week 14. designing for homo ludens, still

Gaver, design for homo ludens. still


1. p. 2


The real revolution is that
computing is leaving the confines of task-oriented, focused, rational work, and
joining us in our homes, on the street, at parties, on lonely mountaintops –
everywhere, in short, where we leave work behind to do the things we really
want to do.

2.

As computing has emerged
from the office and laboratory, it seems to have brought along values of the
workplace: concerns for clarity, efficiency and productivity; a preoccupation (全神貫注)
with finding solutions to problems. It is as if they mirror only the ethnographic
view that ordinary life requires work to achieve, and neglect the joyful, poetic,
and spiritually rewarding nature of the lives we might find.

3.

The idea of Homo Ludens – humans defined as playful creatures (Huizinga, J.,
1950) – is an antidote (解毒劑) to assumptions that technology should provide clear,
efficient solutions to practical problems.

4. p. 3

An aimless walk in the city centre, a moment of awe, a short-lived
obsession, a joke – all are defining and valuable facets of our humanity, as
worthy of respect as planning, logic or study.
...

Play goes well beyond
entertainment: it’s a serious business.


PLAY vs. GAMING

5.
GAMING:  

Taking sides, victory, and defeat, all irrelevant in
play, are the chief requisites of game. In play one is carefree; in a game one is
anxious about winning.
(Kaprow, 2003, p. 122)


PLAYING:

Play, of the sort that might provide a relief from our obsession with work, is
not the same as games or pre-programmed entertainment. Not only are these
forms of ‘play’ fundamentally goal-oriented, but in striving for a defined
outcome they impose rules about the right and wrong ways to go about things.

PLAY vs. ENTERTAINMENT
6. p. 4
ENTERTAINMENT:


Entertainments themselves are designed
with the same concern for efficiently and predictably producing a result – an
‘experience’ – as any online marketing site is for producing a sale.
...

On the contrary, it co-opts (將...選為新成員) play into the same singleminded, results-oriented, problem-fixated mindset that we have inherited
from the workplace.



PLAY:


In order to truly leave work behind, we need to embrace an open-ended, selfmotivated form of play. This is an engagement that has no fixed path or end,
but instead involves a wide-ranging conversation with the circumstances and
situations that give it rise.


7. p. 8

ludic design 較少談 value, 而較多 interaction concept


More recent examples of ludic design focus less on the novelty of the values
they support and more on exploring a different conception of interaction
itself. They let go of the idea of desirable goals or outcomes to the point that
one can say they aren’t ‘for’ anything at all. Instead, they create situations
that people can explore and interpret for a variety of reasons and from
diverse frames of reference. As goals are relinquished (放棄), so are notions of
problems to be solved or preferred courses of interaction to be encouraged.
Instead, designs are better thought of as offering resources to people to make
use of as they see fit.


8. p. 10
...we expected them to orient to the Tracker
around issues of noise and disruption. Instead, they engaged with it in many
different ways: as a window onto places they had been or wanted to go, as a
spur to wanderlust or an uneasy reminder of the environmental effects of air
travel, as a puzzle to be solved, an aesthetic object and an alternative to
television.
...

It simply created a situation that people could explore
conceptually, finding their own meanings and significances over time.


9. p. 11


They raise these issues, but
don’t provide answers. Instead, they offer avenues for people to experience
life from new perspectives, and to consider hypotheses about who we might be
or what we might care about. They hint at possibilities for technologies that
we could use in our everyday life, not to accomplish well-defined tasks, but to
expand in undefined directions.


IMPLY FOR METHODOLOGIES:

10.

First, scientific approaches to design need to be complemented by more
personal, idiosyncratic ones.
...

Instead, designers need to use their personal experiences as
sounding boards for the systems they create.


P. 12


At their most prosaic, Probe materials can resemble stylised
questionnaires (see Boehner et al.. 2007), but more uncompromising (不妥協的) versions
thwart (反對) easy interpretation, disrupting stereotyped roles and requiring active
sense-making both from researchers and the researched. The returns from
such materials are neither clear nor definitive, but they are evocative,


11.

Second, designing for Homo Ludens means allowing room for people to
appropriate technologies.


Playing involves pursuing one’s inner narratives in
safe situations, through projective interpretation and action. If computational
devices channel people’s activities and perceptions too closely, then people
have to live out somebody else’s story, not their own (c.f. Wejchert, 2001).




12.  詮釋的調適,  之策略:


We have explored two primary tactics for encouraging interpretative
appropriation.

