by a short commentary about the human-users the designers conceptualise in the design of the artefact.
Final assignment is an individual position paper. It elaborates on the implications of locating design through visual histories of technological artefacts on the student’s emerging design practice.
