hi I'm Tom Schofield from culture lab in
Newcastle University UK and I'm
presenting this on behalf of my
co-authors John Bowers and Diego Trujillo
Pisantie so one area that seen
substantial and varied interest in
design in HCI is in the introduction of
influences from creative writing and
literary criticism and to DIS2020 we
bring what we believe is a new example
of one such influence that of magical
realism and I'll say more shortly about
why we think that's a good idea
first we'll examine some existing
examples of the relationships
researchers have created between
creative literature criticism and design
then we'll consider for a moment how
this has presented a challenge to
dominant paradigms of doing and
conceptualizing design we ground our
interest in magical realism with the
introduction of a research project which
explored the possibility of developing
influences from magical realism into the
design of an augmented reality app our
reflections on some of the unresolved
designs within this process leads us to
examine some features of magical realism
and the challenge they pose for
doing design our contribution is as
follows we introduce magical realism as
an informant to HCI asking what a
magical realist design could look like
notably on a conceptual level we
consider how the worldview of much
design practice can be fundamentally
challenged by a critical encounter with
magical realism engaging with these two
concerns forms the contribution of this
paper we're far from the first to
consider how literature and its surrounding
critical scholarship my helpfully or
provocative refrain design in our paper
we describe a number of such influences
and people have used literature in a
couple of ways the first is the
challenge to methodology and a second is
a resource of content and it was the
second one in some ways that shaped our
expectations as to how we would use
magical realism in our work and so I'll
just give a couple of examples
so the influence of science fiction
and fantasy writing on design is
become most obvious since Julian
bleeker's formulation of design fictions
in 2009 but as he himself points out
earlier examples exist we might say that
the future orientation of sci-fi
combined with the evocative and
immersive nature of storytelling
produces a rich environment to imagine
the experience of living with future
technologies and in the paper discover
we discussed some of the problems of
exoticsism Orientalism and so forth
can go along with these moves our work
began with a similar orientation asking
what we could learn for magical realist
and treating it as a challenging topic
or resource for a critical hci
literature can bring a shift in an
understanding of what knowledge is
important and the rupture brought by new
epistemological perspectives to existing
research is described by Harrison as
making epistemological trouble it's
such a state of trouble we believe that
magical realism brings to the normal
business of interaction design the
nature of that trouble is partly in the
disruption it brings to the very process
of imagining the world and by extension
the technologies within it so donna
haraway cyborg manifesto made this
movement disrupting the core imaginary
of technological thinking it's very
mythology with the image of the cyborg
magical realism offers an opportunity to
reflect on a series of otherwise
situated imaginaries to examine how in
fiction they play out in detail through
people's lives so magical realist
literature frequently deals with
supernatural events as if they had a
distinctly everyday character indeed in
magical realist novels it's frequently
unclear whether events are unfolding
what we would commonly understand as a
magical fantastical or other worldly
setting or in the imaginations of the
protagonists and what the relationship
of such worlds is to the rest of the
diegetic context so magic is no longer
quixotic madness but normative and
normalizing it is a simple matter of the
most complicated source so says Faris
we've already described at DIS how we
undertook a
series of design workshops with
children and knowledge specialists to
develop an AR app that embedded
digitally developed versions of sketches
and notes from the archive of an author
of children's literature
David almond into a walking tour with
various interactions attaching to them
inspired by magical realist work during
the course of our development process a
number of ideas arose and rearose which
we were unable to directly at upon
within our designs in time we came to the
position that the incommensurability of
our understanding of good interaction
design on the one hand and the value and
interests of magical realism on the
other was not a shortcoming of ourselves
as to designers and developers or at least
not purely rather these were indications
that something more interesting was
going on
with our talk today we want to talk about some
ways that when we were not successful in
making these kinds of translation
thinking back to our point about the
challenges literature compose and think
about why that was so
so novels can be long and some of them very long and the
events that happen within them still
longer during our project we were
interested to explore the idea of
AR objects as sites of exchange
between publics at different times
during the day or across weeks months or
years for others to encounter later we
imagined the possibility that objects
might acquire a patina of age through
repeated interactions that degraded or
renewed them returning to magical
realism though and minded that our job
now is to treat this not as a resource
to be used but as a challenge to
thinking we remember that critics have
observed that the long intergenerational
time spans of some magical realists work
facilitate challenges between one
generation the next so in One Hundred
Years of Solitude
fantastic objects such as magnifying
glasses ice and magnets come to be
surpassed by other technologies such as
