Dasein and the Paradox of Design

One of the main applications of phenomenological theory is technology studies.

One of its most prominent thinkers, Martin Heidegger, was one of the first western

philosophers to seriously examine the role of technology in everyday existence. His

concern is how people interact with technological objects and what this interaction says

about our conception of reality. User experience design (UX) takes a very similar

approach: as a design practice, it analyzes interactions between users and technology

in order to design better systems. This paper will look more closely at the relationship

between UX and phenomenology with the goal to find new applications of this rich

theoretical approach.

While a good number of design theorists and related thinkers (Dourish, 2004

Verbeek, 2005ab) have considered a phenomenological approach for analyzing

everyday objects and the design of things, their findings are still abstracted from the

design process. It is the objective of this essay to create a stronger link between

phenomenology and experience design. As designers, how can we possibly fail to fully

consider such a rich examination of how technological objects mediate the human-world

relationship?

Heidegger’s Influence

The current analysis will focus on more contemporary versions of

phenomenology, beginning with Martin Heidegger, who broke from earlier

phenomenological philosophers with a single word: Dasein.

Dasein refers primarily to Heidegger’s reconceptualization of the subject as

defined over and against the world. Instead of subjectivity, he classifies Dasein, literally

“being-there,” as the individual’s reflexive mode of being in the world: “Dasein exists as

a being for which, in its being, that being is itself an issue.” (Heidegger, 1962)

Heidegger’s choice of Dasein over ‘the subject’ is important, as it is the basis for his

break from Husserl’s teaching. Husserl’s thinking was too decontextualized from

everyday concern. Heidegger sought to base his work in the mundane experience, not

of human and world, but of human and world combined in Dasein.

Being-there implies a sense of knowledge and concern over being-there. Dasein,

then, is a sentient being, involved in the world, its choices, and outcomes.

“Heidegger holds that human beings (which he refers to as Dasein) and

world are not two distinct entities but only one which results from Dasein’s

involvement in the world. Thus the in of being-in-the-world is unrelated to

ideas of Aristotlean containment, instead in is better understood in terms

of involvement. Heidegger characterises everyday life as being an

engaged, absorbed involvement in an undifferentiated world.” (Turner,

Turner, and Carroll, 2005)

Dasein is the embodied, undifferentiated world that is concerned with it own being as

Dasein. Another way to say this is that Dasein is not an entity acting upon an outside

world, but rather an entity that acts with the world, is wrapped up in its dealings with the

world, and can only know of its world by learning in context of engaged interaction. In

this sense, being-there or being-in-the-world are not understood as an entity in a

container, but rather an entity that is actively involved with its own being.

One of Heidegger’s largest contributions to philosophy is his disagreement with

the Cartesian mind-body split. Descartes had a profound influence on how we think

about the self and world, advocating for a hard distinction between what happens in the

mind and what happens in the world. His famous dictum “I think, therefore I am”

prioritized the mind over the body and set forth centuries of work in cognitive science,

philosophy of mind, psychology, and many other fields. Within his articulation, a cogent

and conscious subject acts upon the world in an authoritative manner, and the existence

of thought implies the being of the subject.

Heidegger took a giant step when he called for a complete rejection on

Cartesianism; his philosophy became a “praxis philosophy.” Instead of sticking to a

sharp distinction between the theoretical and the practical, Heidegger based his thinking

on praxis, or the idea that theory and practice co-construct one another. We only

develop theoretical models through active engagement with the world, and practice is,

at least in part, informed by theoretical/cultural/common-sense models of how the world

works. The emphasis, however, is on everyday interaction as a means of gaining

knowledge and understanding.

