On the “surface” and “depth” layers in

anthropology and Human-computer

interaction

A seminar paper

Bc. Jakub Ferenc

(ERASMUS student)

Ethnography in Theory and Practice

SS 2017/2018

University of Bonn

Charles University (in Prague)

Introduction to the HCI field

At this moment I consider Human-computer interaction to be one of the most intellectually

stimulating fields dealing with the relationship between humans and technology. There are
myriad reasons for this praise. Among them is the simple fact that in today’s world, called by
many scholars variously as the information age, network society or post-industrial and cognitive
age (Castells & Cardoso, 2006, p. 4-5; Imbesi; Dijk, 2006, p. 19), technology and technological
work are deeply interwoven into the structure of our societies. The ever-closing integration of
technology and humans is manifested by contemporary approaches such as the Ubiquitous
computing and Internet of Things, with sensors and smart devices monitoring, analysing and
predicting what we do, or could or should do. To study both technology and society then
demand that we consider their mutual influences and co-constitution; the approach that goes
beyond the myopic variants of technological or sociocultural determinisms.
The HCI field seems to be well-equipped for the task. In its genes has the focus on all the
necessary components: humans, technology and the design and evaluation of their interaction.
The broadly accepted beginning of the computer-based era of HCI can be traced to the year of
1983 when the book The psychology of human-computer interaction was published (Card,
Moran, & Newell, 1983). The text applied the contemporary research in psychology and
cognitive sciences to studying individual users and designing, evaluation and testing of
information systems (Carroll, 2003; Turner, 2016). The book also brought to HCI the then-
dominant cognitivistic paradigm. Cognitivism presupposes that everything that matters to
cognition, sense-making, or even the mind is found between the boundaries of skull and skin,
everything else is just the input sense data that are processed by the brain and send as an output
to bodily functions. The mental states and cognition can be compared to the workings of a
digital computer because cognition is seen as information-processing and manipulation of
mental representations in the form of physical symbols and following of fixed, algorithm-like
rules (Brey, 2001, p. 41; Winograd, 1987, p. 25). Under the influence of cognitivistic paradigm,
the HCI thrived and its ideological coherence was proclaimed the golden age of the field
(Carroll, 2003).
With the advent of personal computing, computer technology has shifted from an expensive
and arcane tool for specialists to become a common work accessory and recently a set of smart
devices that accompany us everywhere. In addition, the computing concepts such as ubiquitous
computing and Internet of Things have announced the continual disappearance of technology
and its embedding into the socio-technical fabric of contemporary life. These technological
changes in the society impacted the HCI field as well. Suddenly, the static space of an office
desk and sterile laboratories were incapable to capture the complexity and “messiness” of
technology use in every day’s contexts. New related domains to HCI such as Computer-
supported cooperative work (CSCW) emerged, focusing on the work context and diverse types
of interactions between a worker and the group. Furthermore, participatory design methods
emerged during the socialist government rule in Scandinavian countries of the 1970s and 1980s
to foster democracy at work, promoting the cooperation between designers and workers who
provided a domain-specific expertise.
Crucially, even within the fields of HCI and cognitive science were voices critical of the
cognitivistic dogma: cognitive scientists, philosophers, artificial intelligence researchers or
anthropologists like Don Norman, Hubert Dreyfus, Terry Winograd or Lucy Suchman offered
critical evaluation of cognitivism and its image of human cognition as a disembodied mind
imposing abstract and value-free reasoning upon the world. The mentioned academics were
looking for a radically different intellectual framework that would oppose the limiting
cognitivism. They found the answer in the ideas of the phenomenological philosopher Martin
Heidegger. Especially, Dreyfus’ critique of the then-dominant cognitivistic program in the
artificial intelligence research (Dreyfus, 1979; Dreyfus, 1992) introduced Heidegger to the
whole, then predominantly technical fields that had been struggling for some time in fulfilling
the promises of creating a truly general artificial intelligence.
Later, Winograd and Suchman provided a cogent critique of cognitivism and rule-based
cognition in HCI (Winograd, 1987; Suchman, 1987). By suggesting that a user of computer-
based systems, such as handling of a complex office printer, on which Suchman did her
empirical research, does not follow rules, but instead interprets the situation with the help of
pre-existent knowledge and is solving problems ad-hoc based on the available resources at
hand, brought to the mainstream light in HCI the phenomenological ideas of hermeneutics and
the concept of being-in-the-world. Phenomenologically influenced novel approaches in HCI
started to stress the importance of “embodiment” and “situatedness” of human action,
contextual aspects of sense-making and a tightly coupled relation between humans and
technological artefacts, which brought HCI close to social sciences. HCI practitioners started
to appropriate sociological and anthropological methods for gathering information and
requirements for system design. Cognitive science also moved away from dogmatic
cognitivism, instead embracing alternative approaches to study the mind and cognition, often
called, in contrast to cognitivism, post-cognitivistic (Kaptelinin & Nardi, 2006). Apart from
activity theory, distributed and extended cognition, Kaptelinin and Nardi re-introduced
phenomenology to HCI.

