Staying open to interpretation: engaging multiple meanings in design and evaluation by Sengers, P. & Gaver, B. (2006)

This paper is concerned with the issue of interpretation: ‘the process by which users, nonusers and designers come to assign meaning to the structures and functions of computational systems’ which it frames as a central issue in HCI.

The authors posit that previous approaches to HCI, while diverging in some respects, are in agreement on the problem of and solution to interpretation. They claim that these approaches see the problem as being when users and designers have different interpretations of a system. The approaches differ from each other in terms of whose interpretation should be dominant but they share an assumption that there is a single preferred interpretation.

In contrast to these ‘single interpretation approaches’ the authors aim to demonstrate that allowing multiple interpretations of a system to coexist has potential benefits for HCI. They offer the (now somewhat dated) example of text messaging having been taken up by different user groups – teenagers, business people – for different purposes.

They outline six design strategies for supporting multiple interpretations and for each strategy give examples of technology design experiments. Arguing that, by producing richer understandings of how users and systems interact, such experiments can help with future technology design. They even suggest that this approach can make us safer – using the example of ‘naked streets’ experiments where the removal of road signs allows for multiple interpretations of a situation. Allegedly this makes people more aware of their agency and therefore behave better as drivers, cyclists or pedestrians.

The authors anticipate the criticism that theirs is a relativist position making any evaluation of systems impossible or meaningless. They address this firstly by calling for a shift in what it means to evaluate a system (again moving to a more relativist position). Secondly by stating that the designer still has ultimate responsibility for a design; they must be able to adjudicate between the different interpretations and justify their decisions. And thirdly by again outlining strategies, this time for evaluation that supports multiple interpretations.

The authors conclude by saying that single interpretation design and evaluation strategies are not always wrong but rather, that HCI will benefit from incorporating multiple interpretation strategies as an option in design and evaluation.

My reactions:

– I felt this paper clearly built on last week’s reading on ambiguity as a resource in design, which is not surprising since they share a co-author. However this paper was much more structured than the earlier one and the examples were more coherently presented (although I would take issue with some of them).

– I noted the parallels with the quantitative/qualitative debate in social science research.

– I thought a running theme of this paper was ‘what is the role of the designer?’ and a potential problem for the multiple interpretations approach is the circularity of stating that the designer has to adjudicate between different interpretations without outlining how they would do this.

– I see this paper, with its clear structure, neat examples and methodical listing of typologies, as an attempt to create order out of the potential chaos of allowing multiple interpretations to be valid.

A paper which ‘exemplifies HCI to me’ is this one.