Emphasizing praxis over theoretical formulations results in a significant

epistemological shift in our understanding of objects. “Knowing-how” is more useful than

“knowing-that”:

“To understand a hammer, for example, does not mean to know that

hammers have such and such properties and that they are used for certain

purposes—or that in order to hammer one follows a certain procedure, i.e.,

understanding a hammer at its most primordial means knowing how to

hammer.” (Dreyfus, 1991)

Dreyfus’s interpretation seems to suggest that knowledge of use completely replaces

theoretical knowledge. I disagree with such a binary distinction. While Heidegger

certainly prioritized knowing-how, knowledge through use, he did not completely

discount the role of theoretical knowledge, which is merely a different mode of

understanding—less useful than knowing-how but not completely without value.

Theoretical and practical knowledge are important parts of the design process in

terms of how we determine familiarity and learnability of an interface or an object.

Mental and conceptual models—even when driven by the most meticulous research

methods—are abstracted and decontextualized from everyday use. A user might have a

mental understanding of a situation, but situations are inherently multi-referential, deeply

contextual, and relative. Modeling is the production of theoretical knowledge.

On the other side of the theory-practice continuum, rapid prototyping is often

caught in the trap of production for production’s sake—that is, the prototype becomes

proof of work rather than an artifact of determining the extent to which a user knows-

how.

The ultimate goal, then, is to accurately determine both theoretical and practical

interpretations and use patterns for a particular product.

“The things of technology (instruments) and the activities (of subjects)

which engage them, appear as the do only against the background and

founding stratum of some kind of framework. Technology in its ontological

sense is not just the collection of things and activities, but a mode of truth

or a field in which things and activities may appear as they do.” (Ihde,

1979)

From a Heidggerian perspective, the end goal of user testing might be to gather

knowledge about the background and the mode of truth that the background discloses

when a user interacts with an artifact. To put it another way, the object is a means to

access truths residing in the larger background system; and from the other side,

background knowledge only becomes evident when manifested through an object.

Things, Technology, and Context

How is it that a mode of truth is disclosed by technology? Heidegger’s position

holds that humans can only come to know themselves by knowing the tools they use. In

this sense, Heidegger’s tool analysis is very pragmatic one; he starts from the

assumption that all tool use is in order to accomplish something else. As a result, he

concludes that the nature of time (hence, his main text, Being and Time) is based on

Dasein existing ahead of itself. We exist to accomplish goals, and technological objects

are the means by which we do so.

The conditions that serve as the background for technology use are what we

think of as ‘world.’ Humans learn and interact against the backdrop—and with the

backdrop—of worldy conditions:

“The context phenomenon is a basic characteristic of our cognitive or

mental lives which consists in the fact that we are never (at least in natural

circumstances) confronted with any task at all outside a context: there is

no such thing as understanding a word, translating a sentence, solving a

problem (however simple), deciding on the appropriate response to a

demand, independently of some context in which the word, sentence, etc.

has in fact appeared: for human beings, signs, demands, tasks never

show up in isolation.” (Andler, 2000)

Language is the structural support for our dealings with the world. As such, it shapes

our experience of discrete objects and the interaction between humans and objects. In

this way, context is not simply the sum of all things and associated meanings but rather

the interrelation between things and meanings. We cannot refer to things in isolation;

even something as simple as a pencil is wrapped up in a multitude of cultural references

and, most importantly for phenomenology, its conditions of use in the world. That is, we

might know that a pencil is made of certain materials and has a certain shape, but more

importantly we know how to use a pencil in order to write. Even further, we know that

the use value of a pencil is particularly suited for when the writer seeks a lack of

permanence.

In his core work, Being and Time, Heidegger introduces a model for how we

might understand our interaction with objects. The terms he uses, Vorhandenheit and

Zuhandenheit, have no English equivalent, but are commonly translated as presence-at-

hand and readiness-to-hand. Despite the awkward English phrasing, I’ll stick to these

versions for familiarity’s sake.

Presence-at-hand is the relationship to an object based on theoretical knowledge

and scientific observation. The object is set out over and against the observer as wholly

other, factual, and analyzable. It is a relationship to an object or concept not in use—a

state that can be broken down to discrete facts, decontextualized as an object of

examination, and analyzed according to its existence outside the relationship to a user.

