Unselfconscious interaction: a conceptual construct. Interacting with Computers

In this article we present unselfconscious interaction, a conceptual construct that describes aform of interaction with computational artifacts animated by incremental intersections thatlead to improvements in the relationships among artifacts, environments, and people. Wedraw on Christopher Alexander’s (1964) notion of goodness of fit and unselfconscious culture,and utilize Stolterman and Wiberg’s (2010) concept-driven interaction research to analyzethree interaction design concept artifacts to develop our construct for human-computerinteraction. The concept artifacts include the Discovery-Driven Prototypes (Lim et al., 2013),the Indoor Weather Stations (Gaver et al., 2013), and our own table-non-table. The resultingconstruct is comprised of the motivation of goodness of fit that is supported by two designqualities we name open-endedness and lived-with. We also describe tensions within theconstruct and the notion of purposeful purposeless in design. Our contribution in this articlelies in the articulation of the construct of unselfconscious interaction.