PUC theme issue: material interactions

Abstract

With the advent of smart materials, ubiquitous computing, computational composites, interactive architectures, the Internet of Things, and tangible bits, HCI has increasingly recognized the role that non-computational materials play. As IT gets embedded in everyday objects, vehicles, and buildings, interaction design becomes not only a matter of designing interaction with digital objects but about how material arrangements work to create user experiences. What Robles and Wiberg [30] call ‘‘the material turn’’ in HCI has foregrounded both the materials from which we design interaction, and the design practice for giving form to material compositions under the notion of ‘‘craft.’’ As a direct consequence, ‘‘the material turn’’ is also a turn toward material interactions. In just about any design tradition, a deep knowledge about, and sensibility for, the materials being used is essential. By living in the world of the materials she uses, the designer sees potential and uses this knowledge in the act of design. Design then becomes a negotiation between form and function and between aesthetics and utility. In HCI, ‘‘the material turn’’ emerged from the concept of ‘‘tangible.’’ Ishii and Ullmer [18] talk about tangible interactions that bridge the digital and physical by creating graspable ‘‘bits’’ [12] that can be manipulated, accessed, and programmed [22]. Work on tangible interactions has helped inspire the re-examination of computation in more material terms (see [2, 5, 19, 24, 31, 35, 41, 43]). Computing is re-imagined as just another material, operating ‘‘on the same level as paper, cardboard, and other materials found in design shops’’ [2], and physical materials are now being re-imagined as substrates invested with computational properties (see e.g., [6, 26, 28, 29]). The result is the activation of existing properties of materials to create opportunities for interaction and experience. These two streams of re-imagination around computational and non-computational materials could be called ‘‘post-representational interaction design’’—or as we have chosen to call it here, material interactions. The notion of ‘‘Materiality’’ is now being applied in a number of different academic disciplines including physics [1], politics [4], philosophy [37], sociology [8, 9, 27], architecture [14, 39], and archeology [16]. It is of course not unusual that these disciplines use ‘‘materiality’’ to highlight the material dimensions of their object of study: It would, for instance, be hard to imagine archeology without materials being a central object of study. The interest in exploring computing through a material lens is also growing in computer science, media and communication studies, social technology studies, informatics, and HCI (see e.g., [7, 10, 15, 20, 21, 32, 33, 36, 40, 43]). These information systems-related areas have always focused on the immaterial dimensions of our world—on representations of things—and the differences between ‘‘real’’ and virtual, or ‘‘physical’’ and ‘‘digital.’’ It would seem that current developments in computing, such as cloud computing or ubiquitous computing, would take us even further away from the material. However, while Weiser [38] did envision a ‘‘disappearing’’ computer, he simultaneously envisioned computation as interwoven with the everyday world: ‘‘The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric M. Wiberg (&) Department of Informatics, Umea University, Umea, Sweden e-mail: mwiberg@informatik.umu.se