Readiness-to-hand is a relationship between object and user based on active

engagement. The relationship, and subsequent meaning that emerges from it, is

predicated on the object in use in order to accomplish an end goal. This is the domain of

knowing-how, in which the user achieves a sense of fluidity, acting through the object as

opposed to with or upon the object. The object itself fades into the background of

relations that enable the user to accomplish a task, hence Heidegger’s observation that

Dasein always exists ahead of itself: we are constantly focused on a future event,

merely using the present to accomplish the future.

In this sense, an object with which one is not current engaged simply exists as a

present-at-hand ball of matter. When it is picked up and used, however, it becomes an

embodied instrument. Unfortunately, what Heidegger largely ignored is the notion of

meaning. When an object is picked up and used, we create meaning from it, and this

certainly should play a role in its readiness-to-hand.

These two categories of use are different, but we should not view them as

opposites. While qualitatively different, they are not necessarily opposed to one another.

Take the example of typing and email. If you are fluent with a standard keyboard, your

focus is likely not on the keys but rather on the message on the screen, how the reader

might interpret your message, and what words to choose. Your relationship to the

keyboard is one of readiness-to-hand: you are acting through the keyboard in order to

accomplish the goal of sending the email. Now imagine if, while typing, you misspell a

word, which results in it being underlined in red on the screen, signifying ‘this word is not

spelled correctly.’ At that moment, since your focus was on the screen and not the

keyboard, the red line breaks the ready-to-hand relationship with the keyboard and

makes you conscious of the keys. You now have to go back and deliberately,

consciously re-type the word. The keyboard has become present-at-hand.

Heidegger might refer to this interaction as ‘making the object conspicuous.’

While in the ready-to-hand mode, the object blends into the background of worldly

relations. When that mode is interrupted, it becomes conspicuous as an object of

analysis. Returning to the pencil example, it is easy to see how during the act of writing

the pencil becomes inconspicuous; the writer acts through the pencil to write a

message. But as soon as the tip of the pencil breaks, it becomes conspicuous again as

an object in need to repair. Or when the writer makes an incorrect marking and needs to

erase. We can think of writing as a mode of ready-to-hand relations, and erasing as

presence-at-hand. In the former, the object is simply means of accomplishment; when

goal-orientation is interrupted, the pencil is flipped (literally) to the erasure mode, in

which it becomes a scientific instrument in relation to the marks on the page. Heidegger

calls this switching of modes “coping.” We cope with things that break, things that do not

operate as expected, and poorly designed objects by constructing our own workarounds

to accomplish the end goal associated with their use.

These two modes of human-object relationship do not function as a categorical

switch but rather as a continually moving spectrum. The rate at which our dealings with

objects move back and forth between ready-to-hand and present-at-hand is too fast to

measure. Technology designers see this all the time in user testing. It is tempting to

think the end goal of designing a technological object is to create something with which

users can ‘intuitively’ interact, hence user testing as a means for identifying the

‘unintuitive’ features of the object and eliminating them. However, there are problems

with this approach, While intuition is an important within object relations, to design an

intuitive object would mean to understand all the background relations and networks of

knowledge, understanding, and experience that affect how we approach technology. It

would also mean to create an object so embodied with our ‘natural’ interactions that its

existence is almost unnoticeable.

A better way of approaching user testing and usability is through the lens of

coping. What we are testing is not whether the product itself can be labeled usable or

unusable, but rather the user’s ability to cope with various interruptions and unexpected

twists the object presents. The area of focus during usability testing, then, is not the

product itself; it is the space of interaction between user and object, the space where

coping happens. The object in this situation—whatever we are testing—tends to beg our

attention, but the real focus should be the complex system of engagement that opens

up between object and user. This space opens new possibilities for designers.

