Designing invisible objects: A case study in empathy and
appropriation
Salvatore Fiore (salfiore@cs.york.ac.uk) Peter Wright (pcw@cs.york.ac.uk)
Department of Computer Science,
University of York, Heslington, York. YO10 5DD
Abstract
Current work involves examining the implications
and possibilities of adopting a pragmatist aesthetics
perspective in HCI. Specifically, emphasis is on
pursuing a better understanding of how the practice
of designing technological artefacts may be an
aesthetic experience resulting in the construction of
objects that form the focus for reflection and
meaning-making. In this position paper, we discuss
the initial phases of a developing case study
addressing the challenge for sighted designers of
constructing such a technological artefact for blind
people. The case study, adopting qualities of a
pragmatist aesthetics approach, highlights the
implications for design of the inseparability of acts of
creating and appropriating objects and emphasises
the role of empathy in designing and the search for
the aesthetic in design.
Introduction
Predominantly in response to the ways in which
technologies now pervade the everyday lives of
many people, experience has regained its deserved
importance following the ultimately hopeless project
of conceptualising humans as disembodied
processors. Rooted within analytic aesthetics, HCI
work has historically pursued the objective of
identifying and meeting requirements assumed to be
extractable from intended users of imagined
artefacts. In this context, analytic ideals of
disembodiment, and the presence of logically
independent facts in the world are represented in the
pursuit of functional, usability and, more recently,
experience requirements. However, out of a
recognition that functionality and clarity are not
enough [2], the criteria for assessing design success
have more lately been extended to encompass
wider concerns with experiences of use. HCI
researchers concerned with broader aspects of
experiences with technology, have turned towards
various interdisciplinary paradigms and metaphors,
as diverse as Literary Theory [3], Art [4] and
Pragmatist Aesthetics [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [2] for
ideation. Many such approaches share the common
goal of aiming to provide an holistic and non-analytic
understanding of human interaction and experience,
that is able to account for the ways in which people
engage physically, emotionally and intellectually with
the things and people that make up their
surrounding world.
However, experience has been adopted in a
variety of competing design approaches with
differing ideas about how it relates to design
practice. Indeed, some existing perspectives
adopting experience as a central concern may
appear to encourage more human-centred
approaches but actually suffer from the constraints
legacy to a positivist and ultimately unrealistic
pursuit of objectivity. For example, ‘Experience
Design’ advocates [10] who seek to design
experiences and others who support an orientation
towards ‘Emotional Design’ [11], essentially
classifying users within categories of predictable
behaviours. Doing so disregards the wealth of
experience brought to the interaction by a person’s
prior experiences and individual way of being, as
well as an object’s history and the uniqueness of a
situation. It also fails to account for the inseparable
integration of thinking, feeling and doing in
aesthetic experience.
At the same time, user-centred empathic
approaches to design [12], while seeking to
understand users and their experiences more
holistically, have not yet overcome the problem of
the designer being unable to really access the
subjective experiences of a person s/he wishes to
empathise with. The designer cannot see through
the eyes of another, feel what another feels or
develop meaning as any other person would,
much of this revealed within the work of
Shusterman [1][18]. As such, approaches that
situate the designer in the user’s domain only
really enable the designer to know how they would
themselves feel in that situation, rather than truly
establish empathy towards the other person. The
danger in believing that such empathy represents
a certainty and knowledge of what a user feels,
thinks, senses and ultimately wants, is in the
denial of agency for both the designer and user in
constructing experiences around a thing, as
opposed to the object directing and limiting the
possibilities for experience.
In an effort to avoid such a lack of agency, some
approaches to design are developing to be more
critical and reflective in nature, extending the
relevance of HCI to influence and echo the details
and subtleties of everyday life [4] [13] [14]. At the
same time, such critical perspectives blur
borderlines that separate disciplines and concerns
between the ‘scientific’ and the ‘artistic’. Perhaps
then, further overcoming divides between the
artistic and the scientific by looking towards an
alternative aesthetics of interaction is one way of
establishing a better understanding of aesthetic
experience and requiring a more deeply-rooted shift
in practice and perspective.
Pragmatist aesthetics [1] [15] [16] [17] [18] [19]
provides a more human-centred description of
experience which this research takes as its starting
point. We adopt pragmatist aesthetics as a guide, in
an attempt to better understand what it entails to build
empathy for others in design and support the qualities
of aesthetic experience for the people who create,
perceive and use technological artefacts.
Making sense of aesthetic experience
It is the very nature of experience when understood
as aesthetic which creates problems for cognitive
and behaviourist approaches to HCI and design
work.