Technology as a medium
Scholars in the philosophy of technology and new media studies (Deuze, 2015; Manovich,
2002; Verbeek, 2015) agree that technologies mediate all aspects of our lives and it is
increasingly difficult to get away from the situation, which led Mark Deuze to propose that
instead of combating the technological mediation, we should accept it. It resonates also in the
work of a Czech phenomenologist, professor Miroslav Petříček, who writes that:
“Through media we get access to the world and reality, they are a tool for understanding
the reality […] simultaneously by media we share our knowledge about the reality: our
relation to the reality is not direct, it is mediated, between our cognizing and the reality
stands the medium – in the sense of a fatal split or a gap. The medium enables the contact
with the reality, but this contact is conditioned (realized by a distance), it is simultaneously
the reference to the loss of immediacy, innocence.” (Petříček, 2009, p. 13)

Petříček and other phenomenologist studying technology, most famously post-

phenomenological philosopher of technology Don Ihde (1990), are suggesting a radical rupture
between the human and the world: not only does technology extends quantitatively our already
existing capabilities, but also brings about qualitative changes that were not necessarily
consciously designed for. Verbeek (2015) gives his favourite example of ultrasound
examination as a disruptive technology, enabling future parents to see the unborn child and
decide his or her future according to the information provided by the interface screen and other
analytical measurements. But even other, more typical technologies such as microscopes,
telescopes, cars, internet have opened up before us new worlds and possibilities that have been
transforming our relationship to the world and even to ourselves since their introduction. It was
the media theorist Marshall McLuhan (1991) and Don Ihde (1990) who articulated the notion
that introducing a new technology has a profound effect on our lives. The effect is not in the
form of determinism, but in what Ihde calls non-neutrality of technology, which always
amplifies and reduces certain parts of our reality for its functioning. For example, a microscope
reveals to us a new, microscopic realm of the reality, but at the same time reduces our ability to
perceive the “normal” realm of everyday reality.
Technology is a medium between humans and the world. It ties them together in a new system
of human-technology-environment relations. To study the life of a human community,
especially in the technologically developed parts of the world, it is necessary to include the
technology into the equation. Conversely, the study of how technology influences our lives as
well as the study of the current use of technology for the specification of future technological
design requires from HCI field incorporating anthropological methods. It is then reasonable to
look into the anthropological literature to find about how it treats studying the complexities of
human behaviour. The anthropologist whose work I am going to explore in the following
section is Tim Ingold, who fittingly represents a phenomenological orientation to the theoretical
and philosophical problems in anthropology.

