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Conceptualising Resourcefulness as a Dispersed Practice
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In research on health and wellbeing, resourcefulness is seen as an important skill that can improve quality of life. In design and HCI literature, it has long been acknowledged that resourcefulness is about more than human skills and involves the adaptation, modification and reinvention of technologies in everyday life. In this paper we argue how certain aspects of resourcefulness have so far remained under-theorized, and present a new design perspective on resourcefulness that is grounded in practice theory. In this view, resourcefulness is conceptualised as the dispersed practice of dealing with everyday crises of routine. By elaborating on the complex interplay between means and purpose, we tease out resourcefulness as a practice of reconfiguration. The paper closes by discussing implications of this conceptualisation by zooming in on ways of capturing and designing for resourcefulness.
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... En este sentido, en este ensayo se analizan investigaciones que critican la actitud de diseñadores, investigadores y formuladores de políticas que parecen conceptualizar la edad como una deficiencia y a los adultos mayores como incompetentes, cuyas necesidades se pueden mapear y resolver a través de intervenciones tecnológicas (Peine y Neven, 2018;Peine, 2019). En contraste, se muestra que negocian activamente con los diversos aparatos que componen su mundo y su vida, así como la transforman con sus prácticas (Lassen, 2017;Kuijer, Nicenboim y Giaccardi, 2017;Joyce y Loe, 2010). En este escenario, no utilizar dispositivos tecnológicos y evidenciar el rechazo hacia algunos de estos son resultados posibles válidos de sus negociaciones (Kania-Lundholm, 2019). ...
... El envejecimiento ha sido entendido como una parte del curso de la vida dominado por el deterioro físico y cognitivo, donde la tecnología puede intervenir y analizarlo como un problema social, para el cual proporciona un "triple triunfo" en la medida que alivia las consecuencias sociales del envejecimiento, brinda a los adultos mayores una vida mejor y fomenta el crecimiento económico debido al desarrollo e innovación de tecnologías para los adultos mayores Neven, 2015). Así entendidas, la ciencia y la tecnología estarían separadas de las experiencias del envejecimiento, y es por eso que Peine et al. (2014, p. 199) sugirieron que los adultos mayores deberían entenderse más bien como "cocreadores activos", ya que ellos han sido y son, en muchos casos, consumidores activos y usuarios ingeniosos, más que ineptos receptores (Kuijer, Nicenboim y Giaccardi, 2017). Por lo tanto, ellos están "bien preparados para usar la tecnología como un recurso, es decir, para seleccionar, modificar y usar activamente la tecnología para dar significado e identidad a sus vidas" (Peine et al., 2015, p. 203). ...
... Esto, a menudo, significa deshacerse de las cosas o negarse a adoptarlas consciente y deliberadamente, en lugar de ser un problema atribuible a su falta de capacidad. Por lo tanto, el enfoque del análisis debe centrarse en la co-construcción de la tecnología y los adultos mayores, a medida que estos introducen o rechazan artefactos en su vida cotidiana, o la manera en que los ponen en usos imprevistos (Kuijer, Nicenboim y Giaccardi, 2017;Giaccardi et al., 2016). ...
Este ensayo crítico busca contribuir a la discusión emergente en América Latina sobre la relación entre el envejecimiento y las tecnologías digitales. Para ello, parte de la problematización de ideas deterministas sobre la apropiación de la tecnología por parte de los adultos mayores y su inclusión digital. Se discute la postura de este grupo frente a la tecnología y se contrasta esta posición humanista con enfoques posthumanistas del llamado "giro material", los cuales han considerado la co-construcción o constitución mutua entre adultos mayores y la tecnología, y argumentan en contra de ontologías esencialistas. Se sostiene que el envejecimiento es un proceso que sucede de manera conjunta a distintos artefactos, así como a discursos, políticas, normas, entre otros aspectos. De esta manera, se propone que el estudio sobre la relación entre adultos mayores y tecnologías digitales vaya más allá de la discusión sobre distintas formas de apropiación y se enfoque en su co-construcción.
Palabras clave Tecnologías de la información; Envejecimiento; Vejez; Brecha digital; Digitalización; Internet.
... standing of current and future situations (Desjardins & Wakkary, 2013). Besides offering important insights into design-use complexities, these studies also offer possible strategies for professional designers to 'design for everyday designers', e.g., designing interactive artefacts that invite appropriation and adaptation (e.g., Kim & Lee, 2014 .;Kuijer et al., 2017). They argue that recognising the practice of everyday design is not about equating it with professional design practice, but about engaging in dialogue (e.g., Boeva & Foster, 2016;Raff & Melles, 2015). ...
