What Is Meaningful Human-Computer Interaction? Understanding Freedom, Responsibility, and Noos in HCI Based on Viktor Frankl’s Existential Philosophy
Quynh Nguyen, Julia Himmelsbach, Diotima Bertel, Olivia Zechner, Manfred Tscheligi
DIS’22: ACM SIGCHI Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS)
Session: Video Previews
Abstract
Meaningfulness is a profound aspect of our lives. So far, a concrete reflection of what meaning means in HCI is still rare. To understand users as humans, and thus, the humanity in being a user, we adopt Viktor Frankl’s understanding of users as meaning-seeking subjects. To make the concept of meaningfulness more graspable, we refer to what Frankl calls the three existentials of life: freedom, responsibility, and noos. We elaborate four dimensions, namely the existentials as an outcome, as their embeddedness in technology, their role in interaction, and their (non-)usage.
This is followed by a discussion on the interwovenness of the three existentials as well as their potential impact on HCI research.
By that, we aim to contribute to a profound understanding of meaning for HCI, from the epistemological to the methodological perspective, to enable meaning-centered design.
DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1145/3532106.3533557
WEB:: https://dis.acm.org/2022/
30-second video previews of DIS 2022
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