The first, embodied by the Drift Table and Plane Tracker
described earlier, involves creating situations that suggest topics for
consideration based on the resources they provide, while standing back from
offering clear recommendations about how such situations should be
construed. (self-effacing, 自我消音)



a second strategy is to exaggerate the content and authority of
interpretations offered by systems. This may serve as a provocation for people
to assert their own understandings as a correction.



13. p. 14

Whether employing under- or over-statement, both these strategies rely on
ambiguity to encourage appropriation. The first says too little, obliging users
to fill in the rest, while the second says too much, compelling them to correct
it.
...

ambiguity gives space for
people to intermesh their own stories with those hinted at by technologies.

14.

When systems are designed to be ambiguous, avoiding clear interpretation
and normative paths of action, it is impossible in principle to predict how
people will engage with them. In a very real sense, such designs are completed
by their users. Sometimes this can be left as a thought experiment, as the
Alternatives proposals were, for instance when implementation is difficult or
the ideas too simple to warrant the effort. But usually it is more satisfactory to
deploy such designs as prototypes to witness their completion through use.

15.


Here again, the approach to studying designs in use benefits from a divergent,
personal approach rather than the convergent, objective one advocated by
traditional scientific perspectives.

After all, designs are not hypotheses to be
tested simply as true or false, successful or unsuccessful. They may be
approached at multiple levels, ranging from the aesthetic to the conceptual
and the personal to the cultural.




16. 愉悅先於理解:


Last, and most important, pleasure comes before understanding, and
engagement before clarity.

Designing for Homo Ludens requires a new focus
that seeks intrigue and delight at all levels of design, from the aesthetics of
form and interaction, to functionality, to conceptual implications at
psychological, social and cultural levels.
This implies that designers cannot
stand back, pronouncing as experts on situations they do not engage with
personally.Instead, they need to seek a kind of empathy
...

17.
設計不能只強化已知的愉悅, 必須提出新的.


For
technologies should not only reinforce pleasures that people know, but they
should suggest new ones as well. Designers cannot simply efface themselves
while seeking to fulfil people’s articulated desires.

...

理論只能有限度地使用


And this implies that theories, those attempts to
analyse and abstract from the messy complexity of lived experience, will have
limited purchase and provide limited support. In the end, designers
themselves need to be Homo Ludens. We need to recognise that we are playful
creatures, and that our work depends on our play.



18.

Now itseems we are over the brink and well into a transformation of research
methods, concepts, and practices: a ‘new paradigm’ (see Harrison et al., 2007)
for understanding technology. If we are lucky, this new paradigm won’t work –
it will play.

week 13. ambiguity as a resource for design

Ambiguity as a resource for design

1. P. 233

Ambiguity  of
information finds its source in the artefact itself, ambiguity
of context in the sociocultural discourses that are used to
interpret  it,  and  ambiguity  of relationship in  the
interpretative and evaluative stance of the individual.

2. Instead of regarding ambiguity as a problem, however, in
this paper we suggest that it can be seen as an opportunity.
Ambiguity can be frustrating, to be sure. But it can also be
intriguing,  mysterious,  and  delightful.

3.

But in the many emerging
applications for everyday life, we argue that ambiguity is a
resource that designers should neither ignore nor repress.

4.

Allowing  this  ambiguity  to  be  reflected  in
design has several advantages.
Most importantly, it allows
designers to engage users with issues without constraining
how they respond.
In addition, it allows the designer’s
point  of  view  to  be  expressed  while  enabling  users  of
different  sociocultural  backgrounds  to  find  their  own
interpretations.
Finally, ambiguity can make a virtue out
of  technical  limitations  by  providing  the  grounds  for
people’s interpretations to supplement them.


(1) Sloganbench + Imagebank
(2) Desert Rain
(3) The Pillow
(4) Home Health Monitor

5. p. 235


This
ambiguity ranges from the limited  ability  of  sensors  to
monitor  home  activities  to  the  relationship  between
measurable  variables  and  emotional  ones,  and  from  the
vague  language  used  by  most  horoscopes  to  the
juxtaposition  of  electronic  technology  with  culturally
suspect  ‘fortune-telling.’

6.

Most importantly, they highlight the fact that ambiguity is
a property of the interpretative relationship between people
and artefacts.  This  distinguishes  ambiguity  from  related
concepts  such  as  fuzziness  or  inconsistency:  these  are
attributes of things, whereas ambiguity is an attribute of
our  interpretation  of  them.


