Dear friends, designers, thinkers; the user debate is biting its own tail. It was so already before we contributed to it, and I’m worried that it’s likely to go on fruitlessly so as long as it takes for granted a quite specific interpretation of atomism—the belief that the world is made of individuals with inherent characteristics and definite boundaries.
I’m tempted to propose that to be seriously committed to the user question, requires a pause, a willingness to question this worldview. What counts as a person? What might it mean to design not for preexisting, independent individuals with fixed boundaries but for partially known, locally enacted performances, out of which ‘individuals’ may temporarily materialize as relational effects?
How might a non-atomistic metaphysics be enacted in the mundane practices of design, amidst the very real pressures of for-profit mass production? How might one sustainably practice design, insisting that the division between people and machines and other nonhumans is not a stable, universal lawlike division, but a locally negotiated temporary cut? What would it mean to even ask such a thing? To risk it?
At the very least, it leads to following threads that weave their ways through locations quite ‘Other’ to the blogosphere. I want to point to Karen Barad‘s thinking on agential realism. Her article is here, password-protected as if to say: ‘for academics only.’ And I’d be surprised if non-academics would profit much from her cryptic writing even if it was technically accessible (but do note, her book is forthcoming). What’s it going to take to make a difference? Boring wormholes that traverse discourses? speaking allegorically? magical realism? I don’t know.
One of the reasons I post quite seldom is that it takes a while to articulate things; thoughts don’t ‘naturally’ come out in the weblog format. Perhaps it has to do with the shifting relational effect that is “me”, the blog author. Sometimes the effect is not singular but dispersed, diffracted, unstable: I contradict myself or worse, simultaneously enact multiple incommensurable bits of narratives that interfere with each other. What comes out simply isn’t a coherent story.
Blogs, like email addresses, assumedly stand for an individual person. Sometimes they stand for a group of people or an organization, like the Aula POV (sort of) stands for Aula. Much of the configuration work that is required to maintain this setup gets erased in the name of coherency: colleagues, friends, partners, and also machines and other nonhumans contribute to these messages and posts, sometimes even act as stunt doubles and ghostwriters. But more often than not these shifting configurations don’t produce anything postable. I’m looking for ways to practice greater sensitivity to the effacing that’s going on. Perhaps then I’d post more often :)
A few weeks ago I went to hear Donna Haraway speak about the yet-unpublished Companion Species Manifesto at Lancaster. Here’s a video clip (not from that lecture) where she talks about the way we as humans construct ourselves in relation to, and along with, non-humans. In her words, “The kind of sociality that joins humans and machines is a sociality that constitutes both (…) Who humans are ontologically is constituted out of that relationality. (…) There is not some pre-existing anthropomorphic point of view from which vision proceeds to the world (…) Interactions between humans and machines have produced both. It is not humans that produce machines in some unilateral way. The arrow does not move one way, even in the areas of direct human invention.”