From a pragmatist perspective, an experience has a
consummation and fulfilment, rather than just an
ending, giving a sense of completeness and
enabling the experient to label the experience with
an individual quality and self-sufficiency that sets it
apart as unique. This individualising quality which
makes an experience intrinsically worthwhile is
neither distinctly emotional, practical nor intellectual
although experience is pervaded by a unifying
emotion throughout. Each emotion is undergone in
direct connection with specific circumstances and
context, so that joy felt at one time is unique from
what we may also be inclined to label as joy at
another. The importance of this is that emotion acts
as a unifying force in an experience, functioning “like
a filter through which perceptions are screened” [19,
p11] and giving experience an aesthetic quality. Our
sense of engagement with the happenings and care
for the outcomes thus help make the experience
fulfilling. As such, there is no scientific formula
designers might employ for supporting ‘an aesthetic
experience’: Any normally complete experience may
be said to have an aesthetic quality and intrinsic
meaning residing in it and the symbolic value of
emotion is critical in shaping this aesthetic.
But value and meaning in experience are not
isolated to emotion. When we are in experience, we
cannot describe it but only act in it and respond to
events, objects and situations. While this may firstly
suggest problems for HCI approaches trying to work
from users’ own accounts of their experiences, there
are deeper implications for our understanding of how
people experience objects. As soon as we attempt
to describe a situation and consciously reflect on its
significance, we exit it and enter another,
transforming the previous situation into an object.
While in an experience, though, we may have a
sense of the situation, referring to “the situation itself
and not simply to the feeling the situation
engenders” [19, p.20]. As such, the sense of a
situation is an immediate meaning which is itself
directly felt [15] so that it becomes possible to
sense or feel the situation without first creating an
object out of it through reflection. However, when
we encounter a situation that lacks coherence, or
doesn’t ‘make sense’ we seek out elements and
relations within the situation to reveal its meaning
for us [19], thus introducing the role of intellect in
making sense or meaning out of an experience. In
this way, intellect, and emotion work together as
we interact with objects, events and situations.
This is further complicated by the assumption that
objects and events are virtually inseparable, given
the fact that every object carries with it a past and
a future and is therefore an event in itself. In other
words, objects are events with meaning whose
character has been transformed through inquiry
and which will play a role in the conscious shaping
of future experience [19]. As such, while we give
meaning to events when we abstract and objectify
them, that meaning may always change. As
Jackson notes, “An object is always an
abstraction. It is like a sketch of the thing itself, a
sketch in which certain features are highlighted
and others overlooked.” [ibid, p25].
It is further pertinent for our understanding of
design that we select objects from our
environment and give them meaning for the
purposes of both utility and enjoyment. Such
objects embody qualities which suggest potential
for action and the construction of meaning. In this
way we appropriate the things we encounter with
respect for the historical significance they carry, by
inference
and
imagination
of
possible
consequences: We give things a meaning that no
other person can and which we would not imagine
for any other object in any other situation. In the
same way, the aesthetic of a technological object
is “a result of the human appropriation of the
artefact” that is “released in dialogue as we
experience the world.” [20, p.271]: We create the
meaning of an object not only as we imagine and
make it, but also as we use it, change it, work with
it and make it a part of our experience. The
artefacts a designer makes then, achieve
significance and meaning only when appropriated
through active and critical reception, such that the
object is to be appreciated in its creation and use.
However, meaning also emerges through
knowledge about an object’s history: Encountering
a chair which was sat on by Michelangelo to
observe the Sistine ceiling, the aesthetic quality of
the experience and enjoyment of that chair is
changed remarkably. The chair makes the
perceiver think about the artist as no other chair
can in a way disconnected from its appearance or
formal properties. At the same time, that meaning
is personal for the perceiver and would be
inexistent for a person who knows not of
Michelangelo or the Sistine chapel. Another chair
may be of sentimental value to the perceiver and full
of intrinsic or expressive meaning, for example
expressing the care of a loved one in carving it as a
gift, while yet another chair may have extrinsic
meaning, instrumentally linked and confined to the
cognitive understanding that, for example, it can be
sat on. The Michelangelo chair differs in that it is
fundamentally aesthetic in nature and enjoyed for its
own sake. And the layers of meaning the perceiver
could give it, while ultimately endless, are
inextricably linked to reality and the existence of the
chair. Such meaning comes neither from the formal
properties of the chair, nor as an invention of mind,
but rather emerges from the play of imagination in
direct relation to the perceiver’s ideas about and the
presence of the chair. A person can have a sense of
an experience with ‘Michelangelo’s chair, but more
importantly, s/he can consciously appropriate the
chair’s meaning to make sense of he/his
experience.
