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.

The post “The promiscuity of interaction” appeared first on Alex Taylor.

First, let me respond to your criticisms regarding the interminglings of humans and nonhumans. As I understand it, you are opposed to the idea of a kind of symmetry between the two. I concede, symmetry here raises problems, as does the implication that people and things populate the same single category. With these problems, I realise I need to make my position clearer.
Finding my inspiration in (post) ANT, feminist technoscience and, as Mol now likes to call it, a , you are right to point out that I see the human-nonhuman binary as a  peculiar one. However, I see the symmetry trick to be far from, well, a trick. On the contrary, to me it feels a much more genuine and responsive starting point. Let’s consider the category problem. For starters, when would you and I imagine ourselves to share a category? Well, one rather macabre place might be on the pathologist’s bench. Another might be as one of the many millions of commuters passing through London. In both, we are — in different senses — human bodies. We can, though, imagine just as many situations in which we would be lumped into different categories – ethnicity, geography, intellectual auspices, and so on. Likewise, we could repeat this exercise with things: tables and chairs are items of furniture, but at the same time they of course can be categorised, differently, in that they reference particular styles/periods, or are made of distinct materials. Indeed, this category making could, dare we imagine it, lump things and people together: door-men and self-closing door hinges keep cold weather out, police and road humps slow traffic, etc. So the symmetry here is not one that presupposes categorical sameness, or indeed any essential categories — be they the body or mind, or people vs. things.
My obvious point here (and I apologise for belabouring it) is that categories, , are enacted. Chuck Goodwin provides us with such delightful examples of this. I particularly like his description of . So why then would we presuppose that one very particular category distinction – that between humans and nonhumans — should prevail above all others? Surely, we would want to be open minded about the ways categories are done and not to approach any phenomena insisting that one binary must be enforced?
Let me, then, take up another of your related objections and through this return to my piece in interactions and my modestly pieced together point on relationality. You ask whether it is helpful to attribute agency and normative qualities to things – productive in the short term, you suggest, yet eventually leading us into a quagmire of nonsense and confusion. Can I ask you this: in what way is human agency independent of *things*? I find it hard to think of a context in which agency resides entirely in/with humans. A more honest perspective, as I see it, is to see this more like a spectrum in which agency surfaces somewhere amongst a relational configuration of actors/agents. I slow the car down because I am moving in a car, and together we (me and the car) are obliged to respond to the material arrangement of the road, the road furniture (as it is called), and the road hump. True, remove the human and the intention to slow down is gone, but so too when the car or hump are gone. The intention is in the mixture of humans and non-humans. And your power station gives us another helpful example. Why would we want to imagine that a morality and set of accompanying activities (like investing in nuclear energy) are in someway separate to the things themselves? Without nuclear power stations, and all that ’stuff’ that goes into them, where would we find the morality. Of course, we would not. Agencies and normativities arise out of relational entanglements. 
Alas, I must agree with you though. These are longstanding arguments, and I’m confident I won’t be the one who satisfactorily answers your objections. Yet I hope to have shown that the proposal is not to simply shift agential capacities from one side of the human-nonhuman binary to the other. Nor is it to blindly lump humans and nonhumans into the same category. I draw on a project that contests any such binaries or essentialist categories, and instead invites a serious examination of how worlds of humans and things are enacted.
It’s this point on relationality that brings us back to the heart of the matter, a rethinking of interactions. As a matter of fact, I’m not all that concerned with the word, as it is generally used, and I, like you, greatly admire sociologists such as Goodwin who show the interactional accomplishments that constitute ordinary scientific business. My concern is with an interaction that narrows its sights on the neatly demarcated interactions humans have with machines, and presupposes that we might easily separate and forget about the relational entanglements that run alongside and interweave with these. What Goodwin so expertly illustrates is how the assembled arrangements of human bodies (plus their talk) and things, occasion ‘worlds’ of materially configured knowing and logic. The rationale and product in science is enacted through the incessant categorising and ordering (i.e. bringing into relation) of people and things. In effect, Goodwin shows us worlds in the making — ‘world making’. As he writes:

Rather than sustaining an opposition between the “mental” and the “material” such activity systems seamlessly link phenomena such as the embodied actions of participants, physical tools, language use, work relevant writing practices, etc. into the patterns of coordinated action that make up the lifeworld of a workgroup.()

So through their linking activities his archaeologists are bringing a very particular kind of ‘lifeworld’ or world into play, one enacted and sustained through materially bound activities that keep certain relations stable and others mutable. If you are advocating this kind of attention to interaction then I am all for it. 
My basic premise in the Interactions article builds on precisely this shift from a empirical project that relies on ready-made categories and relations, to one that is genuinely about how the relations are enacted and what the enactments mean for the worlds we live in. I argue this matters for technology because in designing and building technical systems we are affording (and indeed ) certain ways of knowing and doing. We are implicated in that world making that Goodwin observes, but in our case we are giving real shape to the instruments and processes that might bring things, practices, knowings, normativities, etc. into being. We are designing vast arrays of Munsell chart-like systems and the processes that give them authority to claim things about and enforce certain orders in the world.
Finally, it’s this recognition of our inevitable participation in performing worlds, even when we valiantly try to resist a priori categories, that I claim we must show a . The narrow concern for how technical things support or mediate an exceptional human endeavour elides the shear diversity of and possibility for different and new figurings — it is to start too late, it . An openness to the unfolding relations — not just a fixation on a few but in all their varieties — invites us to be far more careful about the worlds we live in; we see that we have some part to play (even though it will always be ) and have a great deal at stake in how we want to live, and how we might make things better.

The post Back to interaction (a reply to Barry) appeared first on Alex Taylor.