Intent, Form, and Materiality in the Design of Interaction Technology

Abstract

In a recently published Swedish textbook on Interaction Design, Lšwgren and Stolterman have polemically suggested seeing information technology as the material without qualities [Lšwgren & Stolterman 1998]. They do this, with reference to the many attempts among software designers to come to grips with their design material [Winograd 1996]. But the suggestion is also paraphrasing the title of Robert Musils book ÒThe Man without QualitiesÓ [Musil 1995]. Musil writes his book in the 1920Õties in an attempt to capture modernity as the purified intentionality, in which structure and form have evaporated. The mirroring of information technology and its embedding in a design discourse of intent and instrumentality in the emblematic image of the 20Õth century modern man is well spotted and far from coincidental. With this double anchoring of software design in a heritage of purified instrumentality and a strive for a workable notion of quality, the authors hit the tune to which much concern with an emerging new field of design is played. But taken literally the statement is misleading. Information technology (or rather, as I will argue by the end of this article: interaction technology) has as any other class of artifacts a ÔmaterialityÕ. This 2 ÔmaterialityÕ is not only shapeable, it is also only through the ÔobjectnessÕ of the artifact, that we as designers can hope to convey anything from setting to setting. Through my personal journey of design projects aiming at informing the skilled work of industrial technicians and operators, the issues of ÔmaterialityÕ and embodiment seem to emerge out of a simple and straight forward engagement with what it means to be informed. Having taken a starting point in participation and work practice it has become increasingly clear that what we can channel with information technology is not information with any assured resemblance to what the ÔrecieverÕ perceives. Rather it is cues and clues for a constructing-sense-of-the-world that is basically not unlike the design process itself [Reddy 1985]. I will argue that this implies an urgent need to escape a dominant utilitarian discourse of design which is centered on intent and instead engage in a more open-ended inquiry into what I will call the formation of artifacts. I will develop my argument in three steps following retrospectively my own movements in the field. First I will look at the fragile nature of the matrices in which we have been considering information technology. From my 3 …