Casting things as partners in design

Abstract

Elisa Giaccardi Understanding how we live with things, and in turn, how things come to live with us calls for methodologies that go beyond a focus on humans. As scholars, from material culture studies to object-oriented philosophies, we have come to appreciate the agency and social life of the things we make. Yet as designers, we fail to move past the blind spots of our intentions and give things a voice in doing design work. We still believe that the relationship between humans and things is unidirectional: only humans make things. In the face of such negligence, design is rapidly being widened and disrupted by the flood of data technologies under the name of Internet of Things, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. These technologies have a profound effect on the nature of products and services, enabling things to “make” things too through the exchange and processing of data (e. g....