Hello, my name is Ron Wakkary, and I'll be speaking on behalf of my co-authors,
Doenja Oogjes and Armi Behzad.
Now our paper focuses on a rethinking or reconceptualizing
of the concept of interactions.
Interactions is central to our field of human computer interactions.
However, we feel that we need a more expansive way of understanding the
relationships between humans and computer.
So we prefer the term relations rather than interactions.
This idea of rethinking interactions in HCI is not new.
They bring critiques from feminists and techno feminist perspectives and
new challenges of emerge when thinking about critical race theory and the
anthropocene . Now our approach is design research, so we're not philosophers.
So in addition to researching, through designing things, we developed
particular methods to guide our research, namely material speculation and co
speculation that we use in this study.
A key feature in the study is what we call polylogues.
So these are conversations that emerged from two years of discussing, these
ideas with philosophers who live with our counterfactual artifact, a tilting bowl.
We analyzed the various polylogues that emerged from the study and derived three
themes that we believe are helpful in refining and exploring this concept
of new relations in relation to HCI.
These include non-anthropocentric care, non presumptive knowing,
and ideologized relations.
So material speculation is the situating of counterfactual artifacts in everyday
setting, and we believe by doing this.
This creates a site for critical inquiry.
Now the counterfactual artifact in this study is a tilting bowl.
Now the bowl tilts periodically and infrequently and random
and at random intervals.
The other method we use in this study is what we call co-speculation.
So co-speculation is recruiting of participants with particular backgrounds
who can actively and knowingly speculate with us on our research questions.
So, at the very outset of the study, we share our goals and we share our research
questions with our co-speculators.
Particular to co-speculations is that the insights and speculations emerge not only
from the expertise of our co-speculators, but from their lived experiences
of the counterfactual artifacts.
So we ask them during the course of the study to live with the things we make.
In addition to co-speculation, we use the notion of polylogues.
Now, polylogues in its practical sense as described by the linguist
Catherine Kerbrat-Orrecchioni describes any multi-participant conversation.
However, we also draw on its use by Julia Kristeva, a feminist semiotician
philosopher who saw in polylogues a way to describe the intertextual, dialogic
and polyphonic, uh, nature of the subject.
And so we want this, these qualities in our own polylogues.
This notion of intertextuality, the translations and retranslation not
only just, not only between us and our co-speculators, but also how we translate
and speak on behalf of the tilting bowl, now Cissie's polylogue focused on ideas of
existential care and non-anthropomorphic care and not knowing and absurdity.
Bec's polylogue discussed ideas of utilitarianism and technological
ideologies and non-human companionship.
Rob discussed presence, ideas of presence and autonomy.
So of the themes that we analyzed, uh, I have time to discuss and give
a brief overview of one and that's non-anthropocentric centric care.
So this idea began with discussions with Cissie, and she presented
us, she gave us a paper by Harry Frankfurt on care, and which there
were multiple dimensions of care.
And the most important one was existential care that can be
described as what to care about.
And for Cissie, this.
what kind of relationship she wanted with the bowl or how to make
that relationship with the bowl.
Now, key features of existential care is that it doesn't require reciprocity.
So Cissie did not feel she needed to have resonance with the tilting bowl.
In this way, existential care is performative.
What is important is not the thing that you care for, but
the act of caring for something.
Now from ideas of existential care, we developed notions of
non-anthropocentric care, which we felt that empathy was not at the center of.
So non-anthropocentric care could be said to be not be empathy and
not empathic, and it is not knowing.
So this was the idea that you didn't need to know the thing you cared for.
In fact, even not knowing it was a form of care.
So Cissie in our main discussion, could articulate, uh, and in depth and in
multi-dimensional ways, the degrees to which she carried for the tilting bowl.
But she also pointed out the obvious that it's impossible to put herself
in the shoes of a non-human entity.
So empathy was not at the center of her caring for the tilting bowl and Bec.
described the Tilting Bowl as a companion in many ways.
Uh, but she was clear to make the distinctions between the companionship
she felt with the Tilting Bowl and that she felt with her cat Gertrude stating
again, the obvious that the tilting bowl does not feel pain or pleasure
when it came to not knowing.
Rob, for example, could pose a question like, knowing he could not answer it,
can a plant choose to end his life or grow in a less habitable patch of dirt?
But this not knowing and this limit of the subject did not limit the
degree to which or the type of care he would have for a plant.
And the same was true of the tilting bowl.
Cissie saw in this not knowing of, of, of the thing that she cared for.
She translated that into listening or not being presumptive.
So for example, She wouldn't put stuff in a bowl simply because it was
a bowl, or she would quite literally listen to the bowl, as you heard
probably in the previous video, that it makes quite a sound when it tilts.
So she would move it around her apartment as types of sonic experiments.
Now to conclude , this paper is an exploration of reconceptualizing and
rethinking the notion of interactions and human computer interaction as
a matter of relations in, in an expansive and multiplicitous way.
Also, we engage this inquiry in a polylogic and lived with fashion and we
described a non empathic not knowing form of care of things that we described that
we labeled as non-anthropocentric care.
So we look forward to your questions.
I really appreciate you listening.
Thank you.