Cecile K. M.

Crutzen

ICT-Representations as Transformative Critical Rooms

The Informatics domain is a world of actors in which information and communication

technology (ICT) representations are designed and used, presented and interpreted. ICT-
representations are present in this world not only as hardware and software. Methods and
theories used for designing and making ICT-products are representations within this world,
too. The Informatics discipline is a part of and an actor in this world of interactions. 1

1. From Information to Interaction

In the nineties, there was a shift in the focus of the Informatics domain. Information is not the
main theme anymore, but interaction. By ICT-products such as e-mail, groupware, workflow
systems and Internet services, humans changed their interaction options and, thus, the

character and content of interaction itself. According to Terry Winograd, the discipline of
Computer and Information Science is in its methods and theories not well equipped for that
change:

In the next fifty years, the increasing importance of designing spaces for human
communication and interaction will lead to expansion in those aspects of computing
that are focused on people, rather than machinery. The methods, skills, and
techniques concerning these human aspects are generally foreign to those of
mainstream computer science, and it is likely that they will detach (at least partially)
from their historical roots to create a new field of ‘interaction design’. (...) The work will
be rooted in disciplines that focus on people and communication, such as psychology,
communications, graphic design, and linguistics, as well as in the disciplines that
support computing and communications technologies. (Winograd, 1997, p.156)

1
This article is a summary of Crutzen, 2000b.
In the Informatics discipline, experts are becoming aware of that change, but it still is the
custom to focus on interaction where one or both actors are non-human. The rich potential
and variety of human interaction is very problematic for the Informatics discipline, because
making interaction ready for people is mostly habituated in the interaction potentials of
technical objects and syntactical data processing. For instance, Peter Wegner developed an
interaction model for ‘computing’ based on an extension of the Turing-machine. He expects
that in the future the significant place of the ‘algorithm’ will be replaced by ‘interaction’
between objects (software- and hardware components).2 Even though the interaction
concept of Winograd and Flores in the COORDINATOR, a CSCW-application, is related to
natural language communication, it is still based on the formal and planned interaction
concept of Searle’s speech act theory (Winograd, 1987, pp.64-68; Searle, 1969)3. According
to Lucy Suchman, traditional system design perpetuates the gap between systems and
users; the notion of ‘purposeful action’ is dominant and will restrict the interaction potential of
humans: "Plans are themselves located in the larger context of some ongoing practical
activity” and only are “resources for situated action, but do not in any strong sense determine
its course” (1987, pp.49-52). Suchman warns for that view on interaction between humans
and non-human actors: “[...] The machine thus becomes the instructor, the monitor of one’s
actions, keeping track of temporal relations and warning of potential breakdowns” (1994a, p.
181).
Brenda Laurel, too, focussed on human interaction by comparing software with
theatre:
In theatrical terms a program (or a cluster of interacting programs) is analogous to a
script, including its stage directions. […] Its [i.e. the computer’s] interesting potential
lay not in its ability to perform calculations, but in its capacity to represent action in
which humans could participate. [...] functionality consists of the actions that are
performed by people and computers working in concert, and programs are the means
for creating the potential for those actions.” (1993, pp.44-45)

In Laurel’s concept of software, there is the restriction of human actors to only play “in the

interface” (1993, p.4) in the same way as the non-human actors, determined by the formal

2
His explanation is gendered: He compares the algorithm with a sales contract with a guarantee for a
specific output for every tolerated input. Interactions between objects should be like marriage
contracts, describing ongoing contracts for services over time. See Wegner 1997, pp. 2441-2442.
3
The following citation from Jan Ljungberg and Peter Holm gives evidence to the correspondence
between speech act theory and the object-oriented approach for the interaction between software-
objects: "A conversation is in this approach a coordinated, coherent sequence of language acts. At
each point in the conversation, there is only a small set of possible action types. The idea is that
whenever a task is being performed for a customer, there is a generic pattern of speech acts that
occurs. The sequence typically starts with a request from the customer, then the performer makes a
promise, and reports completion, which in turn may either be declined or declared complete by the
software script:
In a theatrical view of human-computer activity, the stage is a virtual world. It is
populated by agents, both human and computer-generated, and other elements of the
representational context. [...] The technical magic that supports the representation, as
in the theatre, is behind the scenes.” (1993, p.17)
Even though, the theatre metaphor of Laurel can open directions of change, because in the
rehearsal stage of a play, every human actor could be involved as director or author of the
play. However, the Informatics discipline is not very disposed creating such places of
rehearsal, because of the inherent insecurity.

