Designing to Reflect Our Better Nature
Published in Designing Interactive Systems (DIS), 2019
Recommended citation: Gautam, A., Stewart, M., Shrestha, C., Tibau, J., Harrison, S., & Tatar, D. (2019). Designing to Reflect Our Better Nature. In Companion Publication of the 2019 on Designing Interactive Systems Conference 2019 Companion (pp. 21-24). http://aakash.xyz/files/dis2019b.pdf
We present a set of technologies designed in our research group where the focus has been on highlighting the nuanced but critical agency of people to shape interaction with their world using and through computers. Our design stance emerged by critically seeing technology’s existing power and authority. Taken separately, design traits that promote agency are visible but not necessarily salient. This demo presents different technologies that approach this design direction from different angles and in different contexts. Through this demo, we hope to widen the discussion on the role of design to bring about a kind of power and authority that reflects us not as compliant consumers but more in terms of our better natures.