Anthropological view on cognition and perception in Tim Ingold

Naturally, other fields also stumbled upon the question of what role plays cognition and the
environment in our behaviour. Anthropology is one of the fields that discusses implicitly the
same problematic assumptions of the cognitivistic paradigm that we mentioned in the context
of HCI. Anthropologist Tim Ingold summarizes in his book The Perception of the Environment
the differing positions on cognition of two leading intellectuals of the 20th century: Gregory
Bateson and Claude Lévi-Strauss. Both assert that the mind is a processor of information which
falls under the umbrella of cognitivism, yet there are also differences.
As Ingold writes, “[f]or Lévi-Strauss, both the mind and the world remain fixed and immutable,
while information passes across the interface between them.” (Ingold, 2001, p. 18). For Lévi-
Strauss, there is no significant connection between the inner and the outer of our minds.
Ontologically speaking, the mind and the world are distinct entities, not contributing to each
other nor co-constituting the essence of the other. Because of that, Lévi-Strauss represents the
traditional dichotomies of Western intellectual heritage existing since Descartes. His view
privileges the idea of universal, abstract intellect, observing the world from the a-contextual
and value-free point of view resembling how we conceptualize the ideal case of scientific
thinking. Ingold adds in his essay that Lévi-Strauss saw cognition as an information-processing
that operates on the data coming from the senses which are already pre-structured, and it is the
task of the mind to re-construct this already present structure of the sense data. It suggests that
for Lévi-Strauss the world itself is pre-structured, waiting for us to pick the reality up if our
senses are attuned to the world correctly.
On the other hand, Bateson sees the mind as fundamentally embedded in the world, being a part
of the totality of the organism-environment system. Bateson’s view on the relationship between
the mind and the environment is much more ecological in the sense that the entities do not have
a fixed nature but their “ontological identity” is continually re-negotiated through the dynamic
interactions between the components of the ecological system (the mind, the environment).
Bateson gives us a famous example where we are to imagine a blind man with a cane (Bateson,
1973). According to Ingold. Bateson maintains that the cane for a blind person is so crucial to
her orienting in the world that it functions as an artificial sensory addition to the natural five
senses.
Bateson’s perspective of the ecological closely maps the assumptions held by Ingold. In fact,
Ingold’s agenda is to dismantle the old dichotomies of nature and culture. Instead, agreeing
with Bateson, he proposes “the dynamic synergy of organism and environment, in order to
regain a genuine ecology of life” (Ingold, 2011, p. 16) whereby the ecology should analyse the
human and the environment as one, indivisible unit. The focus of the study would, therefore,
be the “organism-environment relations” and the mutual interactions thereof.

Figure 1 Schematic comparison of Lévi-Strauss's and Bateson's views on mind and ecology as presented by Ingold (2011, p. 18)

