work. Tsing and Ahmed ask readers to struggle against— to take in and work together across difference.

Alex Taylor joins the lively HCID Centre at the City University of London ready to rekindle an academic curiosity and nourish a new generation “to shake the foundations.”

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Daniela Rosner is an assistant professor of human-centered design & engineering at the University of Washington and co-directs the Tactile and Tactical Design Lab ( TAT Lab), a U W group dedicated to reworking the methods and margins of design.

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methods—for making possible other, more bearable worlds.

What I’m curious to hear is whether these ideas of what I’m beginning to think of as “resistances and reparations” resonate with you, and, importantly, if you see them coming through in your design research.

DR: I like thinking of these
as reparative methods—
and, in this sense, I see their
methods as invitations to
reexamine our genealogies.
The lineage of design we
receive as HCI practitioners
looks very different from
the one I inherited as an
undergraduate design
student, which looks
different from the one I
now seek to recuperate in
my recent work (exploring
the practices of women
who wove early forms of
computing memory by
hand). In these multiple
trajectories, I see possibilities
for reconfiguring what design
is today. Design might not
work toward progress or
toward ruin but instead, after
Tsing, it may help us think
with “salvage rhythms.”
It might help us notice the
uneven, contingent, and
collective work required for
change. “We have to shake
the foundations,” Ahmed
writes. “But when we shake
the foundations, it is harder
to stay up.” Does design
call for the same willful
commitment to keep going,
“to keep coming up”?
away wanting to build an
army in which we are not
afraid of putting our bodies
into it. All around us, there
are ideologies, structures,
methods, norms, and
practices that seek to smooth
things over and reduce
the ways in which we are
counted, really counted, as
being “alive with a world.”
What we need are ways to
keep pushing, resisting, and
being “sensational.” We need
our noticings to be noticed!
DR: So maybe, then, this
call to arms shakes up the
problem-solving heritage
of HCI? For good reasons,
we, as HCI scholars, tend
to frame design as a means
of accomplishing ends . But
are we also seeking out
too-easy resolutions?
These texts, by
contrast, encourage
creative listening,
in Tsing’s terms.
They show that
what is at stake
in making and
inhabiting
unpredictable
encounters is our
accountability
to those who
lose out—to
the things that
lie outside our
immediate view,
to the bacteria
that make the
soil in which many
designers mine, to
the “users” subjected to
patriarchal legacies
of innovation
Ahmed and Tsing don’t
speak directly to design, but
I wonder if you see in their
critiques and potentials—
from “decentering human
hubris” to “diversity
work”—an opening for
elaborating a different kind
of technology design? Tsing
writes, “To listen politically
is to detect the traces of
not-yet-articulated common
agendas.” As we do this
listening, this reparation
and resistance, what not-yet-
articulated common agendas
might we find?
AT: There’s so much to say
in response to this, so let me
limit my answer to what I see
to be our contemporaneous
obsession with the numbers,
counting, and simulacrums
of the marketplace. As
I see it, measurement
and market rationalities
have become preeminent
players in technology
design. They enact a
logic that masks how—in
the way Tsing shows so
compellingly— labor and
capital is strewn together
through heterogeneous
flows, disturbances, and
indeed ruin. The messiness
of a lived life. And amidst
this powerful and singular
logic there remain so few
possibilities to resist, to
“shake the foundations” and
“keep coming up.”
Tsing and Ahmed show
that we need, urgently, to
find ways to act together, to
make more possible. Inspired
by Ahmed’s language, I come

DOI: 10.1145/3145630 COPYRIGHT HELD B Y AUTHORS INTERAC TIONS. ACM.ORG

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