Binding the material and the discursive with a relational approach of affordances

Abstract

As Norman's vision of affordances developed twenty-six years ago is unable to address complex challenges faced by today's designers, we outline a view of affordances as discursive relations in HCI design. This argument is framed in the discussion of a larger trend of work beyond the HCI field, the scholarship on relational affordances from the fields of communication and organization studies. Through comparison and interrogation, we maintain a relational approach of affordances that bind the material and the discursive will help us to address design issues such as discursive power, cultural values, performed identities, mediated agency, and articulated voices in this increasingly globalized world and design culturally sensitive technology for transformation and emancipation. With a few cases, this paper deciphers the hidden power relationship of interaction design and suggests ways of we should design for social affordances.

Mobile technology affordance and its social implications: A case of “Rain Classroom”

“…Affordance can address the broader spectrum of social surroundings. Sun and Hart‐Davidson () furthered the notion of technology capacity to social practices. They held that social forms of the actors could be illustrated “…on various levels including the individual, the community, and the society level…” (Sun & Hart‐Davidson, , p. 3538).…”

Does Technology Have Race?

“…They ask, "How might design features that aim to improve efficiency and effectiveness end up hurting a user's feelings and morale, distancing him from his own community, isolating her from other users, and/or labeling him as "other"?" [49]. As Sun and Hart-Davidson inquire about how to critically understand these conceptual categories, located within the context of culturally responsive design through a discursive lens, we argue that design practices cannot be separated from the dialogic standards that inform the design fictions of how we perceive race, gender, and privilege within HCI.…”

“…Young's [59] form of intersectionality, the Lived Body Experience is perhaps most known to the HCI community in that it addresses a person's embodied interaction with the world through the intersectional lenses of their race, gender, sex, (dis)ability, age, etc. Similarly, Sun's work culturally responsive computing [48,49] and Kafai's research on ethnocomputing [18] both build on intersectionality and are known to CHI.…”

“…bell hooks rightly observed that, "Acknowledgment of racism is significant when it leads to transformation" [16, p56]. Therefore, reflexivity is one way in which we can question our own privilege and bias in order to engage with VSD as a racially and culturally sensitive practice that recruits multiple perspectives to STEM [18,41,48,49].…”

“…Sun has indicated that "Insensitive design recommendations could end up strengthening the cultural essentialism designers want to leave behind in this increasingly globalized world" [48; p61]. In order to clarify the enormous impact of how intersectionalist approaches to design inform the future of HCI, Sun and Hart-Davidson [49] caution against even inadvertent biases, which can emerge during the design process. They ask, "How might design features that aim to improve efficiency and effectiveness end up hurting a user's feelings and morale, distancing him from his own community, isolating her from other users, and/or labeling him as "other"?"…”