This ambitious view on the integration of humans into their environment as being by definition
inseparable for the purposes of the analysis poses several theoretical and practical challenges.
The significance of our environment presupposes that not all findings can be neither
universalised nor transferrable over different contexts without losing the original purpose or
meaning. The role of the meaning of human actions and even artefactual objects is also context-
dependent. Moreover, the environment changes and suggests new ways of “doing and
comprehending things”. Not surprisingly, Ingold, therefore, talks about the organism-
environment unit, not as an object, but a process and a constant flux of differences that come
together for a period of time just to be changed again.
To speak of environment does not mean referring only to the immediate physical reality we
inhabit, but also the higher layers of social and cultural spheres. Citing other scholars, Ingold
agrees with the idea that socio-cultural knowledge and “tools” such as the language shape the
way we perceive the world and our conscious and unconscious responses to the environment.
Specifically, the socio-cultural background provides a lens or “discriminating grid” through
which we impose order on the “flux of raw experience” (Ingold, 2011, p. 158). Here is Ingold
again more Batesonian than Lévi-Straussian. If perception was based only on proper,
mechanical functioning of the senses re-presenting the world to our mind, as Lévi-Strauss
maintained, we would more or less see the world in the same manner. But as anthropologists
know, this is clearly not the case. Instead, the socio-cultural background and our situatedness
in the environment shapes how we interpret the world. The meaning of objects in the
environment is not inherent to the environment or the objects themselves but is the result of the
interaction between all the subcomponents of the organism-environment system (between the
human and the environment). By interaction, we also mean how specifically are the objects
used. Ingold comments that it is by the “virtue of their [objects] incorporation into a
characteristic pattern of day-to-day activities” that the meaning is being assigned in respect to
the “relation contexts of people’s practical engagement with their lived-in environments”
(Ingold, 2011, p. 168). Ingold extends here the late Wittgenstein’s idea of the language. In the
posthumously published Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein originates the idea that
words obtain the meaning through the practical, everyday use within a given community of
practice (Wittgenstein, 2009). But the same approach can be applied to the behaviour of humans
where behaviour can be analysed as a sequence of non-linguistic signs.
In explaining the meaning and the occurrence of patterns of human behaviour belongs to what
anthropology aims for (as opposed to finding the propositional truth of statements, for
example), how do we go about studying the meaning of human action if we want to provide an
in-depth explanation?
Within the ecological framework advocated by Ingold, the precision of our explanation “why”
will be tied, somewhat, arbitrarily, to what we consider a “good enough” explanation. The
reason is that once we agree upon taking into account the whole holistic web of interactions and
interrelations that all contribute to the final trigger of why people act certain way or why objects
acquire meanings when used in practice, it is impossible to provide a full explanation because
certain causations will be always hidden from the researcher. And from the individual actor as
well because we cannot expect either that people, in general, are able to verbalize their own
behaviour.
To explain why I consider the “why” question impossible to answer fully, I shall mention
Michael Polanyi, who articulated the now famous distinction between the knowledge of “what”
and knowledge of “how”. The “how” knowledge, oftentimes synonymous with “tacit
knowledge” is difficult to put into words, especially for someone highly skilled in a given
domain. Once we get used to doing something, it becomes for us automatically and intuitive.
For example, a skilful carpenter working with a hammer will seldom focus his attention on the
hammer itself, rather he will focus on the goal to fix furniture for which a hammer is only a
mediating tool. For the carpenter, in order to explain “how” most of the time will prove to be
the best option simply to demonstrate how he goes about hammering. This applies to any skilful
activity or expertise involving the eye-body coordination.
Returning to the “why” question, it also features a tacit dimension that consists exactly of the
holistic web of relations that are extremely difficult to uncover satisfactorily. Any descriptive
account of a human action will have to deal with the “surface” and “deep” layers where the
surface layers are visible to an eye, whereas the full description, however “thick”, of the deep
layer will be lacking.
Surface and depth layers of reality
It seems to me that there are several already existing approaches to explain further the
distinction between the surface and the depth in explaining “why” of human action. For
example, anthropology already uses the terminology of “etic” and “emic” originating from
linguistic terms phonetics and phonemic, respectively. Etic methodology pursues a field study
from the perspective of the outsider with the goal to study “behavior as from outside of a
particular system”, whereas the “emic viewpoint results from studying behavior as from inside
the system” (Pike, 1967, p. 37) The etic approach aim to provide a scientifically objective
account of the behaviour from which a researcher consequently tries to derive an objective laws
about the studied community that can be generalized across cultures. The emic approach, on
the other hand, aims to take the researcher into the community who will become one of the
members, studying and understanding the subtleness of behaviour and the meaning behind it.
To my mind, there is no doubt that the etic approach can capture many valuable observations
regarding the behaviour, but without the access to insider knowledge, it stays on the surface of
the behaviour. Using only the etic approach reduces the real-life complexities and irreducible
quality of meaning and human actions to “appearances” or the surface layer. Against this
reduction to appearances already warned Bateson with his “objection to mainstream natural
science [...] [that reduces] ‘real’ reality to a pure substance, thus relegating form to the illusory
epiphenomenal world of appearances” (Ingold, 2011, p. 16). Bateson here criticizes that the
mainstream science privileges explaining (away) phenomena by describing what it looks like
and neglects the underlying and most of the time invisible forces that nevertheless shape, cause
or create conditions for the visible result. What are the hidden “depths” that emerge as a surface
layer?
The question inevitably leads to asking what gives the shape or meaning to our actions.
According to Ingold and Bateson, we find the answer in analysing the behaviour of people
within the web of relations of the holistic system called organism-environment, with the socio-
cultural past and present a part of the “environment”. What are the surface and depth layers in
technology?
For the answer, it is helpful to browse through the history of modern computing that started in
the first half of the 20th century. The first mainframe and programmable computers were as
large as one room and to change their behaviour was possible only by physically altering the
configuration of electric cables. Later on, from programming done in the “raw” binary code,
through the assembly compilers to the first high-level programming languages. Every change
simplified the use of computers by putting more intermediate layers that abstracted the user
from the underlying physical hardware by providing an access to the computing resources via
a symbolic, textual, graphical or another type of interface. Paul Dourish (2004) summarizes the
history of computing as a history of continual abstraction.
It is true that the process of abstracting the complexities of hardware enabled significantly more
people using computers and computing devices in their lives. Especially after the advent of
mass-marketed personal computers equipped with a graphical user interface (GUI), people
learned very quickly that they can handle their work just by controlling the new visual language
symbolized by the desktop paradigm that provided an accessible and easily recognizable
metaphoric UI resembling the real-life office environment. But the abstraction has also had
what I consider negative consequences: our relationship with computers is, in fact, a
relationship with the interface because, for the majority of the population, the reality of
computers is incomprehensible. For the majority, computers are what they can do with them,
which means that when talking about computers people mean their interface, rather than the
hidden infrastructure.
It becomes even more problematic when designers focus only on the surface layer of technology
(or their interface). It may lead to a more aesthetically pleasing graphical design, but can it
automatically satisfy other requirements, such as functional needs or general meaningfulness
of user experience when using computers? Having analysed the current trend in HCI design of
digital technologies, the focus on providing meaningful user experience (Ferenc, 2016), I
believe that HCI design faces the very similar theoretical and empirical issues shared also by
anthropology: it is the problem of going beyond the superficial appearances of the surface layer,
be it an observable behavioural patterns or the surface layer of the technological interface
(cannot we both behavioural patterns and an technological interface call an interface mediating
between the visible surface and the invisible depths?), and explain the deeper layers of why we
do things certain way. For HCI design, however, the quest becomes even more pertinent
because this knowledge is used for design and evaluation of technological objects and services
that millions of people use on the daily basis.
Being phenomenologically oriented, both anthropology and “post-cognitivistic” HCI design
call for a more holistic, or ecological study of individuals, groups, and the emergence of
meaning and “sociocultural-technical” order. Both disciplines also have to deal with what I
called the surface and the depth layers. In the following parts of the text, I would like to analyse
this dichotomy on the background of Martin Heidegger’s hermeneutical phenomenology as
presented in his magnum opus Being and time with the additional commentary made by the
contemporary philosopher and a great Heidegger’s interpreter Graham Harman.