Before attempting to understand these possibilities, it is helpful to look at

Heidegger’s thoughts on technology. His relatively short and deceptively simple essay

The Question Concerning Technology (1977) is packed with nuances, but I’d like to

focus the discussion on the notion of truth and how truth arises from our dealings with

things:

“[Dasein] finds itself primarily in things because, tending them, distressed

by them, it always in some way or other rests in things. Each one of us is

what he pursues and cares for. In everyday terms, we understand

ourselves and our existence by way of the activities we pursue and the

things we take care of.” (Heidegger, 1962)

Heidegger viewed technology as “a mode of alētheuein. It reveals whatever does not

bring itself forth and does not yet lie here before us, whatever can look and turn out now

one way and now another.” (Heidegger, 1962) Alētheuein, or truth, becomes a potential

product of technological interactions. Technology is what enables us to access truth, but

it is no the kind of truth that comes from theoretical introspection or scientific discovery.

It is the truth in everyday-ness, the truth that springs forth from the mundane

interactions we have with the world.

Technological objects, for Heidegger, are conduit between self and world; they

are the necessary middle points between subject and object that, by their very

existence, blur the lines we have created between subject and object. If technology is a

mode of truth, something that presents truth, what happens when technology breaks or

doesn’t live up to expectations? Does it reveal the same sense of truth?

Broken Things

Heidegger’s notion of the truth-revealing quality of technology comes

dangerously close to inverting his argument involving the context-dependent and praxis-

based nature of being. Heidegger wanted to show that the essence of technology is not

necessarily technological—it lies in the ability for things to reveal a sense of truth about

the world. But Heidegger has been criticized (Ihde 1979; Verbeek, 2005b) for thinking

about technology as an overarching category instead of sets of everyday things. One

reason for this is simply the technological world Heidegger experienced: manufacturing,

war machines, etc. If our being in the world is context-specific, how can technology

reveal a sense of unified truth?

Designers deal with this question more often than they might realize. User testing

and usability is a constant dance between the truth about a product and its use, how

different groups of users create their own truths, and whether each truth holds equal

weight against the future success of the product. Hubert Dreyfus explains the situational

nature of object use:

“When the hammer I am using fails to work and I cannot immediately get

another, I have to deal with it as too heavy, unbalanced, broken, etc.

These characteristics belong to the hammer only as used by me in a

specific situation. Being too heavy is certainly not a property of the

hammer.” (Dreyfus, 1991)

And this property of ‘being too heavy’ likely will not cause a complete abandonment of

the object but rather a new, revised way of interacting with it:

“When equipment malfunctions, Heidegger says, we discover its

unsuitability by the ‘circumspection of the dealings in which we use it,’ and

the equipment thereby becomes ‘conspicuous.’ ‘Conspicuousness

presents the available equipment in a certain unassailableness.’ But for

most normal ways of coping, so that after a moment of being startled, and

seeing a meaningless object, we shift to a new way of coping and go on.”

(Dreyfus, 1991)

The testing process often revolves around the highly ambiguous and often

unanswerable question, “Does the product work as intended?” This question is

evaluated in terms of whether users’ behavioral patterns match the designer’s

expectations, often coupled with external factors such as business-political motivations,

project budgets and timelines, fragile egos, etc. It is easy to fall into dualist notions of a

product ‘working as expected’ or ‘not working as expected.’

I want to argue that user testing and usability studies, when done well, extend

beyond short term implications and into coping strategies and creative misuse. The

conspicuous object, which has become conspicuous by way of defect, is not often

abandoned but rather coped with. Heidegger’s notion of coping explains how we deal

with bad design, broken things, and the natural lacks of things in everyday life.

Inconspicuous objects function at 100% efficiency, but this is not the norm. More often

than not, we are coping in some way. While there is a certain recognition for the act of

coping within the user testing scenario, I believe we can go further in determining how

users cope and work that insight back into the design process.

The Designer’s Paradox

Design Thinking (Cross, 2011; Brown, 2009) has been largely successful in

formalizing a design process that, instead of starting with business goals, concentrates

on a human-centered process by which designers empathize with others, frame a

problem, ideate on solutions, and test assumptions. It emphasizes understanding a

problem before designing solutions for it. In the business world, it is not uncommon to

invest large amounts of money and time into designing a product based off

assumptions, with no real interaction with end users, and therefore little to no insight into

why the product should exist. Design Thinking works to develop deep empathy and

problem exploration before investing in solution design.