In the shift to interaction, the Informatics discipline cannot forget information.

However, information and information processing are not restricted to the syntactical level
anymore. The semantics and pragmatics aspects of information processing became crucial
for the interactions of humans, which are mostly not predictable.

2. Interaction

The relation of humans to the worlds they live in is practical and based on actions. Actions
are accommodated to the conditions of that world. In the view of W. Kim Rogers:
Human life is not something which human beings already possess in themselves but
something to be made together with others, through their actions in and about their
world. The world affords various possible kinds of human life and determines the
limits within which a particular human life can be realized. Human beings give
meaning (interpret) their world in and through their actions.
‘Being-in-the-world’ (‘Dasein’) is ‘being-together-with-others’ and means that actors perceive
other actors and representations according to how they are encountered and respectively
used in one’s everyday routines and tasks.4 According to Dewey:

Life activities flourish and fail only in connection with changes of the environment.
They are literally bound up with these changes; our desires, emotions, and affections
are but various ways in which our doings are tied up with the doings of things and
persons about us. [...] Interest, concern, mean that self and world are engaged with
each other in a developing situation. (1916, Democracy and Education, Chapter 10
Interest and Discipline)

customer. A discourse may thus be defined in a state of transition diagram, where each state-
transition corresponds to a speech act." Ljungberg, 1997.
4
Heidegger, 1926, §63; Mallery, 1987 (Heidegger’s Ontological Hermeneutics); Eldred, 2000.
The concept of ‘interaction’ can be seen as an exchange of representations between actors.
Speaking, writing, making, designing are doings in which the actor presents itself to other
actors: human and not human. All acting of an actor is a representation of itself in a world of
other actors and at the same time an interpretation of that world. ‘Inter’ as prefix of action
means ‘between’, ‘among’, ‘in the midst of’ action.
Every interpretation and representation will influence future action. When we act, we
interpret not only the phenomenal features of the world but also of the results of our action.
Not only the actual behavior but also the actions, which are not executed in the interaction
(actions in deficient mode), are presentable and interpretable because these absent actions
influence the interpretation process, too. Therefore, this exchange of representations is far
from being a simple transmission process from a sender to a receiver.
Interaction is an ongoing process of mutual actions5 from several actors in a (series
of) situation(s)6 . It is a process of constructing meaning through repeated interpretation and
representation of the actors that is always situated in the interaction itself and it depends on
the horizons and the backgrounds of the actors and their representations involved. Repeated
presentations, representations and interpretations of actions create interaction worlds,
spheres of discourses. Stuart Hall calls this discourses meaningful if actors can interpret the
executed acting (Hall, 1980; Zoonen, 1994, pp.8-9). Human actors can experience other
actors as ‘actable’ if these actors present themselves in a way, which is interpretable out of
their own experiences. That does not mean that this is the intended interpretation because
each actor has her or his horizon of experiences and expectations. Interaction worlds are not
without conflict. There are a lot of encoding and decoding processes going on in the course
of time because actors are historically involved in different interaction worlds:
The comprehension of meaning (...) lies not in the text itself, but in the complex
interaction between the author’s intent and his/her performative ability to encode that
intent, and the receptor’s intent and his/her performative ability not only to decode the
author’s intent but to mesh his/her own intent with the author’s. (Robert Kaplan cited
in Dellinger, 1995)
Human actors are ‘travellers’ and gatherers of many experiences, which they connect in the
actual interaction. Wherever there is interaction there is also continuity, a continuity of
experiences, which will function as representations of interactions in the past. Sloterdijk calls
this travelling ‘horizontal movements’ and sees it orthogonal to the ‘vertical movement’ of
thrownness.7 Thrownness8 is the necessity of acting in situations without the time or ability to