Heidegger’s phenomenology
Heidegger’s Being and Time can be also summarized as criticising “the metaphysics of
presence”. By that Heidegger means that “Western philosophy has consistently privileged that
which is, or that which appears, and has forgotten to pay any attention to the condition for that
appearance. In other words, presence itself is privileged, rather than that which allows presence
to be possible at all - and also impossible” (Reynolds, 2018).
In many ways, Heidegger's project is also a response to Edmund Husserl, the former teacher
and the founder of phenomenology. Husserl maintained in his philosophy the influence of
Cartesian dualisms when he postulated the transcendental ego. This disembodied consciousness
reduced the reality to the constant flow of phenomena as if we are frozen at the place and
watching a television screen. Moreover, Husserl believed that we had a direct relationship with
the world through the intentional objects in our minds that we could directly perceive if only
we “bracket” the other cognitive functions that could spoil the pure empirical or sensorial
content in our mind.
Heidegger rejected Husserl’s transcendental ego and with that Cartesian privileging of mind
over body, as well as epistemology over ontology. For Heidegger, it was not the “cogito” but
the question of the Being, or the “sum” part of the famous dictum, that presented the
philosophical conundrum completely misunderstood in the Western philosophy since Plato.
Instead, Heidegger proposed that the reality is “deeper” than just the phenomena we can see
because these phenomena have to emerge from somewhere, and for Heidegger, this
“somewhere” is the phenomenal background of our world. To understand this phenomenal
background, it is useful to look at the notion of how Heidegger sees a human being as a Dasein.
Dasein
Dasein is a German term that Heidegger uses for writing about a human without the baggage
of all the connotations and denotations that we normally associate with the word. Dasein is or
Heidegger the most important essence because it differs from the rest by virtue of it is “Being
[..] that Being is an issue for it.” (Heidegger, 2006, p. 32/12) In other words, Dasein is the only
Being that problematizes its own existence. Moreover, Dasein understands its being because it
is inherently being-in-the-world. Compared to Husserl, the human is being transformed from
an abstract and disembodied consciousness to an entity intimately linked to the world. Dasein
is situated and embodied in the spatial, temporal and other contextual aspects of the world.
The temporality of Dasein is not simply an existence on a timescale, but the fact that we have
at our disposition our social and cultural past that influences the way we interact with the world.
Heidegger was very much interested in the everydayness of our existence, which he claimed is
our default mode of being: everydayness of dealing with the world makes sense to us because
we also exhibit what Heidegger calls “Care” about our being. The practical and every day’s
dealing with the world and objects therein in order to achieve whatever goals we set up to
achieve is the default mode of our being, while the theoretical and descriptive observation of
the world is more specialized, rarer, and usually left to the sciences.
The practical, every day dealing with the world versus the theoretical mode are two principal
modes of interacting with the world, which Heidegger analyses further in his famous “tool
analysis” part of Being and Time. Graham Harman considers the tool analysis the most
important innovation within the Heideggerian corpus and everything else mere commentaries
on this discovery (Harman, 2002).
Tool analysis
Although the name could suggest otherwise, Harman warns us that by “a tool” we should not
think of any specific technological tool, but rather generic things we can use “in-order-to”, for
something. There are two modes whereby we can have a relationship to entities: presence-at-
hand and readiness-to-hand.
Presence-at-hand is a relationship with the entities when their appearance become for us a mere
“physical lump” or set of attributes. Presence-at-hand is a theoretical dealing with entities where
we are fully aware of them. We can see that this mode is rather similar to Husserl’s
transcendental consciousness and generally cognitivist claim across many domains where to
know or to grasp the being of an entity means to describe how it appears to our consciousness.
Readiness-to-hand is the other mode and central idea in Heidegger’s phenomenology. The
entities that are for Dasein “ready to hand” mediate Dasein’s relationship to the world and are
used by Dasein for its practical dealing with the world. Entities in this mode are not the centre
of our attention, on the contrary if they are authentically ready-to-hand, our attention becomes
increasingly focused on the goal we want to achieve and the entity such as a hammer will
become for our consciousness the more transparent the better it helps us achieves our goals, or
as Heidegger says, our work. Readiness-to-hand is not possible to study from a detached,
theoretical and disembodied point of view; any observation of appearance of a tool cannot
uncover the readiness-of-hand of an entity because to understand its readiness-to-hand, one has
to use it practically. But there are also possibilities of how ready-to-hand entities can become
present-to-hand. It happens when entities “brake down” if they do not do what is expected of
them.
According to Heidegger, what makes entities ready-to-hand is that entities always belong to a
large web of other entities (tools) that Heidegger calls an “equipmental totality”. In other words,
