You, Things, and the Space Between

Abstract

we bring to the forefront a body of knowledge that has to do with how to work, collaborate, explain, be present, resist, agree, dissent, progress, and grow in a given context. This is a body of knowledge that evolves over time and that is created each time the worker engages in the work in a new context. It is a unique body of knowledge that represents the transformation a practitioner experiences through their career. To offer a practical example and shift our discussion back to my initial question (What bodies of knowledge are created or experienced in the interstitial spaces between one’s life sphere and one’s career journey?), I’d like to focus on a role that senior practitioners often play: the mentor. Not dissimilar from what many of my colleagues shared with me, my conversations with mentees are typically more focused on how to work in a given context and less on what quality HCI or design looks like. While good design, quality HCI, and a vast array of hard skills can be described and studied, soft skills are often context-dependent and learned over time. Like parents and educators, mentors share with their mentees best practices, written tips, and anecdotes of their own transformations, and provide examples on how to overcome issues or latch onto opportunities. However, mentors also know that mentees will ultimately need to experience issues and opportunities directly—learned over time is indeed code for experienced directly. That direct experience is the by-product of one’s engagement with the work in a given context—it’s what happens when one is transformed by and through the work. I was and I continue to be available in response [1]. What bodies of knowledge are created or experienced in the interstitial spaces between one’s life sphere and one’s career journey? As HCI practitioners, do we simply design things, or does that act of making also shape us? What stands at the end of one’s making—the designed artifact or a redesigned self? Recently I found myself asking these questions more often than before, revisiting visceral moments in my life’s trajectory that show how my craft, as well as the context in which I was operating, have shaped me. Reflecting on my career, I realized how my craft has evolved thanks to my choices and how my understanding of the world (and my ways of operating in it) shifted thanks to my craft. Life feeds and shifts one’s craft, and one’s craft feeds and shifts one’s life—a fascinating example of interrelatedness that we all experience daily. As an Italian who migrated to Australia in the late 1990s and then to the U.S. in the mid-2000s, it is hard to imagine that those life changes did not affect the practitioner in me as much as the migrant. I doubt that my understanding of design and of my craft would be the same if I had decided to stay in my home country. Similarly, as a woman who has operated for the past 20 years in male-dominated workspaces, it is hard to imagine that what I gleaned over time as a practitioner was solely focused on human-computer interaction—and equally hard to imagine that my own craft and sense of self were not influenced in return. Designers and researchers have ongoing opportunities to create relationships and participate with the focus of their design and research endeavors, and frequently do so in visceral, personal, life-changing ways—challenging the world and themselves in return. Each time we embark on a new project, we immerse ourselves in it. This is often an intimate, physical, and emotional act, which results in two designed outcomes: a designed thing and a redesigned self. However, our engagement with the new project never occurs in a vacuum, as context plays a key role, heavily affecting both the resulting thing and self. The designer/researcher, the designed thing, and the context in which that relationship is established influence one another in exciting ways, and each is in turn transformed. The same type of interrelatedness appears to exist when we look at things in more abstract ways, for instance, focusing on worker, work, and workplace. In this case, the worker (designer/ researcher) engages in their work (design/research) within a given workplace (context); they create relationships and participate with their work in frequently visceral, personal, life-changing ways, challenging both the world (work and context) and themselves. Each time we start and then complete a project, we bring to the table far more than our disciplinary body of knowledge. What enables us to complete a project goes beyond