5
Heidegger calls this mutual action, projected in the future Sorge (care), Fürsorge (solicitude) and
Besorgen (concern): 1926, §12,15, 26; Figal 2000, p.81, 144; Inwood, 1999, pp.35-37.
6
Dewey, 1938a; 1938b, Ch. IV-“Common Sense and Scientific Inquiry”; Ratner, 1939, p.145-151, 669,
891-897; Biesta, 1999, p.72.
7
Sloterdijk, Absturz und Kehre, Rede über Heideggers Denken in der Bewegung, 2001, pp. 41-45.
grasp the full consequences of actions or plans in advance (Mallery, 1987, Heidegger’s
Ontological Hermeneutics). So horizon processes of an actor are fusions of experiences,
expectations and fantasy. They can be seen as designing9 a future out of the actor’s
thrownness in the world of the actual interaction. Fusion means connecting and
disconnecting and the result is not always harmonious but should at least be actable.
Through these fusions, actors give meaning to the actual exchange of representations.
Making use of experiences is giving a situated and actual meaning to these
representations in the actual interaction. The capacity to do this is learning.

3. Habits and Routines

Any world of interaction has a horizon, which is the potential of all meaning constructing
processes that may emerge and which will depend on the horizons of the participating actors
and the backgrounds of the exchanged representations. This horizon will determine the
learning possibilities of the individual actors.
Through learning in interaction worlds actors develop habits and routines. A habit is
acting out of acquaintance with the representations and actors. Routines are repeated and
established acting; frozen habits, which are executed without thinking. Dewey thinks that
most people act out of routine and habits. People develop habits out of their experiences.
They experience the effect of acting in certain situations. Out of routines and habits,
traditions and rules, common sense behavior is settled. If this process is not a mutual one,
then it is matter of dominance of a specific group of actors or representations.
Actors will act in a situation, based on an understanding of the situation which is
directly mediated by a foreknowledge, or sensitivity to situations. Our existential
understanding is a largely unreflective and automatic grasp of a situation that triggers a

