Taming the Situationist Beast Lucian Leahu
Jenn Thom-Santelli
Claudia Pederson
Phoebe Sengers
Computer Science Dept. Cornell University Ithaca, NY, USA
HCI Group Cornell University Ithaca, NY, USA
History of Art Cornell University Ithaca, NY, USA
Information Science and STS Cornell University Ithaca, NY, USA
lleahu@cs.cornell.edu
jt17@cornell.edu
ccp9@cornell.edu
sengers@cs.cornell.edu
ABSTRACT
disciplines and those already at play in HCI (e.g. [5][8]).
The interplay between arts and HCI has become increasingly commonplace in the past years, offering new opportunities for approaching interaction, but also raising challenges in integrating methods and insights from across a great disciplinary divide. In this paper, we examine the ways Situationist art practice has been used as an inspiration for HCI design. We argue that methods from Situationist art practice have often been picked up without regard for their underlying sensibility: reflection and improvisation in an activist socio-political context. We describe an experiment in incorporating Situationist sensibility in design and use it to elucidate the challenges that face HCI in truly integrating the arts.
A major issue that arises in such appropriations is a mismatch in the understanding of ‘method’ between HCI and these other disciplines. As a result, methods may be appropriated as relatively straightforward recipes for action, without regard to their richness or use in their home discipline. So, for example, Dourish has critiqued the uptake of ethnographic practice in HCI, arguing that theoretically grounded analysis which takes into account the analytic stance of the ethnographer has been reduced to a simple method by which any person can extract objective meaning from a cultural situation [8]. Boehner and colleagues report similar issues in the uptake of the cultural probes [5]; what was intended as a subversive, arts-inspired approach questioning the basic assumptions of HCI methodology has become a relatively standardized and unproblematic method (see also [12]).
Categories and Subject Descriptors H.5.m. Information Interfaces and Presentation (e.g., HCI): Miscellaneous; K.4.2. Computers and Society: Miscellaneous.
General Terms Human Factors.
Keywords Situationism, art, reflective HCI, methodology.
1. INTRODUCTION HCI has a long history of drawing from a wide variety of disciplines to understand and design for the site of interaction, ranging from engineering disciplines, such as computer science, to social science fields, such as cognitive psychology. More recently, HCI has begun to draw from the humanities and arts as well for inspiration; these areas have become particularly pertinent with growing interest in understanding and designing for the complexity of human experience in interaction, such as its aesthetic and emotional dimensions (e.g. [4][18][19][21][22]). In the process, challenges can arise from the mismatch between theories, methodologies, and conceptualization in these new Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Conference’04, Month 1–2, 2004, City, State, Country. Copyright 2004 ACM 1-58113-000-0/00/0004…$5.00.
In this paper, we look at issues of methodology that arise in the uptake of the arts in HCI. Specifically, we look at the relatively popular use of Situationism as an inspiration for alternative forms of HCI design. We will argue that, as with ethnography and the art-design approach of the probes, Situationism has frequently been adopted as a set of methods irrespective of its original motivation and context of use. We demonstrate through a case study of the design and evaluation of an alternative system inspired by Situationism what it might take to draw seriously on the arts in HCI. Finally, we use this opportunity to discus the implications of our findings and to situate our analysis within a larger trend of appropriations in HCI.
2. BACKGROUND Situationist art practice developed over a period of sixteen years from 1957 to 1973. The Situationists deemed the present the age of the "spectacle,” a concept that evokes connotations with mainstream theater, a display, a show, or any type of performance that positions audiences in the role of passive witnesses of onstage dynamics. According to the Situationists, consumer society positions people in similar passive roles. The role of the consumer, as the Situationists saw it, limits participation to a set of predetermined choices that may satisfy material well-being, yet impede peoples’ agency in shaping the underlying structures of society. The spectacle of material abundance conceals the alienation from one’s creativity and societal environment. The Situationists set out to devise ‘situations’, or experimental practices aimed at raising awareness vis-à-vis the general conditions that prevail in a place or society. Situationism proposed to affect a shift in public awareness towards a participatory model that would challenge materialism as the basis