Reflective design
Abstract
As computing moves into every aspect of our daily lives, the values and assumptions that underlie our technical practices may unwittingly be propagated throughout our culture. Drawing on existing critical approaches in computing, we argue that reflection on unconscious values embedded in computing and the practices that it supports can and should be a core principle of technology design. Building on a growing body of work in critical computing, reflective design combines analysis of the ways in which technologies reflect and perpetuate unconscious cultural assumptions, with design, building, and evaluation of new computing devices that reflect alternative possibilities. We illustrate this approach through two design case studies.
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There is a counter-tradition in HCI that treats friction as a resource rather than a defect.
“These observations connect to a counter-tradition in HCI that treats friction as a resource rather than a defect, from reflective design (Sengers et al. 2005) to slow technology (Hallnäs and Redström 2001) and seamful design (Chalmers 2003;Inman and Ribes 2019;Ehsan et al. 2024).”
From From Oracles to Productive Friction: Designing for Meaningful Human Oversight in Clinical AI (2026) · cites this paper as Sengers et al. 2005
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“…can be accomplished a variety of ways: actively setting out to make the familiar strange [3], introducing and encouraging ambiguity as a resource and not as a factor to be eliminated [19], and building open-ended systems where the reflection itself is an irreducible part of the final experience 2.”
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From Oracles to Productive Friction: Designing for Meaningful Human Oversight in Clinical AI
Rubegni, E., Natali, C., Valsecchi, C., Rizzo, S., Ayoub, O., & Facchini, A. (2026) · Proceedings of the AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society · doi:10.1609/aies.v9i3.43300
- Authors
- Sengers, P., Boehner, K., David, S., & Kaye, J. '.
- Affiliations
- Culturally Embedded Computing Group, Ithaca, NY
- Venue
- Proceedings of the 4th decennial conference on Critical computing: between sense and sensibility
- Publisher
- ACM
- Published
- 2005-08-20
- Pages
- 49-58
- Cited by
- 747
- References
- 3
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