A related movement, the Lean Startup (Ries, 2011), also highlights the need for

proper problem framing and awareness of assumptions before designing solutions.

Within what we might call Lean Design, the entire product development team works to

formulate hypotheses to test and (in)validate before investing too much time into the

design process. The Lean Startup—and its original version, Lean Thinking and Lean

manufacturing from Toyota—aims to reduce waste from the product development cycle.

The end goal is to systematically create a product that solves a problem for a well-

defined group of people.

Each approach relies on prototypes to test possible solutions. As prototypes are

tested with users, designers return to the designs and make changes based on user

feedback. Often, feedback is not taken at face value but rather filtered through an

interpretive screen. For example, users have a difficult time articulating product

features, but they naturally talk about the problems they encounter. Designers take that

data and decode the implicit meaning: what is the difference between what the user

says s/he needs and what s/he actually needs?

Design Thinking and Lean Startup have been successful in getting designers to

think about feedback loops and end user sentiment driving design decisions. However,

there is still a sense of tension in terms of linearity when thinking about problems and

solutions. Lean Startup would claim to be a nonlinear process, as it relies on early

prototyping over upfront strategy; and Design Thinking prides itself on fully

understanding the problem before designing solutions. If phenomenology has taught us

anything, it is the importance of praxis: the real world situations in which users interact

with an object will tell designers more about a product than an infinite amount of time

speculating from afar. But what happens when the product or behavior doesn’t exist

yet?

The designer’s paradox states that we cannot think about solutions until we

understand the problem, and we cannot understand a problem until we think about

solutions. (Dorst, 2006)

The first part of the statement is easy enough. Designing solutions for a poorly

defined problem space is wasteful and is exactly what a good design process tries to

avoid. The second part, however, is more complicated. Saying that we cannot

understand a problem until we think about solutions breaks up the linearity of the first

statement. Moving linearly from problem understanding to solutions assumes that there

is a final answer at the end of the “understanding” phase, and once we find it, we will be

able to design solutions without anything changing in the problem space. It assumes we

can understand a problem space before exploring all the conditions of possibility it

affords. The second part allows for exploring these potentialities in terms of solution

hypotheses, but it largely ignores the need to understand a problem space.

The first part of the statement is theoretical: we generate theoretical foundations

about problem spaces based on distanced observation. Even if designers are

participating in contextual research in the field, we can still consider this work theoretical

if it is not generating solution possibilities. Without tangible things, we are unable to see

how users cope with difficulties. The second part of the statement is purely practical. It

is based on active engagement with real behaviors, but it forgets that pure practice is

often just pantomime without a foundational approach.

How to we solve for such a paradox? Perhaps it is best to start with thinking

about technological objects and how they are used in ways that construct meaning, as

these interactions are often the focus of analysis for both understanding a problem and

its potential solutions.

Don Ihde explains our interactions with technology as multistable. Use cases for

technological objects cannot be determined in any static sense, as the relationship

between humans and technology is truly interactive:

“Technologies do not determine directions in any hard sense … [W]hile

humans using technologies enter into interactive situations whenever they

use even the simplest technology—and thus humans use and are used by

that technology, and all such relations are interactive—the possible uses

are always ambiguous and multistable.” (Ihde, 2002)

Interaction with a technological object goes both ways; we use the object and the object

uses us. In this way, to understand a problem space, we need to see the effects of

different types of objects and how those new additions affect the entire system.

“A hammer is designed to do certain things—to drive nails into the

shoemaker’s shoe or into shingles on my shed, or to nail down a floor—

but the design cannot prevent a hammer from becoming an objet d’art, a

murder weapon, a paperweight, etc. Heidegger’s insight was to have seen

that an instrument is what is does, and this in a context of assignments.

