The polysemy of human–computer interaction
pp. 175-190
in: Hannakaisa Isomki, Pertti Saariluoma (eds), Future interaction design II, Berlin, Springer, 2009Abstract
This chapter provides exemplars of the influence of digital artifacts upon cultural experiences. We argue that the associations between people and artifacts, and specifically digital artifacts, is an increasingly dense, interwoven, and pivotal aspect of everyday cultural experience. Artifacts themselves resist any stability of meaning by being continuously disassembled and reassembled into newly meaningful assemblages. Digital artifacts extend this complexity by accelerating and extending cultural relationships both temporally and geographically, resulting in a wider range of potential and actual relationships in an expansive number of contexts. Through the connections that digital artifacts hold to people, there is a continuously fluid polysemous multivocality that incorporates the multiple and expansive parameters of power, meaning, and cultural knowledge. The human ability to alter and repurpose artifacts to suit immediate and shifting needs prevents any innate definitional quality from making a "table" a table or a "blog" a blog. Purpose and meaning of an artifact is continuously defined and then redefined between individuals and across time, beyond the reach of the original designers or manufacturers.