8
Heidegger, 1926, §29, p. 135, “[...] das Dasein als geworfenes In-der-Welt-sein (...)”. Heidegger,
1926, §35, p. 167. “Real world objects were either ‘ready-to-hand’ or ‘present-at-hand’. When objects
are ready-to-hand, we are unaware of their presence. When objects are present-at-hand, we are
aware of their existence because they are not present, or they do not function as we intend. [...] When
we experience the ‘ready-to-hand’, we are in a position of ‘thrownness’, which Heidegger explains as
being immersed in a situation.” Brunick, 1995/96, III. A. Deconstructing the Rationalistic Tradition.
Heidegger, 1926, §15, §16.
9
Heidegger, 1926, §31, pp. 145-148. Heidegger uses the word ‘Entwurf’ (project-in-draft): “The
German terminology shows us clearly the opposition that there is in Heidegger’s thought between
dereliction and the project-in-draft – between Geworfenheit and Entwurf. […] ‘Entwurf’: “does not
mean, …, to contemplate this beyond as an object, to choose between possibilities as we choose
between two paths that intersect at a crossroads. This would be to deprive possibility of its character
of possibility by transforming it into a plan established beforehand. Possibility must be seized in its
very possibility – as such it is inaccessible to contemplation but positively characterizes the way of the
being of Dasein. This way of being thrown forward toward one’s own possibilities, of adumbrating them
throughout one’s very existence, is a crucial moment of understanding.” Levinas, 1996.
response. This understanding must be incomplete because ‘Dasein’ is both historical and
finite. It is historical in that understanding builds on foreknowledge accumulated from [in?]
experience. It is finite due to ‘thrownness’, the necessity of acting in situations without the
time or ability to grasp the full consequences of actions or plans in advance (Mallery, 1987,
Heidegger’s Ontological Hermeneutics).
This unreflective response Dewey will call fixed habits, ‘routines’:
Fixity of habit may mean that something has a fixed hold upon us, instead of our
having a free hold upon things. [...] Habits reduce themselves to routine ways of
acting, or degenerate into ways of action to which we are enslaved just in the degree
in which intelligence is disconnected from them. [...] Routine habits, and habits that
possess us instead of our possessing them, are habits which put an end to plasticity.
They mark the close of power to vary. (Dewey, 1916, chapter 4: Education as
Growth)
In every interaction world, there are mutually accepted or enforced habits and routines:
‘Reality’, or the way we see reality through the prism of our own culture’s means of
assigning meaning to the various elements of our world, [...] is a phenomenon which
will inevitably be defined differently according to the dictates and needs of different
cultures. [...] The meaning of ‘reality’, therefore, will depend very much on the way a
particular society defines it. All elements of that society’s history, the totality of its
development, including its present economic, cultural, racial, class and political
balance, will make it unlikely that any two societies, no matter how similar, will look at
one issue in exactly the same way. (Dellinger, 1995)
Most routine acting can be qualified as obvious and therefore invisible – which is precisely
the problem of computer scientists designing ICT-representations for actors in interaction
worlds. The obvious acting in both worlds, the world of computer scientist and world of users,
is hidden.

4. Critical Transformative Rooms

Every action and interaction causes changes, but not all activities of actors are present in
interaction worlds. The perception of actors is always situated in an interaction world.
Therefore, the meanings given to actors and representations by another actor rely on the
existing meaning constructions. If changes caused by interaction are comparable and
compatible with previous changes, then they will be perceived as obvious. They are taken for
granted. This kind of interaction will not cause any doubt. Doubt is a meaning given to a
situation in the interaction which is necessary for the change of meaning and changed acting:
Our beliefs guide our desires and shape our actions. [...] Belief does not make us act
at once, but puts us into such a condition that we shall behave in some certain way,
when the occasion arises. Doubt has not the least such active effect, but stimulates
us to inquiry until it is destroyed. (Peirce, 1877)
The act of doubting is a bridge between the obvious acting and a possible change of
habitual acting. Doubt is situated in the interaction. Doubt cannot only occur by the
visible in the interaction but also by the invisible. Actors and representations are present
in an interaction if they are willing and have a potential of creating doubt and if they can
create a disrupting moment in the interaction. In the view of Dewey, doubting is critical
thinking:10
But everything which is assumed without question, which is taken for granted in our
intercourse with one another and nature is what, at the given time, is called
knowledge. Thinking on the contrary, starts, [...], from doubt or uncertainty. It marks
an inquiring, hunting, searching attitude, instead of one of mastery and possession.
Through its critical process true knowledge is revised and extended, and our
convictions as to the state of things reorganized.(1916, Chapter 22, The Individual
and the World)
In open interaction worlds, representations and actors can have such a presence.
Doubts on representations are possible and can be effective in a change of the acting
itself and in a change of the results of this acting: the interpretations and representations.
The ‘preferred reading’ of representations can be negotiated. There is space between
interpretation and representation. Differences and different meaning construction
processes are respected. In rooms where differences are present, truth is an ongoing
conversation and a process of disclosure and not a correspondence to reality. Truth is
then a mere construction of actors being in interaction. Rooms in interaction worlds,
where actions of questioning and doubting are present, which have the potential to
change their habits and routines in their interaction, I will call ‘critical transformative
rooms'11 In a ‘transformative critical room’ as a place of negotiation between
interpretation and representation, mutual actability is a necessary precondition.