the law meanwhile Sethe the protagonist
of Toni Morrison's novel Beloved lives
constantly with the haunting of
presences from other times the tree on
her back inflicted by slave masters and
the ongoing presence of her dead baby
bring these challenges forward in ways
that strongly disrupt the present in
David Almond's book for children heaven
eyes the characters
spend time in and abandoned Printworks
which appears to exist both in current
time and parallel to it so the time of
magical realism is sometimes
foregrounded so as to provoke questions
about the difference between one
generation and the next one political
regime to another my great-grandmother's
values and beliefs compared to mine
time here is particular and it often has the
function of affording a form of social
commentary a response to examples like
this is to attempt to directly translate
them into design ideas for instance by
imagining how we might design artifacts
that lay hidden for generations we
resist such ideas however observing how
the significance of these interface
intergenerational interactions derived
their very meaning from their
embeddedness in the life world to the
characters context which cannot be
meaningfully recreated if translated out
to the diegesis and into the real lives
of people using
technology so we might legitimately ask what
we can say or imagine to explore
intergenerational time in our design
choices to do so let's return briefly to
our AR app design space we described in
the paper how it's almost certainly
impossible to design AR objects using
current tools with generational
lifespans might we though have considered the
imaginations of fictional characters who
themselves are in the position of
interpreting presences from the past as
embodied in objects and their
surrounding mythologies and others
developing their own intergenerational
imaginaries let me explain so the
ghostly baby in beloved and the gold
that continually reappears in one
hundred years of solitude all provoked
complex and imaginative retrospective
understanding in the characters who live
with them and we the reader join them
the characters in this speculative mood
let's remember that speculation can take
place of with regard to the past as well
as the future so we wonder how it can be
supported in particular we can see from
these these examples how the the perdurance
of the various remnants from previous
generations challenges the characters at
the present time we want to ask in our
designs if if examples such as these
could not provoke in us an attitude of
critical imagination towards the past as
the children's presence in the abandoned
print works in heaven eyes provokes them
to both imagine the site as it was and
to reappraise their fixedness in their
own time can we imagine design things
that similarly cast us into a state of
situated ambiguity with regard to the
worlds of the past real or imagined being
cast outside of the proper time is not
the only way the objects or technologies
have political force in magical realism
we described earlier how the ontological
disruption the rift in the way that the
world ought to be brought about by the
presence of the fantastical or marvelous
and magical realism give permission for
a cultural or political disruption in
our own work we tried to respond to themes
of haunting or in realness but these
were always limited representations that
you can see in the in the grab there the
presence in magical realism of for us
what is magical fantastical marvelous
or otherwise unreal is characterized
as part of lived experience supporting
wide and narrative strategies and novels
and allowing the expression of
socio-political
points such as foregrounding women's
voices and interrelationships in allende
and the brutalities of slavery in
morrison there's an interesting
comparison here with moves in design
literature that provoked a tactic of
making by making strangers as Bell et al
put it some authors have even proposed
haunting as a method by which to
accomplish so-called defamiliarisation
where some of such work uses the formal
qualities of ghostly presence to inspire
interactions we suggest that the
treatment of this device haunting within
magical realism differs the presence of
the fantastical is normative when within
magical realism runs counter to the idea of
defamiliarization itself rather than
making strange magical realism functions
by as we put it making the fantastical
familiar the very rhetorical work done
by asserting the strange as the normal
we suggest acts as a counterpart to the
impulse to rationalize design and that's
a valuable corrective
we're conscious that we've concentrated on the positive
perspectives brought by magic realism to
design thinking but we need to
acknowledge that the genre itself is
troubled or enlivened with debate of
gender race or other axes of diversity
and politics it's not our contention that
magical realism offers an easy path for
designers working to a more diverse
HCI or that by mimicking its style or
content we will necessarily come up with
better designs the risk of producing
parody as high as is that of
committing forms of appropriation
similarly we acknowledge that we speak
from our own positions accept that we do
not speak uniquely for magical realism
and indeed must consider carefully what
we do and do not have the right to say
about it the genre should be treated not
just as a topic nor only as a resource
but notably as a context of engagement
with this phase we intend to offer a
distinction between a resource which is
drawn upon when needed and ignored when 310 00:it:23,019 --> 00:10:26,709 there isn't and a context in which one
stages a multivalent exchange around
cultures histories theories artifacts
and practices design then becomes a
meeting point for concerns in our case
those of HCI and those of literature where
at least in principle many different and
potentially reciprocal exchanges are
possible