Making Monsters: the Joy of Creation, the Fear of Death and the Ethics of Interaction Design
Ann Light
Curiosity, inventiveness and the desire for novelty… all these qualities come into the reckoning when
we consider interaction design. We observe with delight the resourcefulness that users apply to
making standard tools work better for them. And this everyday appropriation is only a pale shadow
of the ingenuity of the designers who conceived the devices, or the industrious scientists and
engineers who furnished the technologies on which they are based. Some of that ingenuity is
applied to making life happier, profounder, kinder, sexier and more fun. But similar technologies are
also applied to controlling environments, managing people, increasing productivity and enhancing
safety and security. Our vulnerabilities as tender and perishable animals have inspired a set of
applications which seek to turn the environment into a person-sized protective layer, ready for
storms, fires, wild beasts and other humans competing for finite resources. Thus, interactive
computing systems are the latest in a long line of tools designed as part of two very human impulses.
In this document, I discuss each through the writing of a commentator on the relation between
culture and technology. I draw on Stiegler’s technics (1998) and Virilio’s military-industrial complex
(2000) and examine how these social critics address the nature of humanity through our making of
technology, as a prelude to discussing our responsibility as makers and researchers.
The first of my commentators is Bernard Stiegler, who takes on Heidegger’s analysis of the relation
between people and technology and argues that it is impossible to separate “organised inorganic
matter” (namely technics) from the evolutionary development of the human being. He positions
technics as primordial, since it was/is a process of externalisation - or the ‘pursuit of life by means
other than life’ - that allows us to capture and share our existence. Technics, for Stiegler, makes
temporality possible and with it our historical experience of time, memory, and consciousness. It is
what allows the shared inheritance of past possibilities – through language, technique, and culture –
that we reactivate through future projection to individuate ourselves in relation to our shared
community. In other words, we need no justification for the act of inventing – it’s what we do as
humans and to be human. Externalisation is as old as we are and we can only know ourselves
through it, both in the sense that it provides the lens and in the sense that, for us, there was no
before the imagining, creating and recording. What we are doing with ICT is extending the reach of
our desire to preserve and share.
The other commentator is Paul Virilio, who sees speed as the primary force shaping civilization and
the pursuit of it as part of a permanent assault on the world and on human nature. This produces a
macabre interpretation of technologies of communication with their world-shrinking capacities. For
Virilio, information and communication tools are weapons that extend beyond the body and allow
for disinformation and propaganda wars as a supplement to the contact wars that have always been
waged. His criticisms of automation in general are closely connected to the development of his
concept of endo-colonization — what takes place when a political power like the state turns against
its own people, or, as in the case of militarized techno-science, the human body. In this reading of
technology, we are in thrall to our fears, giving power to the apparatus that magnifies and distorts
our anxieties about safety, adequate resources and survival into crushing socio-technical processes
which finally threaten our wellbeing in a variety of different ways.
This dark vision, which regards invention as the product of a will to overcome and control, is in
contrast to the inventiveness of Stiegler’s humanity, but compatible with it since we are embodied
creatures that must always exist in the context of our own mortality. Making is intrinsic, but what we
make is not only informed by a desire to pass culture forward, but also by our angst as fragile
ephemeral beings. Making accounts for buildings and structured settlements but also the ravaging of
other species and the destruction of habitats, including our own. Left to run rampant, anxiety
produces a world that addresses human vulnerabilities but simultaneously exploits them for the
perpetuation of the state and - more recently - the depoliticizing neoliberalism of the free market. In
other words, a principal reason we invent is to protect ourselves from our harsh and ultimately fatal
environment and, in so doing, damage both ourselves and that environment. In which case, we
need every justification for what we invent and how it is used.
Indeed, the stories we tell ourselves about technology - the fiction and the newspaper reports that
pervade our culture - speak of monsters. Sometimes it is the inventor, sometimes the invention that
is un-human and/or anti-human in its ambitions or actions. The monsters we describe to scare
ourselves threaten life and are seemingly unstoppable. These tales might be regarded as stories of
conscience; as parables: a collective telling of the significance of regarding technics as an interaction
embedded in life and part of a highly developed ecology of people, artefacts and processes.