But he did not elaborate upon the multistable uses any technology can fall

into with associated shifts in the complexities of ‘assignments’ as well. No

technology is one thing, nor is it incapable of belonging to multiple

contexts.” (Ihde, 2002)

A designer has a certain intention when designing an object and designs affordances to

help make potential uses apparent. But the dictation of use is impossible. Technological

objects are multistable: their use is context dependent, and goal attainment trumps

design intention every time. When one needs to prevent a stack of papers from blowing

away, the hammer has completely different possibilities of action versus when that

person needs to drive a nail.

The task of understanding a problem and designing a solution is complex insofar

as it assumes 1) the problem can be understood fully, and 2) a single solution exists

that accounts for its own multistability. Instead, multisatbilities arise when solutions are

designed, even if these solutions are based on complete assumptions, that inform the

nature of the problem space. There is a praxical element to problems that only reveals

itself when users are able to manipulate objects in the world. This is one of the biggest

insights phenomenology can offer design—the idea that our relationship with designed

objects is context-dependent, embodied, and multistable, and therefore this relationship

is mediated by both real solutions that exist in the world and possibilities for new

solutions that only exist as potentialities.

Interactions and Relations

At this point in our analysis, we are encountering a break with Heidegger’s

thought to the extent that we are concerned with specific objects of technology rather

than technology in the broad sense. Don Ihde was largely responsible for rethinking and

reframing phenomenology into what he called post-phenomenology, which accounted

for this specificity, among other aspects beyond the scope of this essay. Ihde described

how the patterns of behavior associated with technology fall into categories: embodied,

hermeneutic, alterity, and background. We will focus on embodied and hermeneutic

relations, as they are the most relevant to the present discussion.

Embodied relations are those in which the object of use becomes incorporated

into the user’s body and enables a true ready-to-hand experience, in Heidegger’s

terminology. A common example is a pair of eyeglasses. The user wears glasses in

such a way that they become embodied and remove themselves as objects of analysis.

The wearer looks through them to see the world, and given that the glasses are not

smudged or broken, s/he forgets about them completely. In this relationship, the glasses

are more an augmentation to the eyes than they are a physical object.

Hermeneutic relations, on the other hand, are classified by object-ness. In this

state, the object must be read and interpreted as a completely other entity that must be

read and interpreted. Verbeek (2005b) gives the example of a thermometer as a

hermeneutic object. One must read the thermometer, which indicates temperature. The

thermometer presents a representation based on cultural symbols, language, and

measuring systems the user must interpret in order to make sense of it. Instead of

relying on ‘natural’ or ‘intuitive’ information, hermeneutic relations are dependent on

designed spaces to function.

The same object can be classified as embodied or hermeneutic in different

contexts. The eyeglasses example is seen as an embodied technology when they are

functioning properly, but as soon as the glass smudges or the hinge starts to loosen,

they become a hermeneutic object of analysis. Their flaw makes them conspicuous, and

the user must cope with them. We can also think about embodied and hermeneutic

relations as the ends of an interaction spectrum. The movement between embodied and

hermeneutic might happen so quickly that classification is not possible.

The two types of relations just mentioned, embodied and hermeneutic, can often

be viewed as two separate and distinct categories, but there is a massive, detailed

space in between. This is the space of interactions, where poles like

embodiment/hermeneutics, technology/humans, and subjects/objects start merging

together. A useful way to understand this in-between space is through James J.

Gibson’s theory of affordances. Gibson was a psychologist studying visual perception

when he articulated his observations on affordances, and his thinking has been

appropriated into design discussions beginning with Don Norman’s The Design of

Everyday Things and now continuing with embodied cognition research.

An affordance can be thought of as an aspect of the environment-organism

relationship that enables action. A common example is a doorknob; its shape affords

grasping and turning in order to open a door. Water affords drinking, chairs afford

sitting, pens afford writing, etc. Gibson saw affordances as much more that objects in

the environment. He viewed an affordance as the connective tissue between self and

world:

“When in use, a tool is a sort of extension of the hand, almost an

attachment to it or part of the user’s own body, and thus no longer a part

of the environment of the user. But when not in use the tool is simply a

detached object of the environment, graspable and portable, to be sure,

but nevertheless external to the observer. This capacity to attach

something to the body suggests that the boundary between the animal

and the environment is not fixed at the surface of the skin but can shift.