the equipment functions and has certain meanings for us thanks to its relations to other entities.
The number and complexity of these relations are recursive and potentially infinite.
Heidegger talks about a larger contextual reality in which even a simple tool like a pencil
belongs to the equipmental totality of other writing tools such as a paper, but also the context
of the general activity of writing. We cannot forget that Heidegger studies the being of things.
And the being of a tool is its relational character to other tools. To give just more examples,
consider a car. Its meaning and functions are shaped by its membership to a set of other cars,
roads, driving licences, urban laws for drawing, etc. Or the case of money. Of itself, it is a
worthless piece of paper (or a digital signature). However, only after we agree upon money
being a default means of exchange in the context of a socio-economic system of humans,
technology, economic relations, etc., do money start to have any value.
If the default mode of how we interact with the world truly ready-to-hand, we have to ask how
humans go about, in reality, interacting with entities that belong to such a complex web of
relations. If we have to use entities practically, without pondering theoretically about their
meanings, functions, etc., what cognitive powers do we use to manage the complexity of our
decision making?
Heidegger does provide an explanation where exactly is the totality of all assignments reduced
to a single space. In chapter § 17 Reference and Signs, the author writes that we do encounter
the equipmental totality of references in what he calls signs. Signs themselves are also an
equipment but their primary function is “showing or indicating” and it is “an item of equipment
which explicitly raises a totality of equipment into our circumspection so that together with it
the worldly character of the ready-to-hand announces itself.” (Heidegger, 2006, p. 108/78-
110/80). Later on, Heidegger says that signs are produced and are deliberately made the way
that is “conspicuous” or easily seen, comprehended or “accessible”. In other words, signs must
be deliberately designed, and the work of the designer is to take the relational complexity of
the web of assignments and create a door or what I consider to be an interface to it.
The meaning and function of the sign are contextually given and depend on Dasein’s (human
being) understanding of it based on its use and intelligibility (Heidegger, 1996, p. 103/82). This
semantic openness of a sign suggests that the meaning is a potentiality which Dasein reduces
to an actuality based on the fact that at a particular situation (context), such interpretation of the
meaning is sufficient for whatever Dasein aims to do. What we should stress is that the
interpretation occurs at the moment of the interaction with a sign or any entity in general. Dasein
interprets the meaning of entities based on the contextual situation. How does it do that? How
does it decide what is sufficient, and in relation to which? What Heidegger suggests is a process
of hermeneutical interpretation of the world.
Cognition as hermeneutical interpretation
Hermeneutics finds its origin in the theological interpretation of Biblical texts. It deals with a
question whether we can find the meaning of a text within the text itself, or whether the meaning
is co-constructed by the “forces” outside the text such as the mind of a reader. The first case
reminds us of Husserl and Cartesian thinking of the universal, transcendental mind being the
final arbiter (everything necessary is in the mind); while the other approach takes the contextual
view.
Gadamer (1976) takes a third view, suggesting that the meaning is created during the act of
interpretation, specifically during the interaction between the “horizon of the reader” and the
“horizon of the text”. Influenced by Heidegger’s concept of Dasein, Gadamer views the human
as a historically grounded being that carries its culture and history with itself in every
hermeneutic situation (Gadamer, 2004, p. 301). In other words, for Dasein to be able to interpret
anything, it has to possess what Levi R. Bryant calls “pre-ontological” understanding (Bryant
2017) of Being, which means all the existing knowledge, but also inherent biases, intuitive
hunches. In other words, the pre-ontological understanding is filled in with cultural, social,
personal influences and experiences that shape the way we approach the world. Dasein
possesses this pre-ontological understanding by virtue of being-in-the-world. Heidegger and
Gadamer took up the concept of hermeneutical interpretation and elevated it to the general
cognitive mechanism of interacting with the world (Winograd, 1987, p. 30).
The phenomenological answer to how we cope with the everyday complexity of the world is in
these lines: we do not normally grasp the world theoretically, as the present-at-hand entity, but
as a set of ready-to-hand, more or less phenomenologically transparent entities whereby we are
surrounded. Instead, we approach the world with existing understanding, however imprecise or
subjective, and are able to reduce the world’s complexity by interpreting it according to our
aims that we want to achieve in the world. There are potentially infinite aims in the world and
infinite ways to achieve them, thus making it impossible to list or represent them for a
theoretical musing. It means that the world’s complexity is interpreted and reduced to
something manageable by normal human beings based on our life goals. But to have life goals
means that we have to live in the world and display a hint of care about our lives.
Surface and depth layers in HCI and anthropology