Things  themselves  are  not
inherently ambiguous.  They may  give  rise  to  multiple
interpretations depending on their  precision,  consistency,
and  accuracy  on  the  one  hand,  and  the  identity,
motivations, and expectations of an interpreter on the other.




7.

This interpretative relationship is the source of ambiguity’s
appeal:  by  thwarting (反對)  easy  interpretation,  ambiguous
situations require people to participate in making meaning.


TYPES OF AMBIGUITY
(1) Ambiguity of information
(2) Ambiguity of context
(3) Ambiguity of relationship

8. p. 237

In summary, the three kinds of ambiguity raise different
sorts  of  problem  and  ask  for  different  sorts  of
interpretation.  Ambiguity of information asks us to project
our  expectations  into  an  interpretation  of  incomplete
information.  Ambiguity of context requires an integration
of seemingly incompatible frames of reference.  Ambiguity
of  relationship,  finally,  evokes  a  projection  of  our
subjective experiences and attitudes onto new situations.

Enhancing ambiguity of information
(1) Use imprecise representations to emphasise uncertainty.

Imprecise  displays  such  as  these  are  often  described  as

‘ambient’,  but  they  are  ambiguous  as  well.  This

ambiguity, we believe, is crucial for  understanding  their

appeal:  they may be perceptually undemanding, but they

require users  to  fill  in  the  gaps  in  information  that  is

purposefully imprecise.  When successful, such interfaces

are  not  only  aesthetically  attractive,  but  conceptually

appealing as well.

 (2) Over-interpret data to encourage speculation.

The design equivalent of gross exaggeration (e.g.

“I’ve been working on this  paper  for  a  million  years”),

over-interpretation  is  best  used  to  draw  attention  to

possible truths rather than simple untruths.

 (3) Expose inconsistencies to create a space of interpretation.

Inconsistent information from interfaces can also encourage

interpretative  engagement.  For  example,  the  Imagebank

used in the Projected Realities system sometimes showed

multiple, inconsistent images (e.g.  a  quiet  family  scene

next  to  a  protest  march)  to  reflect  inconsistent  slogans

appearing on the  Sloganbenches.

(4) Cast doubt on sources to provoke independent assessment.


Creating ambiguity of Context

(1) Implicate (暗示)  incompatible contexts to disrupt preconceptions.

Though  none  of  our  introductory  design  examples

implicate  incompatible  contexts  as  powerfully  as

Duchamp’s Fountain, all use this tactic to some degree in

interrupting an easy interpretation.  

The Sloganbenches are

not quite public furniture or public displays, and treating

them simply as one or the other is problematic (sitting on

them  blocks  the  displays;  viewing  the  displays  blocks

sitting). 

(2) Add incongruous (不一致) functions to breach (破壞) existing genres.

Adding  new  functions  to  designs  can  sometimes  move

them out of their ‘home’ genres.  From this perspective,

the  conceptual  origin  of  the  Sloganbenches  as  public

furniture  is  apparent,  but  they  have become  something

different through  the  addition  of  the  scrolling  displays.

(3) Block  expected  functionality  to  comment  on  familiar
products.

Perhaps the purest example  of  blocking  functionality  to

achieve ambiguity of context is Sarah Pennington’s design

of a mobile phone  cover  that  has  no  ‘call’  or  ‘receive’

buttons.  The phone is transmuted into a device that can

only signal when somebody is trying to call: the owner

can’t  pick  up  or  make  calls.  Through  this  simple

modification, Pennington disrupts our reading of the phone

as  a  communications  device,  creating  instead  a  rather

plaintive reminder of separation.  But the  result  doesn’t

escape its origin as a phone: it is simultaneously phone and

not-phone, and this ambiguity is central to its effect.

Provoking ambiguity of relationship

(1)  Offer unaccustomed roles to encourage imagination.

Dunne’s  Pillow  [7]  is  a  seminal  example  of  applying

ambiguity of relationship to electronic products.  Culling

electromagnetic  information  from  sources  that  might

include mobile phone calls or baby  monitors,  it  entices (誘使)

people to assume a  voyeuristic (窺淫狂者的)  role  amid the  airwaves.

(2) Point out things without explaining why.

For  example,  the  rationale  for  tracking  certain  physical

events for the Home Health Monitor is not apparent, but

the mere fact of their being tracked may arouse curiosity

among participants.

(3) Introduce disturbing side effects to question responsibility.

