Peter-Paul Verbeek

User behavior and technology development. Shaping sustainable relations between consumers and technologies

Environmental policy has long been determined by a dichotomy between technology and behavior. Some approaches stress the importance of technology and technological innovation, while others focus on behavioral change. Each approach has its limitations, however, since technology and behavior often appear so closely intertwined. Human behavior results not only from intentions and deliberate decisions, but also from its interaction with technological artifacts. In the area of traffic safety, for instance, peoples driving behavior is determined as much by curves, speed bumps and the power of their motors as by considerations of safety and responsibility. How can we best describe and understand these interactions between behavior and technology? What conceptual frameworks and empirical studies are available, and how can they be integrated? And how can we bring these interactions to bear on product design and policy making? The book User Behavior and Technology Development explores these relationships between technology and behavior from an interdisciplinary perspective. This includes contributions from cognitive psychology, industrial design, public administration, marketing, sociology, ergonomics, science and technology studies, and philosophy. The book aims to create a conceptual basis for analyzing interactions between technology and behavior, and to provide insights that are relevant to technology design and environmental policy.

Editorial: Ethics and Engineering Design

Engineering ethics and science and technology studies (STS) have until now developed as separate enterprises. The authors argue that they can learn a lot from each other. STS insights can help make engineering ethics open the black box of technology and help discern ethical issues in engineering design. Engineering ethics, on the other hand, might help STS to overcome its normative sterility. The contributions in this special issue show in various ways how the gap between STS and engineering ethics might be overcome. In this editorial introduction, the authors discuss the various contributions briefly and delve into the way the various authors conceptualize the engineering design process and the consequences of those conceptualizations for what ethical issues become visible. They also discuss the implications for the responsibility of engineers for technological development.

On icarus' wings: craft and the art of hybridization

New products and technologies increasingly blur the boundaries between humans and things. This has major implications for what interaction design can be. In a world of wearable technologies, social robots, smart environments and implanted technologies, the relations we have with technologies can hardly be characterized as use anymore. Rather, concepts like immersion, fusion, implication, or even enhancement apply. In order to analyze the character of these new interactions, we need to expand existing analyses of human-technology relations, most notably the postphenomenological framework, which has traditionally focused on relations of use. This expansion of our understanding of human-technology interactions has major implications for our understanding of what craftsmanship can be. First of all, it shows that interaction design needs to take into account many new contact points between human beings and technological artifacts, which requires new material accounts of the human and new social accounts of the technological. We need a hybrid ontology in which the boundaries between humans and things are continuously redefined. Second, it shows that crafting technologies also implies crafting the self. New technologies imply new ways of being human, because they mediate human behavior and experiences in novel ways. In order to deal with these mediating powers, we need technologies of the self, to use an expression of Michel Foucault. Such technologies do not only consist in ascetic practices of using technologies, but also in ascetic design: material arrangements of the ways in which human beings are consciously and responsibly affected, influenced and enacted by technologies.

Deployments of the table-non-table: A Reflection on the Relation Between Theory and Things in the Practice of Design Research

Design-oriented research in HCI has increasingly migrated towards theoretical perspectives to understand the implications of newly crafted technology in everyday life. However, in this context, the relations between theory and understanding the things we make are not always clear, especially the degree to which the nature of research artifacts is revealed through or determined by theory. We examine a series of field deployment studies we conducted with our research artifact table-non-table over the course of four and a half years that we came to see as a postphenomenological inquiry. Importantly, our interpretations of this artifact, methodological concerns, and theoretical groundings evolved over time. We account for and critically reflect on these shifts in the relationship between theory and our design artifact. We detail how theory was enacted and embodied in our design research practice and offer insights into the complex relations between theory and things in design-oriented HCI research.