It is in this act of appropriation of the history of a
thing that the perceiver is able to construct the
meaning of the chair as more than a functional
object. Experiencing it, they can have a sense of
something intangible; a sense which pervades the
moment that is perhaps something like awe,
wonderment, fascination and delight. Reflecting on
the experience brings forth the conscious recounting
of it and perhaps thoughts about how this chair
came to be here, wondering what it meant to
Michelangelo or imagining him seated on it, for
example. In all this though, the perceiver is also
aware that the chair is a chair and that chairs carry
significance as objects to be sat on, to be used as
symbols of power, to give comfort or provide a
platform to reach up higher, etc. But the aesthetic in
the experience is rooted in the way in which this
object is meaningful for an individual in a way that
teaches him/her something about him/herself and
other things: offering opportunity for growth and
transformation of understanding and experience and
making enjoyment of the object so much deeper.
Design as an aesthetic experience
The question from here then, is whether or not this
aesthetic experience can be purposefully embodied
in objects by their creator. And, moreover, can a
designer provide me with that same sense of
extrinsic enjoyment of a technological object; turning
technological materials into eloquent expressions of
meaning?
While artists create artworks, turning materials at
hand into a medium of expression, able to embody
meaning as s/he transforms such materials through
his/her own vision and unique experience, the
meaning of the object is limited to that expression.
Making the connection to the meaning in the object
can only come from the perceiver appropriating it.
As such, we are forced in this light to begin
recognising the presence of the designer as an
expressive subject in the creation and making
meaning of the artefact, subverting analytical HCI
practice that puts the user at the centre, makes
the interface invisible and anonymises the
designer. In short, adopting such a Pragmatist
understanding of aesthetic experience implies a
different way of understanding the experience of
creating technological artefacts.
Certainly the focus in this should be on the actual
use of objects in appreciative experience rather
than on fetishizing the objects themselves as finite
and incorruptible ends. In relation to this, if
appropriation is seen as a process of creative
production where the perceiver actively constructs
the aesthetic object, the line blurs between the
dichotomous and dualistically defined roles of
designer and user. In this light, making and
perceiving are interdependent wherein the artefact
itself is always becoming as people understand it,
actively interpret it, appropriate it and ultimately
create new objects.
Importantly though, such notions of interpretive
appreciation and construction of meaning do not
imply any suggestion that a person’s appreciation
of an object is about merely transforming it to
mean what they want, as this would deny all the
enrichment and pleasure achieved from submitting
ourselves to it’s alterity and seductive power [1]
The point is simply that
“Experience
involves
both
receptive
undergoing and productive doing, both
absorbing and responsively reconstructing
what is experienced, where the experiencing
subject both shapes and is shaped. The notion
of experience…links artists and audience in
the same twofold process. Art, in its creation
and appreciation, is both directed making and
open receiving, controlled construction and
captivated absorption.” (ibid, p.55, emphasis
added)
In the context of HCI, this suggests that while the
creative act shapes both designer and artefact,
appreciation (by a ‘user’) is also an act of creative
production. As such, while the aesthetic
experience may begin with the ‘user’ it responds
directly to the history of the thing as event, which
the ‘designer’, by expressing through the object,
has played a significant role in shaping.
It is this point which most significantly suggests
the importance of examining the experience of
HCI design itself, raising questions about the value
of the creative process. In particular, how can we
embody in HCI practice, the pragmatist ideals of
design as a process of self-development, change,
discovery and of reflection that is felt and sensed
as well as intellectual? Whose values are
represented within the object? Who is the creator of
an object? And further, who is the object for?
We simultaneously move away from a conception of
the designer as detached observer of another’s
experience, towards an emphasis on understanding
the other person and their experiences, in relation to
ourselves [21] so that the essence of empathy with
others lies in “…moving what was Other, through our
understanding of their independent selfhood and
experience, into relation with us…” [ibid, p31].
Appropriation then becomes the basis for creation of
objects and experiences, whereby the designer
reaches an understanding about something and
transforms it with respect to its own qualities or
creates something new from their understanding.
Appropriation also becomes the focus for aesthetic
experiences of using an object as people
understand and construct meaning around it.
Developing Empathy through appropriation
In
this
research,
exploratory
reading
of
autobiographical narratives [22] [23] [24] [25] [26]
[27] has brought to the fore the relevance of these
implications when the designer’s way of perceiving
the world differs fundamentally from the people who
will use and perceive the intended artefact. While all
experience is subjective and unique, the significance
of understanding experience as embodied becomes
more evident when the people who will perceive it
are blind (or otherwise physically disabled). Design
both for and as aesthetic experience then becomes
a process of constructing objects to connect with
others whose experiences the designer, by virtue of
his/her own phenomenology, cannot understand.
Just as a person cannot know another by putting
him/herself in their situation, a sighted person
cannot know what it is to experience blindness by
merely wearing a blindfold or turning out the lights.