10
Dewey gives several meanings to the function of doubt in a variety of modes of thinking; the thinking
necessary for change. Ratner, 1939, pp.837-850; Dewey, 1917, pp. 183-216.
11
According to Helen Longino scientific knowledge is an outcome of a critical dialogue in communities.
She gives four necessary criteria to achieve a transformative dimension. These criteria are rigidly
formulated out of the perspective avoiding absolute relativism (Longino, 1993, pp.112-113). Jane Flax
chooses the interdisciplinary discourse and connects the disciplines: post modern philosophy, gender
studies and psychoanalysis (Flax, 1990). For her transitional space, she outlines four aspects of
 In closed worlds, differences from the dominant meaning and acting are seen as
errors, failures and dissidents. Doubt is only seen as a feeling of insecurity and not as
necessary prerequisite for change. Domination and ignorance cause the hierarchical
opposition between doubt and security. Changing routine acting is always very difficult
because routine does not have much presence in each world of interaction. Moreover, in
such closed worlds, interaction routines and habits are frozen and creating doubt is seen
as an unpleasant activity.
Thus, opening the obvious established discourse can make room for negotiations
on possible changes in future acting. It can create a transformative critical space in which
doubts can occur. Such a strategy is helpful for breaking through the obvious acting
within the discipline and can cause change by re-valuing ‘the other’ Above that it can
give the act of doubting a positive meaning: causing doubt and thinking and feeling doubt
are necessary moments in an interaction for changing the concept of interaction itself in
the Informatics domain.

5. Gender and Informatics

In the Informatics discipline, there is little attention for gender aspects because the
interaction between humans and between humans and non-human systems are placed
at the border and not in the core of the discipline.12 The phenomenon of under-
representation of women in the Informatics discipline is not simply a question of deficits of
women, of removing barriers, or of making products more attractive to women. It is
connected to the dominant epistemological and ontological actions and structures within the
Informatics discipline and it can be seen as a symptom for deeper lying phenomena of power
which are visible in existing hierarchical binary oppositions in Informatics. Gender is hidden
under that weave of hierarchical binary oppositions. The dominant attitude in Informatics is
still that its products and its acting are or should be gender neutral. An enriching dialogue
between the feminine and the masculine cannot take place because gender is seen as
‘outside’ the Informatics discipline. Gender itself is recognized just as sets of fixed
characteristics of two generalized types of human beings. Female qualities are seen as only
useful for the interaction between professionals and users. It is problematic to find conditions

justice: reconciliation (“requires a unity of differences”), reciprocity (“connotes a continuous though

imprecisely defined sharing of authority and mutuality of decision”), recognition ("acknowledging the
legitimacy of others”), judgment (“capacity to see things from the point of view of another”). (Flax,
1993, pp.121-125; Grimm, 1998.
12
Alison Adam calls this ‘gender blindness’ in the Informatics discipline and in the critical discourse on
that discipline. Adam, 1998, p. 67.
and constructions in which the dynamics of gender can be present on all levels of meaning
construction processes.
Asking directly for the meaning of the relation between masculinity and femininity in
the Informatics domain is risking a fixation and a re-enforcement of stereotypes and
hierarchies. The closed core of Informatics can be opened in a confrontation with the
epistemological and ontological assumptions of another discipline such as Gender Studies.
Questioning gender can lead to a reformulating research into: “What is missing in Informatics
if femininity is not present in all possible processes in which meaning is constructed?”, “Why
did the hard core of methods, theories and practices of the Informatics discipline become a
symbol for masculinity?” and “Why is femininity constructed as situated only in the
discipline’s soft border of the interaction with the users of ICT-products?”. In the view of
Judith Butler, questioning gender is a strategy to disrupt the obvious acting of every actor:
designers and users in the Informatics domain:
The abiding gendered self will then be shown to be structured by repeated acts that
seek to approximate the ideal of a substantial ground of identity, but which in their
occasional discontinuity, reveal the temporal and contingent groundlessness of this
‘ground’. The possibilities of gender transformation are to be found precisely, in the
arbitrary relation between such acts, in the possibility of a failure to repeat, a
deformity, or a parodic repetition that exposes the phantasmatic effect of abiding
identity as a politically tenuous construction. (Butler, 1990, p.141)
In every interaction world, there is a continuity of ongoing weaving of a complex web of
meanings in which we live, constructed by the interactions, which take place in that world. In
that web of meanings, gender is a web of meanings on women and men, masculinity and
femininity, which is connected to other webs of dualistic meanings. Gender is a process13 in
which the meaning of masculinity and femininity are mutually constructed, situated at
symbolic, individual and institutional levels of a domain. All social activities, practices and
structures are influenced by gender. The meaning of gender is thus embedded in social and
cultural constructions and is always dynamically linked to the meaning of many concepts
such as technology or the relation between use and design. The performances of gender are
the symbols for power relations in a domain (Harding, 1986, pp. 15-18; Scott, 1988, pp. 135).