Reflection about the balance of desire and ethics  can  be

provoked by designs that seem immediately appealing but

which have disquieting (焦慮不安) implications.  The Pillow works

this way in  providing  an  aesthetic  experience  that  only 

slowly  reveals  itself  as  depending  on  eavesdropping (偷聽):  it

seduces  people  into  a  voyeuristic  role  that  may  be

uncomfortable.

CONCLUSION 

Ambiguity is not a virtue in itself, nor should it be used as
an excuse for poor design.  Many ambiguous systems are
merely  confusing,  frustrating,  or  meaningless.
Nonetheless, as we hope to have shown in this paper, it can
be an important factor in crafting interactive designs that
are engaging and thought-provoking.  Moreover, it has the
added  advantage  (which  we  have  purposely  avoided
stressing in this paper) of enabling designers to go beyond
the limits of their technologies. From this point of view,
ambiguity provides a frame of reference that allows the use
of inaccurate sensors, inexact mappings, and low-resolution
displays because it encourages users to supplement them
with their own interpretations and beliefs.

...

Ambiguity
of information impels people to question for  themselves
the truth of a situation.

Contextual ambiguity can question
the discourses surrounding technological genres, allowing
people to expand, bridge, or reject them as they see fit.

Relational ambiguity, finally, can lead people to consider
new beliefs and values, and ultimately their own attitudes.

week 12. reflective design

one of the three manifestos: Ludic design, Ambiguity as a design resource, and Reflective Design

Reflective design

1. p. 49

These critiques made it possible to
question why particular aspects of human life were left out
of design, to discuss whether or not they should be, and to
begin to imagine new HCI methods that could more
adequately address important parts of human experience.

2.

Rather than focusing
on a particular assumption, we argue that critical reflection
itself, can and should be a core principle of technology
design for identifying blind spots and opening new design
spaces.

3. p. 50

Critical
reflection on the limitations of the field's methods and
metaphors can help us to see the world in a new way,
identifying and weighing new technical possibilities.

4.

We believe that, for those
concerned about the social implications of the technologies
we build,   reflection itself should be a core technology 
design outcome for HCI.

5.

We define 'reflection' as referring to critical reflection, or
bringing unconscious aspects of experience to conscious
awareness, thereby making them available for
conscious choice

6.

Additionally,  reflection is not a 
purely cognitive activity, but is folded into all our ways 
of seeing and experiencing the world.  Unconsciously
held assumptions are not things we rationally know; they
are part of our very identity and the ways we experience
the world.


Foundations of Reflective Design:

1. Participatory Design
2. Value-Sensitive Design
3. Critical Design
4. Ludic Design
5. Critical Technical Practice
6. Reflection-in-Action


7. p. 50


From participatory design, we draw several core principles,
most notably the reflexive recognition of the politics of
design practice and a desire  to speak to the needs of
multiple constituencies in the design process.

8. p. 51

PD strategies tend to be used
to support existing practices identified collaboratively by
users and designers as a design-worthy project.
...

While
values clashes between designers and different users can be
elucidated in this collaboration, the values which users and
designers share do not necessarily go examined. For
reflective design to function as a design practice that opens
new cultural possibilities, however, we need to question
values which we may unconsciously hold in common.

9.
VSD

To do so, VSD employs three methods:
(1) conceptual investigations drawing on moral philosophy,
which identify stakeholders, fundamental values, and tradeoffs among values pertinent to the design;
(2) empirical
investigations using social-science methods to uncover
how stakeholders think about and act with respect to the
values involved in the system;
(3) and technical investigations
which explore the links between specific technical
decisions and the values and practices they aid and hinder.





10.

Inspiringly for us, VSD brings values questions into the
design practice, not just from what stakeholders want but
based on deeper questions about what values should be
thought about and what values are, consciously or
unconsciously, shaping the design. For Friedman et al., the
core values to examine and include are values related to
human justice, well-being, welfare, and rights. While these
values are important for us, we propose critical reflection in
and of itself as a core value for technology design.

11. Critical Design

A critical designer designs
objects not to do what users want and value, but to
introduce both designers and users to new ways of looking
at the world and the role that designed objects can play for
them in it.

12.

It uses the
critical design strategy of ‘value fictions:’ as opposed to
science fiction, which assumes existing values while
projecting new technology into the future, value fictions
assume existing technology but project a new set of values
that are embodied in them.