The reading of autobiographies by and about
blindness provide documents of unique experiences
of blindness and seen collectively, help develop a
picture of how blindness is not an experience of
itself but a way of being that alters the conditions for
experience. Clearly, experience, whether blind or
sighted,
is
always
experience;
unique,
intersubjective,
embodied,
meaningful
and
emotionally intoned. However, if we are to turn the
materials at hand into some eloquent expression of
meaning, if we are to develop a chair that will be
enjoyed for its own sake, we need to find some way
of connecting with the people who we hope will
appreciate this new object.
We can search ways of providing a useful chair to a
blind person; listening to and interpreting their stated
needs and constructing an object which we know will
meet them. For example, we might identify in the
autobiographies how blind people use sound to
locate things and navigate space, and give the chair
some auditory capability to make it easy to find in a
room. We would then have satisfied our useful
function as builders of an accessible artefact. We
might further try to embody some intrinsic meaning
in the object; by presenting our auditory chair as a
device that helps a blind person feel more control
over a space by being able to remotely identify the
location of the object that would otherwise have
been memorised in numbers of steps or made
present by feeling the way or with the assistance
of a sighted bystander. These are certainly worthy
objectives of design. However, what is missing
from this scenario is the aesthetic connection
between object, ‘designer’ and ‘user’. In creating
such a chair without attention to aesthetic
experience, we would have failed to do any more
than respond to some of the practicalities of
blindness. Driven by the technological possibilities
of implementing an auditory interface, we would
merely have built a (possibly) useful object in
response to one observable characteristic of being
blind; the auditory navigation of space. And,
although we would have been able to say that we
now have greater awareness of this characteristic
and of how blind people use objects, we would not
have
understood
anything
more
about
experiences in being blind or how to create some
object that connects meaningfully with such
experiences in the same way that the
Michelangelo chair might have done for us.
So, we try instead to understand better about
being blind. This is a process that is more
accessible and uncomplicated than it might seem.
Reading the narratives, we do so not to analyse
them, but to understand as subjective readers. As
we are confronted by difficulties in understanding,
we try to interpret [1] [7], but do so always as a
way of making sense of our own experience of
reading. We cannot, for example, have the sense
of an experience of not knowing what the visual
appearance of a person is, or make sense of how
such non-knowledge could bear no personal
meaning for us. But we can become more aware
of our own understanding of blindness and begin
to explore ways of expressing that understanding
in an object in the hope of connecting better with
other people.
As such, we take freedom in exploring the
autobiographical narratives and in constructing a
new artefact out of our appreciation for the
experiences recounted. This artefact, a story
about a chair [28], embodies our own
understanding of blindness and explores, through
fictional narrative, some possibilities of interaction
with an interactive chair. We, in this way,
appropriate the autobiographies and transform
their significance through the creation of the story
artefact.
But clearly we have not created a chair yet. For
now, it is just an idea, linked to fictional characters
in a story, all fruit of imagination in connection with
the narratives read.
However, passing the story to an artist 1, we are
presented after weeks of careful sketching, by a
storyboard2. This storyboard presents new meanings
to us. The artist has taken the story and
appropriated it, transformed it and given it new
meaning. Situations are embodied visually in a way
not imagined previously and characters, interactions
and events are more complete. The artist has made
his own appropriation which we can now take
forward for further phases which will give form,
functionality and situation to the chair.
References
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
Conclusions
The process of developing this chair is not complete.
Nonetheless, it is a process that has already opened
opportunities for feeling design as an aesthetic
experience. In this sense, we are less concerned in
this paper with elucidating a precise methodology
than with establishing a coherence with a pragmatist
conception of aesthetic experience in the design
process. Building the actual chair in collaboration
with other designers and engineers will in future be
an opportunity to explore if such an object will be
appreciated by people for its own sake. For now
though,
the
artefacts
being
created
as
representations of designers’ appropriations of the
chair, are themselves meaningful and aesthetic.
Identifying a way towards design as an aesthetic
experience is a necessary part of establishing any
support for aesthetic experience for people using
and perceiving objects. If aesthetic, the experience
of using a thing is inseparable from the experience
of creating it. As such, the inseparability of creating,
perceiving and appropriating must be taken as
fundamental if we want to design in a way that
supports aesthetic experiences with objects as
events; with design, like art, as experience.
As the case of trying to understand blindness shows,
empathy with others comes not through entering the
field or asking questions, but by appropriating the
objects created through experience and making
sense of the experience of doing so.
As a case study in design as/for aesthetic
experience, this research is providing opportunities
for reflection on the hopelessness of trying to
establish some form of analytic checklist for design
that will lead more-or-less reliably to aesthetic
experiences and is instead suggesting the benefits
of opening the way to a more artistically-led
approach based on pragmatic empathy.
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1
Our thanks to Mikey Ball for his artistry in creating
the storyboard.
2 The storyboard will be presented at the workshop,
along with the story.
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