6. Re-Gendering the Informatics Domain

13
Judith Butler sees gender as a daily performance of each individual: “Gender ought not to be
constructed as a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts follow; rather, gender is an
identity tenuously constituted in time, instituted in exterior space through a stylized repetition of acts.”
Butler,. 1990, p. 140.
Gender is not absent in the Informatics domain. Gender is covered by the unquestioned
habits in interaction worlds. The performance of gender in Informatics can become visible
through questioning and doubting: What has been overvalued, what has been undervalued
and what has been ignored? Doubt can occur by criticizing the constructed meaning of
activities which we humans call design- and use-activities which are linked to gender in the
discourse of the Informatics domain. The deconstruction14 of the hierarchical opposition ‘use-
design’ will function as a source for doubts on the discourse and the acting, methods and
theories in Informatics. Analyzing these kinds of power oppositions such as use-design could
prevent the risk of reducing masculinity and femininity to fixed attributes based on biology
and sex.
The hierarchical opposition ‘use-design’ is linked to other oppositions such as
‘technical-human’, ‘hard-soft’, ‘secure-doubtful’. These gendered symbolic links are
established and re-enforced through the military, mathematical and technological traditions of
the Informatics discipline and through concepts of female Informatics based on essentialist
and deterministic views on femininity and technology. Strategies to destabilize this matrix of
links are not easily found and executed for female ICT-professionals. To accept the
established horizon of the Informatics discipline means to lose the potential of doubt because
socialization demands a commitment to the practices of the discipline. To oppose means to
reinforce the link between the technical-social and the male-female oppositions.
A forced socialization of women into the Informatics discipline will not change its
methods or assumptions. Giving women the responsibility for changing Informatics by means
of the incorporation of human and ethical aspects or by taking it as a necessary condition for
involving more women is based on the stereotyping of the sexes and will only freeze the
binary oppositions. Design strategies such as Prototyping or Participatory Design are not
sufficient for disconnecting the dominance of design over use. Necessary is a displacement
of the binary opposition ‘use–design’ and a change in the Informatics discipline to a view that
the relations of use and design are basically interactive.
Transformative critical rooms are the necessary conditions for making the gendering
of the Informatics domain visible and present. They enable a mutual dialogue between the
female and the male in which differences can continue to exist. Interdisciplinary interaction
and deconstruction (of gender) are helpful strategies to search for places of interaction where
transformative critical rooms can be created in a discipline.
Deconstruction is a method to evaluate implicit and explicit aspects of binary
gendered oppositions such as ‘use-design’. The meaning of the terms of oppositions,
constructed as a weave of differences and distances, can be traced throughout the discourse