Contemporary understandings of vulnerability highlight its critical, relational and enabling aspects. Through leveraging these understandings, this article contributes to conceptualizing the notion of everyday design by interweaving it with that of vulnerability. A case study brings vulnerability into view by zooming out from and in on everyday practices around an aquarium in a paediatric oncology ward. Subsequently, we unravel the notion of vulnerability as used in design research and in anthropology and philosophy: while vulnerability grounds everyday design philosophically and ethically as a form of care, everyday design challenges the tendency to situate vulnerability in (relations between) human beings. Our article thus exemplifies design anthropology understood as bringing in dialogue theory and methods from both anthropology and design.
... It demands abandoning 'set ways', adopting alternative life and work models, and to continually craft, nurture, and grow personal resources (including intellectual, social, and emotional capitals) in conscious ways (Gratton, 2011). As artefacts and tools increasingly matter, "resourcefulness is about more than human skills", capitals, and resilience; it entails the ability to "adopt and adapt technologies, incorporating them into (working) practices", systems, and routines (aligning unaccustomed contexts and means) which allow "for emergent properties to arise" (novel outcomes and ends) (Kuijer et al., 2017). Resourcefulness and generativity are, hence, closely allied. ...
This peer-reviewed Article is a re-structured and expanded version of an InSite-2000 conference paper by the same authors titled: "Entropy, Generativity, and Rugged Fitness Landscapes as the Means to Rationalize a Paradigm Shift in Knowledge Management" (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/342365773).
Aim/Purpose: As traditional Knowledge Management (KM) struggles to support the personal needs of knowledge workers in a new era of accelerating information abundance, we examine the shortcomings and put forward alternative scenarios and architectures for developing a novel Personal KM System (PKMS).
Background: While prior publications focused on the complementing features compared to conventional dynamic KM models, our emphasis shifts to instantiating a flourishing PKMS community supported by a Digital Platform Ecosystem.
Methodology: Design science research focusing on conceptual analysis and prototyping.
Contribution: The PKMS concept advances the understanding of how digital platform communities may serve members with highly diverse skills and ambitions better to gainfully utilize the platform’s resources and generative potential in their personal and local settings.
Findings: We demonstrate how the needs to tackle attention-consuming rising entropy and to benefit from generative innovation potentials can be addressed.
Future Research: As this article has iteratively co-evolved with the preparing of a PKMS implementation, business, and roll-out plan, the prototype’s testing, completion, and subsequent migration to a viable system is of primary concern.
... Because resourcefulness is a dispersed practice that is difficult for the human eye to observe and capture (Kuijer, Nicenboim, & Giaccardi, 2017), we invited five household of people in between 65 and 78 years old as well as their domestic objects to take part in the thing ethnography. Human participants included four females and one male living independently at home, two of which with their spouses. ...
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 other in ways that do not involve us at all.
Smart home technologies with the ability to learn over time promise to adjust their actions to inhabitants’ unique preferences and circumstances. For example, by learning to anticipate their routines. However, these promises show frictions with the reality of everyday life, which is characterized by its complexity and unpredictability. These systems and their design can thus benefit from meaningful ways of eliciting reflections on potential challenges for integrating learning systems into everyday domestic contexts, both for the inhabitants of the home as for the technologies and their designers. For example, is there a risk that inhabitants’ everyday lives will reshape to accommodate the learning system’s preference for predictability and measurability? To this end, in this paper we build a designer’s interpretation on the Social Practice Imaginaries method as developed by Strengers et al. to create a set of diverse, plausible imaginaries for the year 2030. As a basis for these imaginaries, we have selected three social practices in a domestic context: waking up, doing groceries, and heating/cooling the home. For each practice, we create one imaginary in which the inhabitants’ routine is flawlessly supported by the learning system and one that features everyday crises of that routine. The resulting social practice imaginaries are then viewed through the perspective of the inhabitant, the learning system, and the designer. In doing so, we aim to enable designers and design researchers to uncover a diverse and dynamic set of implications the integration of these systems in everyday life pose.
Since the introduction of the iconic Aware Home project [39] in 1999, the notion of "living laboratory" has been taken up and developed in HCI research. Many of the underpinning assumptions have evolved over the past two decades in various directions, while the same nomenclature is employed - inevitably in ambiguous ways. This contribution seeks to elicit an organized understanding of what we talk about and when we talk about living lab studies in HCI. This is accomplished through the methods of discourse analysis [66, 69], a combination of coding, hypothesis generation, and inferential statistics on the coded data. Analysing the discursive context within which the term living laboratory (or lab) appears in 152 SIGCHI and TOCHI articles, we extracted five divergent strands with overlapping but distinct conceptual frameworks, labeled as "Visited Places," "Instrumented Places," "Instrumented People," "Lived-in Places," and "Innovation Spaces." In the first part of this article, we describe in detail the method and outcome of our analysis that draws out the five strands. Building on the results of the first part, in the second part of this article, each of the five types of living lab is discussed using some of the prototypical examples of that kind presented in the literature. Finally, we discuss the raison d'être and future position of the living lab as a method within HCI research and design and in relation to advances in sensing technologies and the emerging world of intelligent built environments (e.g., smart city and smart home).