13. Ludic Design

It
recognizes that playful or ludic activities are not merely a
matter of entertainment, or a waste of time, but can be a
‘mechanism for developing new values and goals, for
learning new things and for achieving new understandings’
[23]. Ludic design promotes engagement in the exploration
and production of meaning, providing for curiosity,
exploration and reflection as  key values. In other words,
ludic design focuses on reflection and engagement through
the experience of using the designed object.


14. p. 52

In the context of HCI, ludic design explores the limits of
technology design practice - what it is we may design for,
what methods we may use - by proposing a specific set of
values that contrast sharply  with those currently at the
center of technical practice: functionality, efficiency,
optimality, task focus.

15. Critical Technical Practice (CTP)


Briefly, CTP consists of the following moves:
(1) identifying
the core metaphors of the field, noticing what, when
working within those metaphors, remains marginalized,
(2) inverting the dominant metaphors to bring that margin to
the center,
(3) and embodying the alternative as a new
technology.  Agre sees CTP as a way to solve recurring
technical impasses by enabling reflection on, and
potentially alteration to, the core metaphors that structure a
technical field.



16.

In this work, CTP functioned to bring to
the fore and make technically meaningful aspects of human
activity that were previously marginalized from design.

17.


All designs have centers and margins, all are
based to some degree on a constitutive metaphor. The
process of exploring the limits of design need not wait until
a technical impasse requires reflection.

18. Reflection-in-Action


Schön’s metaphor of conversation with the situation shares
similarities with current experience-focused approaches in
HCI. McCarthy and Wright [33], for example, propose that
design should avoid the reification (具體化) of experience and
instead support the dialogical nature, i.e. the emergent 
unfolding of experience. They illustrate the tension
between theorizing experience as a static or known
phenomenon and the practice of leaving room for change
and the unknowable.



19. p. 53.

Finally, we draw from the
observation that reflection is often triggered by an element
of surprise, where someone moves from knowing-inaction, operating within the status quo, to reflection-inaction, puzzling out what to do next or why the status quo
has been disrupted [3].   We expand on reflection-in-action
by not waiting for surprise to occur but by intervening to 
create or stimulate these reflection triggers.

20.


Reflective
design integrates, but does not replace, these other rich
approaches.



21. p. 54

In designing for marginal experiences,
we wanted visitors and curators to reflect on these underdesigned for aspects.

22.

For CTP, there was no technological impasse to overcome,
handheld tour guides deliver information reasonably well.
With PD or VSD, visitors or curators would have had to
initially ask for alternate experiences with technology. Our
argument is that the marginal experiences are so implicit
that their value may not be accounted for until experienced
in alternate ways.

23.

The logbook
consisted of open-ended questions inspired by cultural
probes [20] and Likkert-scale questions about the users’
relationship, about their attitude and use of the VIO, and
about the study.

24. Anticipatory framing:


For example, we asked
users when they used their IO, what sound it would make if
it could make one, and to draw a picture of what their ideal
IO would look like.

25. p. 55


This question gave an opportunity
for users to express both their enthusiasm and their
skepticism with the intimate objects, but in an interesting
way:

26.

Finally, we included questions asking our users to reflect
on the study itself. Some were short-answer questions,
which still gave us a strong impression of how some of our
users felt: "What would you  name the people conducting
this research?" gave answers as varied as "Mysterious
Watchers" and "Intimacy Dream Team".
...

One user accused us of
"Creating computer dependency and spreading and
marketing it to the general public".  We found this
(hopefully good-natured) skepticism a sign that we were
successful in encouraging reflection.

27.

However, the
diaries gave us both a strong understanding of the
phenomenological or felt experience of VIO use as well as
a concrete understanding of our next steps in the project.



28. p. 57.


An interpretively flexible system, where
meaning is co-constructed by users and designers, does not
have an a priori benchmark of what works. We want to
evaluate our systems phenomenologically, i.e. allow for
new interpretations and uses, yet we still want to be able to
identify when and how a design has failed.


29. CONCLUSION


Reflective design is a set of design principles and strategies
that guide designers in rethinking dominant metaphors and
values and engaging users in this same critical practice.

week 11. Making epistemological trouble: Third-paradigm HCI as successor science

Framing design in Practice:

   Active@work- design dealing with social change

Making epistemological trouble: Third-paradigm HCI as successor science

Discussion

1. p 391.


As Harding (Harding, 1986) famously argues, a successor
science that takes feminist philosophy of science to its logical
conclusion will not be oriented towards establishing a new, stable
paradigm, but rather will develop a reflexive awareness of the limits
of knowledge practices as part of scientific practice itself.


