In their article Animistic Design: How to Reimagine Digital Interaction Between the Human and the Nonhuman, Betti Marenko and Philip van Allen suggest that uncertainty can add value to interactions with objects, prototypes, other humans, data, and things. “Animistic design, which provides a sense of intention, attitude, point of view, goals and provocation, aspires to extend people’s creative thinking into a digitally augmented, tangible world and make complexity and ambiguity useful.” As ubiquitous computing and IoT connected devices become increasingly present, these kinds of approaches may prove to be instrumental in removing the “black box” element of such technological systems. Animistic design could also provide a more meaningful connection with “things” whose functions may not be readily apparent to us today. It makes me wonder… what kinds of information could we begin to visualize through these unpredictable interactions, and how would this challenge our current paradigms?
Animistic Design: How to Reimagine Digital Interaction Between the Human and the Nonhuman