Capturing the in-between of interactive artifacts and users: a materiality-centered approach

The materiality of interactive artifacts concerns, on one hand, design materials and activities, while on the other hand, it is strongly related to the users experiencing the materiality. However, current approaches to investigate the material and the user perspective face several shortcomings, as they focus on either the human or the artifact. In our paper, we describe a materiality-centered data analysis approach that puts the user and the artifact equally in the center of attention. Based on Actor-Network Theory and Bruno Latour's thoughts on monads, we provide examples stemming from interactions in an industrial fabrication plant in order to illustrate the potentials of such a "monadological" approach for accessing materiality from a user and artifact perspective. We show that this approach allows alternating between a human- and an artifact-oriented perspective that finally leads to the identification of material attributes of actors that are less obvious.

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