“The promiscuity of interaction”

This is a brief com­ment on a meet­ing Bar­ry Brown and I host­ed at Microsoft Research Cam­bridge, titled .

“Inter­ac­tion as a a promis­cu­ous con­cept”: it’s Stu­art Reeves’ phras­ing that nice­ly cap­tures the sen­ti­ment of our small meet­ing’s dis­cus­sions. The col­lec­tion of short talks and the empha­sis giv­en to talk­ing (and not just lec­tur­ing), gave rise to a lan­guage of crit­i­cal but pos­i­tive reflec­tion. Rather than delib­er­at­ing on an ‘after’ or ‘post’ inter­ac­tion turn or wave in HCI, inter­ac­tion was seen to still offer a great deal. The con­sen­sus (led by posi­tions from David Kirk, Abi Dur­rant , Bill Gaver and Stu­art) was it pro­vides us with a device or machin­ery in com­mon, and, con­cep­tu­al­ly, there remains much to do with the word that keeps us open to new domains and indeed new (design) pos­si­bil­i­ties. Here, I’m remind­ed of Isabelle Stengers use of the phrase a “tool for think­ing”. It cer­tain­ly appears inter­ac­tion (still) pro­vides us with just such a tool.
And yet I felt there was a shared frus­tra­tion — or at least a frus­tra­tion in myself — of what lim­its come with using the word inter­ac­tion. With it, I find it hard not to feel bound to medi­a­tion as a cen­tral mat­ter of con­cern, and along­side that being drawn to a fixed ‘divide’ between humans and machines that must be bridged or some­how solved. For me, this brings to mind Karen Barad’s ’ in which she intro­duces “intra-action” to pur­pose­ful­ly con­trast it with the “the usu­al ‘inter­ac­tion’, which assumes that there are sep­a­rate indi­vid­ual agen­cies that pre­cede their interaction”. 

With inter­ac­tion, it seems we also strug­gle to account for the worlds that are instant­ly and irrev­o­ca­bly entan­gled in our ‘inter­ac­tions’ with machines, the scales of order (Eric Lau­ri­er) or scal­ing (Alex Wilkie) that always looms large. Among her reflec­tions on the day, Kat Jung­nick­el remind­ed us of Leigh Star’s won­der­ful “Cul­tures of Com­put­ing” in which she writes evocatively:

“, typ­ing this, my neck aches and I am curled in an uncom­fort­able posi­tion. I try to think about my fin­ger­tips and the chips inside this Mac­in­tosh as a seam­less “web of com­put­ing,’ to use Kling and Scac­chi’s clas­sic phrase (1982). But chips make me think of the eye­sight of women in Sin­ga­pore and Korea, going blind dur­ing the process of craft­ing the fid­dly lit­tle wires; of ‘clean rooms’ I have vis­it­ed in Sil­i­con Val­ley and the Nether­lands, where peo­ple dressed like astro­nauts etch bits of sil­i­con and fab­ri­cate com­plex Sand­wich­es of infor­ma­tion and log­ic. I think of the silence of my Euro­pean ances­tors who wore Chi­nese embroi­dery, mar­veling at its intri­cate com­plex­i­ty, the near impos­si­ble stitch­es woven over a life­time with the eye­sight of anoth­er gen­er­a­tion of Asian women. I think, I want my body to include these expe­ri­ences. If we are to have ubiq­ui­tous, wire­less com­put­ing in the future, per­haps it is time to have a less bor­ing idea of the body right now—a body politic, not just the sub­strate for meet­ings or toys.” 

So, yes, inter­ac­tion analy­sis, such as that from Chris­t­ian Licoppe, offers us some com­pelling tools for exam­in­ing the unfold­ing detail of mun­dane activ­i­ties, but how do we extend these analy­ses to account for a wider ethics (Yvonne Rogers), the “body right now”, and indeed our own pro­duc­tive roles in enact­ing these cuts (Kat)? How might we focus our atten­tions not on the agen­cies intrin­sic in humans and things (before inter­ac­tion, if there could be such a thing), but where and how agency is brought into being (Alex Wilkie and Mike Michael).
I ask, then, is this the point of inflec­tion? As we turn our minds and bod­ies to very present tech­no­cul­tures that sur­round us, ones where things take on new agen­cies (David Mar­tin), have the capac­i­ty to push back (Elisa Giac­car­di ), and where data infra­struc­tures and algo­rithms are per­va­sive (Airi Lampinen and Bar­ry), these weak­ness­es become increas­ing­ly pre­scient. How are we to think with the “usu­al” inter­ac­tion here? How does a pre­oc­cu­pa­tion with a human-cen­tred inter­ac­tion with machines give us the capac­i­ty to see things and prac­tices that stitch and weave across geo­gra­phies and over life­times? Do our promis­cu­ous inter­ac­tions, if you will, leave us room for think­ing and mak­ing around these sprawl­ing, always pro­vi­sion­al cos­mopo­lit­i­cal land- and time-scapes?
Here, might we sketch out a way to move on in which the uses and design of tech­nol­o­gy become ways to extend our think­ing about and with promis­cu­ous inter­ac­tions? These interactions—from small scale, one-to-one tin­ker­ings, mak­ings, and repairs, to move­ments and trans­for­ma­tions at scale—aren’t so much things that fol­low know­ing (or for that mat­ter pro­duce what we know); the divide here isn’t between know­ing and inter­act­ing. Rather they are active process­es through which we come to be in the world, not just in what we know, but how we organ­ise our­selves, what we val­ue and care for, etc. We might grap­ple with things, mate­ri­al­ly, at the one-to-one scale, but we are for­ev­er work­ing with their extend­ing web of entan­gle­ments (Abi Dur­rant). This, we might say, is to take inter­ac­tion seri­ous­ly, to under­stand it beyond the object of study and see it more as a pro­duc­tive recon­fig­u­ra­tion of what for many of us have become the trou­bling dis­ci­pli­nary divi­sions between the social sci­ences, design and com­put­ing. What we have is an inven­tive ori­en­ta­tion to inter­ac­tion; whether it’s the detailed study of car dri­vers using Face­book (Chris­t­ian Licoppe) or the eco­nom­ic and polit­i­cal assem­blages emerg­ing through wide­ly dis­trib­uted Uber and AirBnB use (Bar­ry and Airi Lampinen), inter­ac­tion gives us a way to cast things dif­fer­ent­ly and get clos­er, so to speak, to the entanglements.