Education guide 'Eindhoven designs' - Technische Universiteit ...

Eindhoven designs / volume two
27
Technological mediation
But how does one design for social and
societal transformation? What are the
mechanisms that one can use? Philip
Ross devoted his PhD thesis to social
transformation with an emphasis on the
relation between ethics and aesthetics.
He studied how we can we design an
intelligent system or product that elicits
specific values in aesthetic interaction,
which resulted in the Perspectives on
Be¬haviour in Interaction framework,
and the Interaction Quality framework, in
addition to two intelligent lamp designs
for AEI and Luxger, which can evoke
different values in interaction (Ross,
2008). See chapter eight of his thesis for
an explanation and movies at:
http://www.idemployee.id.tue.nl/
p.r.ross/thesis/
For his work, Philip Ross used the
Technological Mediation framework of
Peter-Paul Verbeek, which builds on the
work of e.g. Don Ihde and Bruno Latour
(Verbeek, 2006). Let us briefly explain
Verbeek’s framework that gives us a
vocabulary to discuss and address social
transformation.
“Technological mediation concerns
the role of technology in human action
(conceived as the ways in which human
beings are present in their world) and
human experience (conceived as the
ways in which their world is present to
them).” (p. 363, Verbeek, 2006).
So, technological mediation has two
perspectives: experience and action/
behaviour, both with their own
mechanisms that we will explain further
on.
Transformation of
experience
Don Idhe sees two relationships for
mediating human experiences and
interpretation of reality.
Firstly, there is the embodied relationship
in which the technological artefact
becomes an extension of the human
body. Heidegger (1927; Coyne &
Snodgrass, 1993) calls this a ‘ready-tohand’
tool that typically withdraws from
the user’s attention. For example, when
looking through a pair of glasses one
perceives the environment and not the
glasses. The opposite of ready-to-hand
is present-at hand, in which the product
itself asks for attention instead of the
things you want to do with the product,
for example when it is malfunctioning.
The second relationship is called the
hermeneutic relationship, in which
a person needs to interpret (the
information presented by) the designed
artefact because it’s a representation
of reality. For example, the thermostat
represents the actual temperature, so