On icarus' wings

Abstract

New products and technologies increasingly blur the boundaries between humans and things. This has major implications for what interaction design can be. In a world of wearable technologies, social robots, smart environments and implanted technologies, the relations we have with technologies can hardly be characterized as "use" anymore. Rather, concepts like "immersion", "fusion", "implication", or even "enhancement" apply. In order to analyze the character of these new interactions, we need to expand existing analyses of human-technology relations, most notably the "postphenomenological" framework, which has traditionally focused on relations of use.