Appropriation of wearable augmented reality

Wearables, like augmented reality glasses, are more and more commercially available but uptake has been slow and concerns on social and ethical implications are raised. Current adoption theories can provide insights into the adoption or rejection process, but very few studies are conducted in this field to address the social and ethical implications of wearables. This paper provides results about the inclusion of different perspectives, namely diffusion and adoption theories, mutual shaping perspectives and philosophy of technology to study the social interactions and ethical implications of wearables as well. By following this path we would like to develop a model of appropriation in the future to get a better understanding of the acceptance and interactions of emerging technologies such as wearable augmented reality.

Ethics from Within : Google Glass, the Collingridge Dilemma, and the Mediated Value of Privacy

Following the “control dilemma” of Collingridge, influencing technological developments is easy when their implications are not yet manifest, yet once we know these implications, they are difficult to change. This article revisits the Collingridge dilemma in the context of contemporary ethics of technology, when technologies affect both society and the value frameworks we use to evaluate them. Early in its development, we do not know how a technology will affect the value frameworks from which it will be evaluated, while later, when the implications for society and morality are clearer, it is more difficult to guide the development in a desirable direction. Present-day approaches to this dilemma focus on methods to anticipate ethical impacts of a technology (“technomoral scenarios”), being too speculative to be reliable, or on ethically regulating technological developments (“sociotechnical experiments”), discarding anticipation of the future implications. We present the approach of technological mediation as an alternative that focuses on the dynamics of the interaction between technologies and human values. By investigating online discussions about Google Glass, we examine how people articulate new meanings of the value of privacy. This study of “morality in the making” allows developing a modest and empirically informed form of anticipation.

TECHNOLOGY AND USERS

The goal of the first part of this book was to identify concepts, conceptual frameworks and methods in various disciplines and areas of application that are used to describe and measure features of the interaction between technology and users. From the previous chapters it is clear that many scientific domains contain relevant knowledge for studying this relationship. However, they also show that the information is scattered and often unknown outside of a particular field. By providing an overview, this part of the book aims to take a first step towards a deepening of the understanding of user-technology interaction. The unveiling of different frameworks to conceptualize apparently similar phenomena may stimulate reflection and hopefully even invite co-operation. In the end, this may produce design guidelines that serve an easier, safer and sustainable use of technology and the well-being of its users. The following synopsis attempts to outline the various concepts and frameworks, their differences and their mutual associations by using the metaphor of a map. This conceptual map also serves to identify areas that are covered and fallow land. Before we draw the map, some introductory remarks are required. The first concerns the selection of concepts and frameworks in this part of the book. They emanate from scientific disciplines (environmental and social psychology, philosophy of technology, science and technology studies) and some specific areas of application (action theory, safety studies, and household and consumer science). This selection does not imply that other disciplines or fields do not have appropriate information: it is the result of a search that was extensive and, simultaneously, limited because of practical reasons (e.g. authors willing to participate) and the coherence of the book as a whole (some insights have a special bearing on a particular subject and are presented in other parts). We are confident, however, that most of the primary concepts are covered here. Secondly, we would like to stress that this chapter does not offer an integrated conceptual model, nor an elaborated view of the interaction process between users and technology itself. The matter at hand is far too complex for that purpose. The frameworks in the various chapters of this part of the book all have their own bearing, specific mechanisms and evolutionary history. We aim at relating these frameworks, not molding them together. As a consequence of leaving out the interaction process, global input variables (technology and user characteristics) and results (e.g. efficiency or pay-off on the side of technology and satisfaction or well-being on the user side) are not discussed either, although we recognize that these results are crucial for the reiteration of the process. We do hope, however, that the overview will contribute to future efforts to develop such a model. And thirdly, the map to be drawn does not represent an overview of the determinants of interaction. We focus on concepts that are useful to describe and analyze relations between users and technology. These concepts may be determinants, but they may also be research methods or analytical terms that encompass more or less complex issues. In the next section we will describe the metaphor of the conceptual map. Sections 3 and 4 explain the arrangement of the concepts on the map, their theoretical backgrounds, and their main differences and associations. Conclusions, including the identification of fallow land, are discussed in section 5.