Materiality Matters—
Experience Materials
Mikael Wiberg, Hiroshi Ishii, Paul Dourish,
Anna Vallgårda, Tobie Kerridge, Petra Sundström,
Daniela Rosner, and Mark Rolston
tions related to how we might
conceptualize the inseparability
of digital materials, user experiences, and the social context.
Aiming to address the current
theoretical discourse in HCI focused
on conceptualizing material integrations under the notion of
materiality, we realized our panel session
was quite timely. In browsing the
technical program of last year’s
CHI conference, we noticed that it
contained at least three full papers
on materials and materiality, one
best paper, one alt.chi talk, two
Doctoral Consortium papers, two
posters, one interactivity presentation, one video presentation, and
one complete paper session explicitly focused on materiality as a way
to conceptualize these issues. We
sought to contribute to this vibrant
stream of research in our field.
March + April 2013
interactions
The theme for last year’s ACM CHI
2012 conference—It’s the experience—
underscores an important shift in
HCI research: a move away from a
perspective that treats people and
computers as two separate and
distinct entities toward a perspective that acknowledges how people,
computational materials, and even
traditionally non-computational
materials are coming together as a
whole, forming our experiences in
and of the world. This shift might
enable us to rethink what computing can be about, and, accordingly,
what experiences of interacting
with computers might include. It
also simultaneously prompts us
to conceptualize computers not
as black boxes, but as yet another
design material operating in concert
with other physical materials—
again, with a focus on what these
material assemblages can enable in
terms of new user experiences and
new practices.
At CHI 2012 we organized a panel
titled “Material Interactions—
From Atoms and Bits to Entangled
Practices” [ 1]. The panel was
specifically arranged to discuss
assemblages of digital and physical materials and how these compositions might form and enable
new experiences, as well as ques-
The Need for a Shared Vocabulary
and a Multifaceted Understanding
In the panel we acknowledged that
although the topic is highly specific,
we have developed a wide range of
Photographs of Droplet by Robert Hemsley and Henry Holtzman
• Droplet is a tangible interface that explores
the movement of information between digital
and physical. Through light-based communication, data can be extracted and presented
in a physical form, altering our perception
and understanding.