Tyler Fox

As issues of climate change become more apparent and intertwined with our daily lives, calls for action amplify. The causes and effects of anthropogenic climate change (rising temperatures and oceans, drought, wildfire, famine, refugees within the paradigm of late-stage capitalism) equate to a wicked problem. Yet, the problem is not humanity's alone. Living nonhuman organisms experience ecological shifts and disruptions also. Climate change requires a more-than-human perspective if we are to approach these problems ethically. HCI has become increasingly interested in the projects, visions, and narratives that investigate this complexity. However, research and pedagogy do not always emerge at the same rate; questions of how to teach this remain. In this article, we offer a description of and reflection on two of our courses from September-December 2020 and March-June 2021, offered at the University of Washington, Seattle, as examples of Value Sensitive Speculative Design (VSSD) i...

Copyright held by the owner/author(s). CHI’20,, April 25–30, 2020, Honolulu, HI, USA ACM 978-1-4503-6819-3/20/04. https://doi.org/10.1145/3334480.XXXXXXX Abstract This paper introduces the notion of making as a pedagogical practice in HCI education. Our focus is on generative design teaching in HCI that prioritizes collaborative engagements across a wide range of material encounters. We take the view that HCI education without a critical view of the relationship between people and objects results in abstract reasoning that runs the risk of an impoverished basis in praxis. To support this position, we provide a series of examples from our own teaching. Through these examples we locate our work in the field of new materiality and post-human design asking the question: How can HCI education account for the material turn? We observe that there is important theory-building work to be done in this area and propose some methods and a direction this work could take. HCI education remains do...

Gilbert Simondon’s philosophy of individuation and technology provide valuable conceptual tools for understanding contemporary, technologically-based artworks – what we consistently refer to as “new media.” Simondon offers a form of analysis that brings the functional, or operational, aspects of the machine to the fore. It is a model of analysis well suited to understanding technologically-based artworks. That is to say, to understand how a work of technological art mediates between humans and the world, we must begin with its functions and not with the audience. This is especially true for responsive or interactive works that physically relate to the world through sensors. Simondon understands a technical object based upon its functionality within a specific, localized milieu that is also conditioned by the object’s functions. The environment sustains the machine, but is also changed by the machine. Simondon calls the resulting environment the “techno-geographic milieu.” It is a ca...