James Pierce

Making Multiple Uses of the Obscura 1C Digital Camera: Reflecting on the Design, Production, Packaging and Distribution of a Counterfunctional Device

This paper describes and explains details of the design, production and packaging of a counterfunctional device: The Obscura 1C Digital Camera. We further describe a small-scale distribution of Obscura 1C packages into everyday contexts. The paper then reflects on the various types of conceptual, imaginary and firsthand uses made of the Obscura 1C. These include its uses for everyday audiences as a unique camera and as a conceptually usable device. But we also prioritize uses particular to the HCI and design audience. These include using the Obscura 1C to articulate the concepts of inhibitive interfaces, counterfunctionality, and enabling limitations. The Obscura 1C is further used to articulate how abstract ideas can be translated into material forms, to rethink the role of packaging in user studies, and to draw attention to how discursive design objects are packaged and presented.

Real-Fictional Entanglements: Using Science Fiction and Design Fiction to Interrogate Sensing Technologies

We present a set of design fiction proposals related to sensing and tracking technologies, inspired by the 2013 science fiction novel The Circle. By creating design proposals that explore connections between the novels imagined world and our present and future realities, we show that we are able to explore, expand, and articulate a range of social, technical, and legal configurations of the future. This paper contributes a set of design fiction proposals and a case study of a design project that uses design fiction inspired by a science fiction text to engage issues of privacy and surveillance. The paper also provides a new approach to creating design fiction, by using science fiction texts as a starting point.

Design Proposal for a Wireless Derouter: Speculatively Engaging Digitally Disconnected Space

This Pictorial uses design as a way to imaginatively and critically engage with digital disconnectivity as the obverse reaction to an increasingly hyperconnected, sped-up, and always-on digital world. Design is practiced here as a mode of inquiry and the outcomes presented as conceptual tools.

Crafting a place for attending to the things of design at CHI

Over the past two years, we have organized workshops at the CHI conference that have focused on the “Things of Design Research. The goal of these workshops is simple: to explore and develop a venue at CHI for research through design (RtD) practitioners to materially share their work with each other. RtD often centers on the making of things— artifacts, systems, services, or other knowledge in the interaction-design and human-computer interaction (CHI) research communities. Yet, over the years, we have felt that the things of design research have remained conspicuously overlooked, under-engaged with, and, for the most part, absent from the CHI conference. If RtD is to continue to develop as a research practice in the HCI community—and we want to build a community of designers doing research with and through designed objects—we need more things at CHI.

Addressing Network Anxieties with Alternative Design Metaphors

Optimism and positivity permeate discourses of smart interactive network technologies. Yet we do not have to look too far or too deep to find anxieties knotting up on the horizon and festering below the networks glistening surface. This paper contributes a set of concepts, tactics, and novel design forms for addressing network anxieties generated through a design-led inquiry, or research through design approach. We present three technically grounded metaphors illustrated with examples selected from our exploratory design process. Weaving together concepts from surveillance studies, cultural studies, and other areas of the humanities with our visual and physical design work, we help draw attention to under-addressed concerns within HCI while proposing alternative ways of framing and engaging design issues arising with network technologies.

An Interface without A User: An Exploratory Design Study of Online Privacy Policies and Digital Legalese

Privacy policies are critical to understanding ones rights on online platforms, yet few users read them. In this pictorial, we approach this as a systemic issue that is part a failure of interaction design. We provided a variety of people with printed packets of privacy policies, aiming to tease out this forms capabilities and limitations as a design interface, to understand peoples perception and uses, and to critically imagine pragmatic revisions and creative alternatives to existing privacy policies.