Behaviour that does not acknowledge this context is portrayed as psychopathic. It is interesting to
reflect on the film The Corporation (2003) and related book The Corporation: The Pathological
Pursuit of Profit and Power (Bakan 2004), which narrates the growth of the company as psychopath,
ruthless in pursuit of a single interest, unconcerned with social norms and others’ needs, free of
empathy and ready to appropriate anything for a quick profit. Noam Chomsky is interviewed in the
film: “Corporations were given the rights of immortal persons [in the USA]… but then special kinds of
persons, persons who had no moral conscience… a special kind of persons which are designed by law
to be concerned only for their stockholders …and not, say, what are sometimes called their
stakeholders, like the community or the work force or whatever.” These corporations drive the
pursuit of technology in Virilio’s vision, in partnership or tension with the state, harnessing our
gleefulness and fear and behaving as the seemingly unstoppable monster. It is not the robot or
computer, but what automation, computerisation and networking have enabled our psychopaths to
carry out in terms of organisation and spread that calls for heroes...
In contrast to the giant transnational commercial structures of late capitalism, individual humans
(and therefore designers and design researchers, social scientists and all those who observe and
steer the shaping of technology) have a moral nature. Implicit in the theory of technics as primordial
is recognition of a human power to reason and attribute cause and effect. With such attribution
comes a sense of responsibility. And as Voltaire (1734) rejoindered in a discussion about the
selfishness of self-interest, it is through (the recognition of) our mutual needs that we are useful to
the human race. But there is increasing evidence that we are not just motivated by a rational and
thus enlightened self-interest. Recent neuroscientific research suggests that disgust at selfishness
and desire for fairness are as hard-wired as making activities, overriding logical analysis (see Tabibnia
et al 2008). So, while we might not wish to curtail our unbridled creativity or admit our fear, we
share a potentially conflicting feeling that selfishness is unacceptable and that mindfulness and
ecological sensitivity (see, for example, Blevis 2007, Buckmaster Fuller 1969, Papenak 1985, Sengers
et al 2005, Suchman 1987) must also be part of any design process. And while this emotion may not
feature strongly in the practices of technological innovators or the minds of the despots that use
technologies to control others, it is alive in the HCI researchers working in response to untrammelled
inventiveness by finding application for it.
This last impulse, for fairness, is of a different order than many of the design considerations that we
consider important, such as wellbeing, sensuousness, affect, connection and intimacy, since it
supports the social conditions in which these can be meaningful. It requires us to reflect on our
embodiment and our situatedness, informing the design choices we make as creatures embedded in
our world through our technologies. We can only prevent the construction of monsters with
hindsight, but applying more foresight is within our grasp and we can design tools that help us (Light
2011).
There are, it is clear, major questions to be asked about what we design. There are also more subtle
nuances to this argument about the role of researchers. Social science/design researchers are
perfectly placed to observe the invention and exploitation processes of new technology creation and
contribute to the development of new, more considered, practices through reflective and critical
activities. We might ask how far ethics is our business. How far is intervention, through data
collection, commentary, or more deliberate action research, itself an ethical business? And we might
argue that the act of interpretation that underpins all social science and design research, when we
make sense and attach salience and value to a phenomenon, is the basis of ethics and inseparable
from it. For many years we have been asked to make interaction better at the level of the individual
machine or network. Here is an argument to apply broader social knowledge in the service of
relations between people, artefacts and processes. This is a different kind of interaction design and
one which acknowledges that, given our antecedence, ethics is inseparable from observation.
References
Blevis, E. (2007) Sustainable Interaction Design: Invention & Disposal, Renewal & Reuse. CHI’07
Buckmaster Fuller, R. (1969) Operating manual for spaceship earth, Southern Illinois University
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Light, A. (2011) Digital Interdependence and How We Design for it, Interactions, Mar/Apr 2011
Papanek, V.J. (1985) Design for the real world: human ecology and social change (2nd edn),
Academy, Chicago
Sengers, P., Boehner, K., David, S. and Kaye, J. (2005) Reflective design. Proc. CC '05, ACM Press, 4958.
Stiegler, B. (1998) Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus, Stanford: Stanford University
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Suchman, L. (1987) Plans and Situated Actions: The Problem of Human-Machine Communication.
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Tabibnia, G., Satpute, A. B., & Lieberman, M. D. (2008) The sunny side of fairness: Preference for
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