2.
In considering the potential of the third paradigm to live up to
this feminist vision, we must recognize that HCI operates within a
pragmatic, industrial context that renders it more than a pure
search after knowledge.

3.
This notion of continuous reflexivity
is remarkably consonant with Harding’s call for a destabilizing
feminist successor science, but it simultaneously raises the specter (幽靈)
of an unproductive intellectual churn (攪乳器)  in which margins are simply
brought to the center, codified, and then made marginal again.

4.
"Haraway’s conceptualization of situated knowledges, with its
emphasis on the articulation of mechanisms for the production
of knowledge as a foundation for engagement between varying
knowledge claims, may offer a way out. While Agre would argue
that knowledge arising from different metaphors is more or less
incommensurable (沒有同一標準), Haraway sees mutual engagement as possible
as long as we are explicit about the standpoint from which a particular knowledge claim comes and the methodology which is used
to generate it."

5.
"We note that taking this point of view seriously clouds our
description of the third paradigm. For example, we described one
of the epistemological shifts underlying the third paradigm as
moving from analytic, controlled forms of knowledge production
to hermeneutic, interpretive ones. Looked at from the vantagepoint (有利位置)
of Haraway’s situated knowledges, however, the situation is more
complex, since Haraway suggests that the problem is not the nature of the mechanism for generating knowledge but a recognition
of its fundamentally situated character. This suggests that a feminist take on third-paradigm HCI would put both analytic and hermeneutic approaches into dialogue."


6.
Rather than determining which methodology is best, this
suggests a need for continuing sensitivity to where methodologies
come from and adaptations to make them locally meaningful.

Conclusion

7.

First,
given Agre’s articulation of the need for reflexivity in technical
practice, feminist philosophy of science has provided us a lens to
become aware of how knowledge claims and forms are changing
within HCI. In particular, we argue that a new epistemological
framework is emerging across the landscape of HCI research which
takes as central the phenomenological situatedness of users,
designers, and researchers, a perspective closely tied to feminist
notions of standpoint epistemology.


8.
3rd paradigm 並不會有固定的方法論和產出, 重點是覺知


Second, feminist philosophy of science, having worked out the
implications of standpoint epistemology, suggests that, if the third
paradigm takes its own epistemological commitments seriously, it
will not lead to a stable paradigm with clearly defined methodologies and outcomes, but must remain aware of and questioning its limits as a knowledge practice.


9. p. 392

 全篇大重點: 研究必須交代 , 處理 認識論


This development suggests that we
as a field need to engage in discussion of epistemological issues as
a first-order part of technical practice, i.e. as regular research
papers.


10.


Second, since the mechanisms by which
knowledge is produced are crucial for its evaluation, research
papers should not only mention what methods were used but also
articulate how and why methods are applied.


11.

Black-boxing methods – i.e. turning them into recipes that can be applied without
understanding, sometimes articulated in HCI as improving their
ease of use by practitioners in the field – is inappropriate, since
we need to know how knowledge was generated in order to be able
to weigh it. So, for example, making critical technical practice itself
a mechanically reproducible method is probably ill-conceived.

12.
對user 地位, voice 等等的持續覺知.


The theory of situated knowledges calls for
special awareness of voices which are marginalized.
...

Feminism suggests no easy
answers to this difficulty, but emphasizes continuing awareness
of its existence and systematic questioning of the ways in which
users are represented in particular projects.


3.4 Epistemological trouble-making in the third paradigm

13. p. 390


Feminist philosophers argue that standpoint epistemology
leads to substantially changed epistemological commitments.
Within HCI, we can see the difference that standpoint epistemology makes in many of the qualities of feminist HCI identified by
Bardzell (2010):

• The quality of pluralism involves a shift from universal knowledge claims to multiple, particular knowledge claims, including a shift in central object of study from the ‘typical’ user to including marginal users.
• The quality of participation involves a shift from a distant, God’s-eye view on the subjects under study to active participation with those under study in the construction of knowledge.
• The quality of advocacy challenges HCI researchers to move from positions of apparent neutrality with respect to what they study to politically informed advocacy and engagement.
• The quality of ecology moves the scene of knowledge creation from controlled, artificial situations to holistic, complex contexts.
• The quality of self-disclosure echoes Haraway’s articulation of situated knowledges by suggesting a shift from hidden to exposed mechanisms for generating conclusions about users.