14
On deconstruction, see eg. Brunick, 1995/96, II. D. Deconstruction; Meijer, 1991; Culler, 1983, p.
155, pp. 213-215, p. 228; Faulconer 1998; Biesta, 1998; Crutzen, 2001a.
of a discipline and its domain. By examining the seams, gaps and contradictions, it is
possible to disclose the hidden meaning on gender and the gendered agenda. Identifying the
positive valued term, reversing and displacing the dependent term from its negative position
will reveal the gendering of the opposition and create a dialogue between the terms in which
the difference within the term and the differences between the terms are valued. It uncovers
the obvious acting in the past and how it has been established.
According to Eva Feder Kittay, metaphors, metaphor analysis and metaphor use can
play a crucial role in the creation of critical transformative rooms:
In metaphor the domain of the vehicle mediates between that which is not well
known, or that about which we want to learn more, and what is familiar or ready to
hand. (...) metaphors mediate between an assimilated [...] conceptual domain and a
distinct and separate domain which needs to be newly assimilated or
reconceptualized. [...] In this way metaphor can, through a relational transposition,
structure an as yet unstructured conceptual domain, thereby altering, sometimes
transiently, sometimes permanently, our ways of regarding our world. (1988,
pp.266/7)
However, if metaphors are taken from a domain where habits are frozen, they lose the critical
power of causing doubt and just transport the routine acting of one world to the other.

7. Use and Design of ICT-Representations

Deconstruction of the opposition ‘use-design’ in the Informatics domain reveals that use and
design are treated as activities in different worlds - the world of senders and then world of
receivers - while the ICT-products are seen as the exclusive links between these worlds.15
ICT-representations are perceived as the products of a design process if the product is new
and innovative in the receiver world whether or not that the process of making was only a
process of applying obvious methods and routines.
The symbolic meaning of use and design is constructed as an opposition in which
‘design’ is active and virtuous and ‘use’ is passive and not creative. Designers see
themselves and are seen as makers of a better future and working in a straightforward line of
progress. Designers follow the ideal of making ICT-products, which cause no disturbances
and fit completely within the assumed expectations of the users. The concept of ‘user
friendliness’ is based on this notion of non-problematic interaction, doubtlessness and

15
Kapor speaks of two separate worlds: “What is design? What makes something a design problem?
It’s where you stand with a foot in two worlds - the world of technology and the world of people and
human purposes and you try to bring the two together. (Kapor, 1990)
reliability of interaction. ‘Good’ design is defined as making a product for users, which should
not create disharmony or doubt in the life of the users. Easiness is equal to progress and
‘user friendliness’ (Markussen, 1995).
There is a dominant belief in the objectivity of values. A belief that qualities as ‘good’,
‘innovative’, ‘friendly’, ‘secure’ and ‘reliable’ can be measured objectively and that their
achievement can be planned in advance before sending the product into the users’ world.
The design of ICT-products is characterized as decision making, problem solving, optimizing,
controlling, prescribing and predicting, and therefore has become an activity of displaying
power. The announcement of new products often is performed like a religious proclamation.
The use of expert languages and methods within the closed interaction world of Informatics
also establishes the dominance of design over use.
The dominance of design discloses and mostly prevents the act of discovery of the
users by the designer and acts of discovery on the part of the users. Design is focused on
generalized and classified users. Users are turned into resources, which can be used by
designers in the process of making ICT-products.16 Users do not have any more room for
starting their own designing processes. Those who do not fit in pregiven classes are seen as
dissidents.

8. Cause, Doubt and Change

One of the main causes of the hierarchical opposition between use and design is that
oversimplified models for interaction and communication are used in Informatics. In models
such as the transmission-model and the impulse-response-model there is no room for
processes of meaning construction. ‘Communication’ is defined as the transmission of
representations from a sender to a receiver through a neutral channel. Transmissive models
of communication do not have ‘a message to the message’. The meanings of a message, the
role of sender and receiver are fixed and separated. The sender has the active role and the
receiver has the passive role.
The channel of communication is conceived as neutral. It cannot influence the
interaction of sender and receiver. There is no room in the models for negotiation or doubt.
Interaction and communication are only defined on a technical and syntactical level but then
are used on a semantical and pragmatical level to construct planned and closed interaction.

