Abstract
In this chapter, we focus on understanding the role of non-human elements or what we refer to as things in everyday domestic practices through the concept of displacement. Our concept of displacement is informed by design research inquiries known as material speculations and postphenomenological notions of withdrawal and multistability. We use displacement alongside the philosophical concepts and design research to explore our understanding of things in theories of practice. Displacement describes how things are part of practices without us knowing fully what a thing is, its direct use by humans, or the particular practices they are embedded within.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
See a comprehensive report and discussion of this deployment study in Wakkary et al. (2017).
References
Baird, Davis. 2004. Thing Knowledge: A Philosophy of Scientific Instruments. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Bennett, Jane. 2009. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Bogost, Ian. 2012. Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Desjardins, Audrey, and Ron Wakkary. 2013. Manifestations of Everyday Design: Guiding Goals and Motivations. In Proceedings of the 9th ACM Conference on Creativity & Cognition (C&C ’13), 253–262.
Ihde, Don. 1990. Technology and the Lifeworld: From Garden to Earth. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Latour, Bruno. 1987. Where Are the Missing Masses? The Sociology of a Few Mundane Artifacts. In The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology, 225–258. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
———. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Odom, William, and Ron Wakkary. 2015. Intersecting with Unaware Objects. In Proceedings of the 2015 ACM SIGCHI Conference on Creativity & Cognition (C&C ’15), 33–42. ACM Press.
Reckwitz, Andreas. 2002. The Status of the ‘Material’ in Theories of Culture: From ‘Social Structure’ to ‘Artefacts’. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 32 (2): 195–217.
Rosenberger, Robert, and Peter-Paul Verbeek. 2015. A Field Guide to Postphenomenology. In Postphenomenological Investigations: Essays on Human-Technology Relations, ed. Robert Rosenberger and Peter-Paul Verbeek, 9–41. Lanham: Lexington Books.
Schatzki, Theodore R. 1996. Social Practices: A Wittgensteinian Approach to Human Activity and the Social. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.
Shove, Elizabeth, Matthew Watson, Jack Ingram, and Martin Hand. 2007. The Design of Everyday Life. New York: Berg.
Shove, Elizabeth, Matt Watson, and Mika Pantzar. 2012. The Dynamics of Social Practice: Everyday Life and How It Changes. Los Angeles, CA: SAGE.
Strengers, Yolande. 2014. Smart Energy in Everyday Life: Are You Designing for Resource Man? Interactions 21 (4): 24–31. https://doi.org/10.1145/2621931.
Verbeek, Peter-Paul. 2005. What Things Do: Philosophical Reflections on Technology, Agency, and Design. University Park, PA: Penn State Press.
Wakkary, Ron, Audrey Desjardins, and Sabrina Hauser. 2016. Unselfconscious Interaction: A Conceptual Construct. Interacting with Computers 28 (4): 501–520.
Wakkary, Ron, Audrey Desjardins, Sabrina Hauser, and Leah Maestri. 2013. A Sustainable Design Fiction: Green Practices. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction 20 (4): 23:1–23:34.
Wakkary, Ron, and Leah Maestri. 2008. Aspects of Everyday Design: Resourcefulness, Adaptation, and Emergence. International Journal of Human–Computer Interaction 24 (5): 478–491. https://doi.org/10.1080/10447310802142276.
Wakkary, Ron, William Odom, Sabrina Hauser, Garnet Hertz, and Henry Lin. 2015. Material Speculation: Actual Artifacts for Critical Inquiry. Aarhus Series on Human Centered Computing 1 (1): 12.
Wakkary, Ron, Doenja Oogjes, Sabrina Hauser, Henry Lin, Cheng Cao, Leo Ma, and Tijs Duel. 2017. Morse Things: A Design Inquiry into the Gap between Things and Us. In Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS ’17), 503–514.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Wakkary, R., Hauser, S., Oogjes, D. (2019). Displacement: Attending to the Role of Things in Theories of Practice Through Design Research. In: Maller, C., Strengers, Y. (eds) Social Practices and Dynamic Non-Humans. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92189-1_8
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92189-1_8
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-92188-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-92189-1
eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)