The surface and depth layers of the phenomenological reality are a problem both for HCI and
anthropology. According to hermeneutical phenomenology, the default mode of how we
interact with the world is by interpreting it. The interpretation is an ad hoc process that happens
during the act of interacting with the world and the outcome of such interactions depends not
only on the environmental side but also on the human side of the interaction. In the 21st century,
it is a truism to say that technology adds itself to the aforementioned interaction and strips us
from the direct access to the world by functioning as a medium in-between.
To understand why we behave and why we use technology in a certain way requires to go
beyond the surface into the depths of a web of references that co-constitute the behaviour,
meaning and the function of entities in the world, technology and human beings included. But
how and what methods and techniques to study the “depth” layers are there? Even though we
agree with Ingold, Bateson, post-cognitivistic theoreticians arguing that our cognition and even
the mind itself is distributed across humans, environment and artefacts (Kaptelinin & Nardi,
2006; Clark, 2014) and counting with the inevitable hermeneutic circle where we interpret the
world by our knowledge of it, how can we bridge the theoretical ideas to applied research?
HCI field has recently, under the umbrella of User Experience design, appropriated many
anthropological and sociological methods by introducing the human-centred design approach
to designing technology. Field research, personas, storytelling, quantitative analysis and
qualitative interviews have made their way into the daily practice of designers. Human-
centredness of the design was a great victory over a narrow obsession with the technical side of
technology that was so common during the 2000s. The human-centred design gave us many
answers how to study the human component in the Ingold-Bateson-Ihde’s ecological system of
humans, technology, and environment.
Yet, how do we study, (re-)design or evaluate large-scale sociotechnical systems such as public
transport or the role of smartphones in the life of teenagers where human-computer or human-
technology interactions exists on a daily basis and multi-layered scale?
A design theoretician Horst Rittel and more recently Richard Buchanan (1992) call these large-
scale problems wicked problems. They are wicked because they are systemic, holistic,
intractable, avoiding full logical analysis, and without the possibility to discern where the
problem starts and when it ends. Solutions to wicked problems are more in the area of suitability
and appropriacy rather than true-false propositions. Political theorist Nick Srnicek (2015)
argues that one of such wicked problems is economy: it is a massively distributed socio-
technical system that is for most of us absolutely intangible and ephemeral, although we all
share and feel the consequences of its forces. Srnicek argues, citing Fredric Jameson, that what
we lack is a cognitive map of such systems, or in other words a way to represent meaningfully
what the system looks like, which components it consists of and what are the relations between
the components. Srnicek, therefore, calls for the need to represent to the surface layer of a
system like economy before we proceed with a deeper analysis and proposing political changes.
There is a new design-oriented field that set up to satisfy some of these demands. Having
attended two years ago a public lecture given in Prague by academics from The Oslo University
of Architecture and Design, I for the first time learned about Systems oriented design. One of
the main innovations of this new design field is to approach design problems from a systems
perspective, where each entity of the system (humans, technological objects) is interconnected
with others, each providing and receiving functions and meanings through its membership
within the larger system. Because it reminded me of what I read in Heidegger, I was curious to
learn what is the actual method for mapping a system they used. It has been called GIGA-
Mapping and tries to capture as many components of a system and their relationships as
possible.