More generally it suggests that the absolute duality of ‘objective’ and

‘subjective’ is false. When we consider the affordances of things, we

escape this philosophical dichotomy.” (Gibson, 1986)

For Gibson, objects in the world are simply dead objects, until we are able to interact

with them through the affordances they provide. A hat sitting on a table is known

through cultural meaning, the fact that we call it a “hat” and are aware of how it might be

used. But once we pick up the hat and put it on our head, it becomes part of the body,

linked by its affordances. The shape of the hat affords placement on the head, but we

know that the head is its proper place because of customs and cultural meanings we

have associated with hat use.

The theory of affordances is a way to resist the urge to categorize human

experience in unnecessarily restrictive buckets. Instead of thinking only about self and

world, we can think about the space in between:

“An important fact about the affordances of the environment is that they

are in a sense objective, real, and physical, unlike values and meanings,

which are often supposed to be subjective, phenomenal, and mental. But,

actually, an affordance is neither an objective property nor a subjective

property; or it is both if you like. An affordance cuts across the dichotomy

of subjective-objective and helps us to understand its inadequacy. It is

equally a fact of the environment and a fact of behavior. It is both physical

and psychical, yet neither. An affordance points both ways, to the

environment and to the observer.” (Gibson, 1986)

When we think of entities and objects, there is an entire space of interaction in between.

This is where interaction designers work. We might say user experience focuses on the

individual user, while industrial designers or interface designers are creating objective

elements, and interaction designers are creating affordances. While there is significant

overlap, this distinction might be useful for defining roles and allocating the correct skills

toward certain problems. User experience designers attempt to affect the user’s

interpretation. Interface or industrial designers focus on how a product communicates its

functionality. And interaction designers design the affordances that live in the middle

space between object and user, communicating the potential actions that one can

accomplish with the object.

Designing Mediation

Beyond the individual work of a single designer, what this discussion is really

about is mediation. Technology—both in the sense of broad, non-object-specific

technology, and specific device-based technologies—mediates the relationship between

humans and their world. It is not that technology shapes behavior, nor is it that behavior

shapes technology: they co-construct one another.

Peter-Paul Verbeek has been influential in this conversation over the last decade,

focusing on rethinking linear frameworks of human-technology relations: “Technologies

coshape the human world and thus also human relations with technology itself. Human

beings are not sovereign with respect to technology, but are, rather, inextricably

interwoven with it.” (Verbeek, 2005a) A favorite example over the past couple decades

has been the gun. (ibid) The National Rifle Association’s slogan, “Guns don’t kill people.

People kill people” has been influential in the discourse around rights to bear arms in

the United States. The slogan, meant to shift responsibility off of the technology and

onto the active agent that wields it, can be thought of as particularly misleading. While

we might think of the person with a gun as ultimately responsible, it ignores how the

simple act of holding a gun changes someone. A person with a gun is very different

from a person without a gun, as evidenced by the way we refer to that person: a

“gunman.” This linguistic classification points to a particular way of combining man and

gun. Separate, they are agent and object; but together, a new form of being emerges in

which the agent is mediated by the technology that incorporates itself into the body of

the user. Or perhaps with a more mundane example: “Mediation shapes the mutual

relation in which both subject and object are concretely constituted. Someone who

wears eyeglasses, for instance, is not the same without them.” (Verbeek, Peter-Paul.

2005b)

This idea of mediation starts to rethink the common notion of “agent acts upon

technology to accomplish a goal.” We can see some divergence from traditional

phenomenology at this point. While someone like Heidegger would conceive technology

as something humans act through in order to accomplish something, this new form of

phenomenology—or post-phenomenology—stresses that the object itself also has a

mediating role. It is not simply that the human agent acts upon the object, but the object

also acts back upon the agent. Together they become something else.

