Existential time and historicity in interaction design

Abstract

Time is considered a defining factor for interaction design (Kolko, 2011; Löwgren, 2002; Malouf, 2007; Mazé, 2007; Smith, 2007), yet little is known about its history in this field. The history of time is non-linear and uneven, understood as part of each society’s cultural development (Friedman, 1990; Souza, 2016). As experienced by humans, time is socially constructed, using the available concepts, measurement devices, and technology in a specific culture. Since each human culture produces its own history, there are also multiple courses of time. The absolute, chronological, and standardized clock time is just one of them, yet one often imposed on other cultures through colonialism, imperialism, globalization, and other international relationships (Nanni, 2017; Rifkin, 2017). Digital technology is vital for this imposition, and interaction design has responsibility for it. As everyday life becomes increasingly mediated by digital technologies, their rhythms (Lefebvre, 2004) are formalized, structured, or replaced by algorithms that structure everyday life rhythms (a.ka. algorhythms) that offer little accountability and local autonomy (Finn, 2019; Firmino et al., 2018; Miyazaki, 2013; Pagallo, 2018). These algo-rhythms enforce absolute time over other courses of time as a means to pour modern values like progress, efficiency, and profit-making. Despite the appearance of universality, these values do have a local origin. They come from developed nations, where modernity and, more recently, neoliberalism were invented and dispatched to the rest of the world – as if they were the only viable modes of collective existence (Berardi, 2017; Harvey, 2007). Interaction design contributes to this dispatch by embedding – and hiding – modern and neoliberal values and modes of existence into digital technology’s temporal form (Bidwell et al., 2013; Lindley, 2015, 2018; Mazé, 2007). In the last 15 years, critical and speculative design research has questioned absolute time in interaction design (Huybrechts et al., 2017; Mazé, 2019; Nooney & Brain, 2019; Prado de O. Martins & Vieira de Oliveira, 2016). This research stream made the case that time can also be designed in relative terms: given a certain present, what are the possible pasts and futures? Looking at alternative futures (Bardzell, 2018; Coulton et al., 2016; Duggan et al., 2017; Linehan et al., 2014; Tanenbaum et al., 2016) or alternatives pasts (Coulton & Lindley, 2017; Eriksson & Pargman, 2018; Huybrechts et al., 2017) enables realizing alternative presents and alternative designs (Auger, 2013; Coulton et al., 2016; Dunne & Raby, 2013). These alternatives often include deviations from the (apparently) inevitable single-story future shaped by digital technologies envisioned by big tech companies. The deviation expands the design space – the scenarios considered in a design project (Van Amstel et al., 2016; Van Amstel & Garde, 2016) – to every kind of social activity, even the noncommercial. Dystopian what-if scenarios reveal undesirable modern futures that certain publics would oppose to (Dunne & Raby, 2013) whereas utopian how-might-we scenarios generate desirable local futures that communities may commit (Baumann et al., 2017; DiSalvo, 2014). Each community has different perceptions of time, requiring different ways of representing time,