Figure 2 GIGA-Mapping of a public transport system and commuting (Source:

https://www.systemsorienteddesign.net/index.php/giga-mapping/100-giga-mapping)
GIGA-mapping is clearly an interesting representational tool for capturing the structures of a
given sociotechnical system. But it is static. From the hermeneutic-phenomenological point of
view, it is problematic because the real and actual interactions and interpretations occur in real-
time at the moment of interacting within the system. The GIGA-map thus represents only an
idealistic version of the reality, abstracting and reducing the real-world complexities.
If we ponder for a while, we have to realise that however we try to represent the real world for
capturing its complexity, we will always be working with an abstraction of the reality because
the only best model for the reality is the world itself. If we try in detail to describe the dynamics
of a community we study anthropologically, we will also always provide a reduced and
deformed reality.
With technology being a functional necessity for our lives, sensors of the internet of things
sensing and smart devices producing the enormous amount of data about our biorhythms, eating
habits, working patterns or tons of likes whereby we rated our favourite online content, we
could try taking advantage of the situation. The data about past, present, real-time and even
future behaviour of human and technological “individuals” within a larger sociotechnical
system could potentially be out there in the digital cloud. Since data can have an unlimited
number of representations, the main task for exploiting the data of large sociotechnical systems
is to create an appropriate interface for the cognitive mapping of how the system works. It is
here where HCI explicitly meets anew with human sciences. In the end, Tim Ingold as a
theoretician of anthropology believes that if we want to study human beings ecologically, there
is no further justification for continuing separating anthropology and psychology (Ingold, 2001,
p. 171).
Richard Buchanan suggests that design is a suitable field for tackling wicked problems: apart
from having a long tradition of synthesising complex and conflicting information, designers
these days are increasingly the ones at the epicentre of our society and culture: by designing
technology they also design our lives (Verbeek, 2015). Buchanan assigns design a status of a
new liberal art that can say something interesting about the contemporary life (1992).
Contemporary HCI and design are manifested in technological interfaces, be they graphical,
tactile, voice-activated or virtual reality, as digital and technological embodiments of
philosophical ideas of how we see the contemporary world. The point is to make designing
interfaces open to critiquing from the seemingly outside fields that would provide a necessary
check to designers and engineers how they products are influencing everyday lives of thousands
or millions of people. This critique must come during the development and also after the release
of a product. Our society regularly scrutinizes other techno-cultural products such as cars,
fashion, art, architecture and so on. The interface should join the crowd. Moreover, it is true
that the corporate sphere has appropriated anthropology and ethnography for the purposes of
improving the product. But it is hazardous to leave the decisions on how technology influences
our lives only to the corporate world.
My idea would be to regularly conduct anthropological and ethnographic research amidst our
own Western societies that are most vulnerable to unplanned, yet malicious consequences of
massively used technologies. Remember what phenomenology tells us: we have to go beyond
the obvious, and in many ways superficial surface layer of Being; the surface layer is a result
of hidden conditions that enable the surface layer in the first place. In the context of technology,
we need to research how technology manifests itself during the everyday interactions and
behaviour patterns. For studying the depth layer of technology and how it shapes the current
human condition, anthropology and ethnography seem most appropriate fields.
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