Since the introduction of the iconic Aware Home project [39] in 1999, the notion of “living laboratory” has been taken up and developed in HCI research. Many of the underpinning assumptions have evolved over the past two decades in various directions, while the same nomenclature is employed—inevitably in ambiguous ways. This contribution seeks to elicit an organized understanding of what we talk about and when we talk about living lab studies in HCI. This is accomplished through the methods of discourse analysis [66, 69], a combination of coding, hypothesis generation, and inferential statistics on the coded data. Analysing the discursive context within which the term living laboratory (or lab) appears in 152 SIGCHI and TOCHI articles, we extracted five divergent strands with overlapping but distinct conceptual frameworks, labeled as “Visited Places,” “Instrumented Places,” “Instrumented People,” “Lived-in Places,” and “Innovation Spaces.” In the first part of this article, we describe in detail the method and outcome of our analysis that draws out the five strands. Building on the results of the first part, in the second part of this article, each of the five types of living lab is discussed using some of the prototypical examples of that kind presented in the literature. Finally, we discuss the raison d’être and future position of the living lab as a method within HCI research and design and in relation to advances in sensing technologies and the emerging world of intelligent built environments (e.g., smart city and smart home).
In the current Internet of Things (IoT) environment, objects are tagged with sensors without a clear understanding of people’s individual and collective patterns of behaviour. We argue that designers can create more meaningful and effective networked objects through collaborating with ethnographers and Machine Learning (ML) experts. In this paper, we present the approach and preliminary insights of two analysts from those disciplines on the same data set, and speculate on how they complement one another and the design process. Ethnographic data can indicate the questions that are interesting to study with ML algorithms and help interpret the data generated by ML by positioning it into wider socio-cultural situations. Ultimately, this collaboration can inspire designers to create meaningful products, services, and processes of IoT.
Drawing from a study of everyday home practices from a material objects’ perspective, this chapter examines the potential that a thing perspective holds for both design and anthropology. In doing so, the chapter challenges anthropocentric assumptions about the world, and opens up ways of understanding relationships among people, objects and use practices that would be difficult to elicit through traditional observations and interviews alone.
As humans, we shape objects, and objects shape us in return. Acknowledging this ongoing interaction among people and objects calls for approaches in both design and anthropology that give both parties an equal role. We argue that adopting the perspective of a ‘thing’ that is situated within social relations and has different skills and purposes than humans, can present new ways of collaboratively framing and solving problems. Equipped with software and sensors, things can have access to fields, data and perspectives that human ethnographers do not, and therefore may help see what is not immediately apparent.
This paper discusses an innovative approach to the design of technologies for older people. The approach contains a critique of “gerontechnology” as taking decisions out of the hands of older people and materializing what it means to live healthily and well into “foolproof” designs that easily become inappropriate in the variety of situations in which older people end up using them. The proposed design approach focuses on re-delegating such ethical decisions to the point at which technology is used. It does so by considering technologies as resources that can complement the ageing competences of older people and adapt in a variety of ways. To gain design knowledge of the way existing technologies as well as prototypes function as resources across webs of practices, and the dimensions of ‘openness’ along which they may adapt within such practices, the approach enlists networks of everyday things as co-ethnographers.
Drawing from a study of everyday home practices from a material objects' perspective, this paper examines the potential that a thing ethnography holds for both design and anthropology. In doing so, the paper challenges anthropocentric assumptions about the world, and opens up ways of understanding relationships among people, objects and use practices that would be difficult to elicit through traditional observations and interviews alone.
The ability to be creative and innovative in a society influenced by stress, lack of time, and other factors, harnessing the technology available in today's knowledge society is key towards increasing the overall productivity of a future European society. Whilst technology enables new value-chains, product and service development increasingly need to focus on true user needs in order to be successful in today's increasingly global and competitive market. New R&D and innovation methodologies need to be developed to meet the challenge of addressing those needs. This paper examines the need for involving the user and other stakeholder organisations into the innovation process, analyses the key issues regarding regional innovation, and presents a basic concept of Living Labs as a multi-contextual R&D methodology addressing those issues. The proposed Living Labs methodology contributes to the coming challenges of mass-deployment of ICT solutions as a mean to further develop the society involving the citizens. It brings the users/consumers/citizens into the system of innovation, thereby leveraging on a larger mass of ideas, knowledge and experiences etc and substantially boosting the innovation capability.