Post-phenomenology has much to offer design processes. It is easy for

designers to think of their work as the intentional process of creating a set of conditions,

including objects that support those conditions, that increases the potentiality for a

certain outcome. Much of this sentiment, I believe, stems from the same sentiments

voiced by post-phenomenology—namely, that technology mediates the relationship

between self and world. If this is the case, then designers are not necessarily creating

objects and affordances that allow users to perform an action in order to accomplish a

goal, as more classical phenomenology might hold. Instead, designers are creating

conditions of possibility for certain outcomes, but should always be aware of the

multistable, mediating forces of technology.

Another way to think about this relationship is in terms of sense-making, or the

creation of emergent meaning. Designers are creating conditions in which objects,

users, and contexts are combined to create something emergent that did not exist

before these entities were combined:

“People can only develop a durable relationship with artifacts if what

matters is not just a matter of style or function. After all, other artifacts

could embody the same meaningfulness or functionality, but no other

artifact can be this specific material thing, here and now.” (Verbeek,

2005a)

Verbeek’s mention on situation or context serves to stress the idea that Heidegger’s

phenomenology does not sufficiently address the hermeneutics of technology—that is,

by taking a broad view of the essence of technology, he is not able to properly consider

specific technological objects and our relationship to them. Post-phenomenology

attempts to make up for this lack by examining how humans use technology not only to

accomplish goals but also to create meaning.

Experience designers are not simply creating an object or an interface, they are

creating all of the peripheral context that surrounds it along with the human involvement

that comes with it. Even in cases where human involvement is purposefully minimized—

e.g., ubiquitous computing, the so-called “natural” user interfaces, etc.—the design of

the object is even more important, as it so drastically affects the periphery. There is this

sense that design of an object or and interface inherently includes a concern for the

emergent affects of that object. But this concern is not always apparent in the design

process. Part of what post-phenomenology offers is a way to articulate the importance

of that concern an possibly suggest ways to highlight it during a design process.

In a certain sense, many designers are already practicing this deep concern for

end users and multistable relationships through activities like research as an empathy-

building activity and user testing as a means of observing technology in use. The

inherent, but perhaps not articulated or intentional, goals of research and testing all

revolve around interpreting systems of meaning and understanding use contexts.

“The mediating role of technologies comes about in a complex interplay

between technologies and their users. At the very moment human beings

use them, artifacts change from mere ‘objects lying around’ into artifacts-

for-doing-something. And this ‘for doing something’ is determined not

entirely by the properties of the technology itself but also by the ways

users handle them. Technologies have no fixed identity; they are defined

in their context of use and are always “interpreted” and “appropriated” by

their users.” (Verbeek, 2011)

In-context user research aims to understand the hermeneutics of current behavior. It

uses observation and probing to interpret the role of cognition, behaviors, and rituals

that shape the human-technology relationship. Using this as groundwork, design inserts

a new variable into the system. User testing then analyzes how that new variable affects

the system as a whole. To put it another way, research maps the system of meaning,

design introduces new meaning, and testing measures the effects of new variables in

context of the entire system. The idea is that we can never know the real affects until

they are implemented and observed. Design never happens in a vacuum. The

designer’s tacit goal is to see how the state of his or her designed object changes from

when it is an ‘artifact laying around’ versus an ‘artifact-for-doing-something’ and creating

meaning.

Designer’s Paradox Revisited

Post-phenomenology provides a way to frame technology within technological

objects and opens possibilities for examining multiple potentialities. The downside is

that this opening does not the designer’s job easier. Multistability remains as the wrench

within the machine of technology design, and designers must adapt to increasingly

complex domains. The post-phenomenological method also calls out the paradox of

problems, solutions, and their apparent linearity. Even if it suggests no concrete

solutions to overcoming the paradox within the design process, it at least provides a

means to understanding the problem. While post-phenomenology might not warrant a

radical rethinking of design processes as we know them, it does underscore the

importance of deep thinking about things.

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