1. HCI reaches out.
"Key examples include the rise of aesthetics as an approach to user experience design [2]; the introduction of “reflective HCI” [3] to reposition the field with a more self-critical stance; as well as the use of feminist [4], queer [5], and postcolonial [6] approaches to emancipatory computing."
2. The humanities reach in.
" As alternatives, Winograd and Flores introduced Heideggerian phenomenology, biological accounts of cognition and language, and speech act theory to HCI. Offering an epistemological critique of the field as a whole and introducing an alternative epistemological stance are philosophical activities. It is easy to see that Winograd and Flores’s seminal work was in fact humanistic HCI, even if no one at that time was using the term."
3. What is Humanistic HCI?
". It is not the same as digital humanities, which is humanistic research supported by digital technologies, and which is by and large practiced by humanistic scholars (see, e.g., [9])."
"Humanistic HCI operates in the opposite direction: It is HCI research and practice that is supported by humanistic practices, theories, and methods."
4. History and tradition
"Many HCI systems are presented with little to no reference to their own historical genealogies, and the field itself has no significant histories beyond a generally shared sense that HCI has had three paradigms or waves [13,14]."
" Our expectation is that interaction design and/or HCI (whatever their relation is or will become, exactly) will develop much more of a historical sensibility in the coming decade."
5. Conceptual analysis
" During its rise in the 19th century, science began to displace philosophy as the knowledge discipline best able to account for the world. What was philosophy’s role in a scientific era? One answer was that philosophy ceased to provide doctrines and instead became an activity directed at the clarification of thoughts. As the early Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote, “The object of philosophy is the logical clarification of thoughts. Philosophy is not a theory but an activity. A philosophical work consists essentially of elucidations” [15]. Philosophy was thus moving away from producing original systems and toward the disciplined analysis of the concepts we think with."
Summary:
" overall humanistic dispositions: the attempt to take on a situation or work that is in some sense confusing; to do so holistically (rather than analyzed and operationalized into well-defined parts); to bring clarity to it; and to do so in a way that orients itself toward emancipatory change (diversely defined)."
Humanistic HCI Practices and Methods
1. Excursus: The expert subject.
2. Interaction criticism.
3. Critical discourse analysis.
" HCI examples of such critiques include studies of cultural probes [25], affective computing [26], and sustainable making [27]."
4. Critical social science
5. Design futuring.
"These strategies are commonly deployed in speculative design, critical design, design fictions, and science and utopian fiction"
6. Emancipatory HCI.
