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The supervisory energies of Bill Gaver and Mike Michael have been boundless. Bill you have helped me develop an academic account of design practice that owes much to the intelligence and incisiveness of your own writing. Mike your provocative treatment of public engagement and generous dealings with speculative design have enabled an analytical account of these practices. I have benefited from substantial feedback from my upgrade examiners Sarah Kember and Jennifer Gabrys, and responded to the insightful comments of my viva examiners Carl DiSalvo and Jonas Löwgren in the body of this final transcript.

In this paper, we describe the failure of a novel sensorbased system intended to evoke user interpretation and appropriation in domestic settings. We contrast participants' interactions in this case study with those observed during more successful deployments to identify 'symptoms of failure' under four themes: engagement, reference, accommodation, and surprise and insight. These themes provide a set of sensitivities or orientations that may complement traditional task-based approaches to evaluation as well as the more open-ended ones we describe here. Our system showed symptoms of failure under each of these themes. We examine the reasons for this at three levels: problems particular to the specific design hypothesis; problems relevant for input-output mapping more generally; and problems in the design process we used. We conclude by noting that, although interpretive systems such as the one we describe here may succeed in a myriad of different ways, it is reassuring to know that they can also fail, and fail incontrovertibly, yet instructively.

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