Heather Wiltse

• PhD
• Professor (Associate) at Umeå University

Many of the things we now live with do not take a purely physical form. Objects such as smart phones, laptops and wearable fitness trackers are different from our things of the past. These new digital forms are networked, dynamic and contextually configured. They can be changeable and unpredictable, even inscrutable when it comes to understanding w...

We relate to things and things relate to us. Emerging technologies do this in ways that are interesting and exciting, but often also inaccessible or invisible. In Relating to Things, leading design researchers and philosophers respond to issues raised by this situation - inquiring into what it means to live with and relate to things that can active...

Both perspective and leverage are needed in order to arrive at a place where it is possible to do the philosophical work required in order to adequately account for our present sociotechnical landscape. One of the key characteristics of this landscape is the collapse of scale, as things become more like fluid assemblages and the economic incentives...

As materiality of interactive artifacts is diversified with integrated physical and digital materials, metaphoric design approaches in Human–Computer Interaction (HCI) go beyond resembling the appearance of physical objects, exploring novel materials and forms of interactive artifacts. The hybrid materialities and forms of artifacts influence how i...

Contemporary connected things entail ongoing relations between producers , end users, and other actors characterized by ongoing updates and production of data about and through use. These relations are currently governed by Terms of Service (ToS) and related policy documents, which are known to be mostly ignored beyond the required interaction of t...

The design discipline is implicated in the trajectories that have led us to an unsustainable present. There is an urgency to re-direct the design discipline, so that it can become able to not only stay with past and present trouble, but also to develop other futures. To see how design museums might support change rather than preservation, we look t...

How can design museums be disentangled from systems like patriarchy, so that they become able to support change towards more justice? To explore this question, we use our standpoint as design researchers in combination with a feminist perspective. Historically, most design museums supported a path of progress which supposedly leads straight from th...

In the face of massively increased technological complexity, it is striking that so many of today’s computational and networked things follow design ideals honed decades ago in a much different context. These strong ideals prescribe a presentation of things as useful tools through design and a withdrawal of aspects of their functionality and comple...

Everyday connected things have become key sites for the production of behavioral data about people’s lives, enabling corporate actors to predict and control behavior in service of enormous profit under the economic model of surveillance capitalism. This production of data and nudging have come to be primary functions of digital networked technologi...

Emerging technologies relate to us in ways that are interesting and exciting, but often also inaccessible or invisible. In Relating to Things, leading design researchers and philosophers respond to issues raised by this situation – inquiring into what it means to live with and relate to things that can actively relate to us, and that relate to each...

Emerging technologies relate to us in ways that are interesting and exciting, but often also inaccessible or invisible. In Relating to Things, leading design researchers and philosophers respond to issues raised by this situation – inquiring into what it means to live with and relate to things that can actively relate to us, and that relate to each...

Digital networked technologies are currently at the forefront of contemporary innovation, driving changes in sociotechnical practices across industrial sectors and in everyday life. Yet technical innovation has been outpacing our capacity to make sense of these technologies and the fundamental changes associated with them. This sense-making enterpr...

In the fall of 1991 the Munich Design Charter was published in Design Issues. This charter was written as a design-led "call to arms" on the future nations and boundaries of Europe. The signatories of the Munich Design Charter saw the problem of Europe, at that time, as fundamentally a problem of form that should draw on the creativity and expertis...

The current unsustainability crises have called on design to pay greater attention to the social, political, cultural and environmental dynamics of designing. These include the processes, relations, consequences, and response-abilities of design. As design practices continue to move out of the studio and engage with ‘the social’, the character of t...

Design research has considered the power of collaboration in terms of the politics of artefacts, services and practices to build or to support publics. Working within a framework of “commons” as continuing processes of negotiation in collaboration, this study asks: How can design skills and agency build up collaborative capacities in urban communit...

One of the key features of a postphenomenological account is its attention to the multistability of artifacts and the many variations that are possible in use. In other words, any given artifact can be perceived and appropriated in a vast number of ways. Recognition and analysis of these multistabilities counters technologically-deterministic readi...

Although design continuously has been expanding its scope of concern and intervention from products to processes, experience, and entire product and service ecologies, ‘things’ remain central to how we think about design and use. but ‘things’ have changed. contemporary materials, technologies and contexts of design and use, we argue, now result in...

Heather Wiltse shares her views on the identity crisis of people who are involved in excessive use of the Internet. She states that the identities of people have been turned inside out in such interactions on the Internet. It is observed that most of the interactions of this nature lack authenticity due to the presence of a large number of fake ide...

The digital computational technologies that over the past decades have come to be fully integrated into nearly all aspects of human life have varying forms, scales, interactive mechanisms, functions, configurations, and interconnections. Much of this complexity and associated implications for human experience are, however, hidden by prevalent notio...

Emerging post-industrial societal needs require the evolution of existing networks of industrial infrastructures toward more distributed and citizen-centered configurations. This opens up new questions regarding what design processes and practices are necessary to effect change within these systems that are often deliberately not accessible and ope...

Digital technologies mediate engagement with the world by making activities visible. The automaticity and physicality of the ways in which they do this suggest that it could be productive to view them as responsive digital materials. This paper explores the structure and function of responsive materials in order to develop a conceptualization of re...

The relationship of values to technology is an important topic in the fields of information studies, human–computer interaction, media studies, and science and technology studies, but definitions and attributes of values differ within and ...

Digital technologies have become thoroughly enmeshed in everyday life, forming a backdrop of experience. We live not only with these technologies but also through them as they mediate our engagement with the world. This mediation calls for closer attention with respect to practical design concerns as well as more theoretical and philosophical quest...

Digital technologies increasingly form the backdrop for our lives, and both provide and shape possibilities for interaction. This is a function similar to that of architecture in the physical world. For this reason we suggest that it could be productive to view and critique interactive digital technologies as one might physical architecture: in ter...

Collaborative web browsing tasks occur frequently, such as one user showing another how to use a web site, several users working together on a search task, or even one user sending an interesting link to another user. Unfortunately, tools for browsing the web are commonly designed for a single user. PlayByPlay is a general- purpose web collaboratio...

The underlying motivation for our research is the need for a deeper understanding of human-computer interaction that can speak to the increasingly varied and intricate forms of interactivity and interfaces that are present in everyday life. With this purpose in mind we have examined and 'tested' an already existing theoretical framework on interact...

Communication has become one of the most popular applications of information technology. A considerable body of work addresses both theoretical and applied aspects of computer-mediated communication. However, much of this work has not been able to capture the complexity and significance of everyday communication activities and the mutual shaping of...