Making by Making Strange

Bell, Genevieve, Blythe, M. & Sengers, P. (2005). “Making by Making Strange: Defamiliarization and the Design of Domestic Technologies”. In ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction. 12. 149-173.

07.03.2022

Notes:

This paper argues that because the home is so familiar, it is necessary to make it strange, or defamiliarize it, in order to open the design space for it. Critical approaches to technology design are of both practical and social importance in the home. Home appliances are loaded with cultural associations such as the gendered division of domestic labor that are easy to overlook. This paper has attempted to defamiliarize domestic technology by visiting some foreign countries like the past, England and Asia. However, it is not necessary to travel to defamiliarize.

• Peoples’ aspirations and desires differ greatly across and between cultures.
• Everyone is an expert on the home. Since our births, we have been immersed in, moved

through, and made homes for ourselves.

• “defamiliarization” is a useful tool for creating space for critical reflection and thereby for opening up new possibilities for the design of domestic technologies. Making domestic life and technologies strange provides designers with the opportunity to actively reflect on, rather than passively propagate, the existing politics and culture of home life and to develop

new alternatives for design.

• In ‘Shame’ Tolstoy ‘defamiliarizes’ the idea of flogging people in this way:

  ‘to strip people who have broken the law, to hurl them to the floor, and to rap on

  their bottoms with switches.' [Shklovsky 1986: 56]

• obvious application of this perspective to computing technology in the home is online

  shopping.

• “naturalization” – the way in which cultural phenomena gradually come to be seen as

  natural – the only possible way to do things - until their cultural roots are thoroughly

  obscured.

• In analyzing trends in information appliances for the home, the design space currently

  seems unnecessarily constrained.

• defamiliarize the familiar/ making something strange popularized a spirit of critical inquiry that has become a standard method in usability studies. ” [Norman 1988:9] it provides a lens to help us see our own design practices in a new light.

America

• Cooking has increasingly been seen as an industrial process to be optimized.
• Marketing has become central to American culture,

gradually penetrating all aspects of the kitchen.