16
Steve Woolgar tells us about the opinion on users of a company which develops a PC: “The user’s
character, capacity and possible future actions are structured and defined in relation to the machine.
[...] This never guarantees that some users will not find unexpected and uninvited uses for the
machine. But such behavior will be categorized as bizarre, foreign, perhaps typical of mere users.
The semantically and pragmatically ambiguities which occur in ‘being-in-interaction’ are
ignored. Ambiguity is seen as troublesome and inconvenient and thus has to be prevented
and ‘dis-solved’ at the technical and syntactical level (Crutzen, 1997, 2000a, 2000b, 20001b).
Those models of interaction are frozen into the behavior of computer scientists and
into the ICT-representations which they themselves use and which they apply and force back
onto the Informatics domain. Design in Informatics is seen as making a product for a remote
world, whose interaction can be modeled from a distance and without being experienced. In
the process of making ICT-representations. Professionals are mostly not designing but using
established methods and theories. They focus on security, non-ambiguity and are afraid of
the complex and the unpredictable. Meaning construction processes have disappeared in
processes of doubtless syntactical translation. These usage practices of professionals are
reflected in the ICT-products ready-made for users. Users are not given enough
opportunities to intertwine use and design. They are not subjects but mere objects (software-
OBJECTs) in the representation. The room for mutual actability of ICT-representations has
become very small and is fenced in between forced routine and despair.17
By deconstructing the ‘use-design’ opposition in the Informatics discipline and domain
the vanishing of the critical ‘subject-position’ and the vanishing of design as a changing
activity focused on an openness of the future can be ‘disclosed’. Changing the frozen habits
can start with the disclosure and the repair of a variation of ‘transformative critical rooms’,
which were closed in the past. These ‘rooms’ should be reopened and redecorated with
differences. However, that redecoration is only possible in interdisciplinary fashion. Creating
‘critical transformative rooms’ needs another interaction concept than the obvious concept of
interaction of the Informatics discipline. It needs actors who have a habit of causing doubt.
The discourse in Gender Studies on ‘subject-object’ relations, ‘subjectivity-objectivity’, and
possible constructions of truth and reality in three main feminist tendencies toward
generating new theories of knowledge: feminist empiricism, feminist standpoint theory, and
feminist postmodernism, are developed out of critical positions in and towards these three
tendencies. They have in common that they reject the claim of universal truths; truths are
always particular and situated. Actors socialized in Gender Studies can cause doubt in the
Informatics discipline by presenting their critical way of acting and exploiting the play of
differences.18

More generally, of course the more significant this boundary, the more likely will be the prevalence of
this kind of separatist talk.” (Woolgar, 1991, p. 89)
17
Despair in the meaning of continuous doubting. Dewey calls this kind of doubt an intruder, a not
welcome guest (Ratner, 1939, p.838; Dewey, 1917).

18
See Adam, 1998; Suchman, 1994.
 One transformative critical room, where redecoration is urgent, is that of the
interaction between human actors and ICT-representations. Much of people’s life consists of
interaction with themselves and interaction with others: people, machines, animals, objects,
etc. In the future, people will live in ICT-based webs of connections, in ICT-based webs of
interaction systems. Webs will be in the people and at the same time, people will be nodes in
several webs of interaction. They will become ‘Cyborgs’ and live in ‘cyborg worlds’ (Haraway,
1991). So, a lot of interaction will be influenced by information and communication
technology. This influence should not be a deterministic one because people themselves
should construct the meaning of the technology. In the view of Heidegger, the essence of
technology is “disclosing something, for bringing it forth, for letting it be seen” (Zimmerman,
1990, p.229).19 . It is the opening of ‘Dasein’ itself even to the discovery that human actors
will become “standing reserve within the global technical system”.(Heidegger, 1962, pp.21-
28; 1936, p.39, 41; Zimmerman, 1990, p.215, 229). Redecoration means to reconstruct the
meaning of ‘use’: Using ICT-representations means always designing and redesigning a
flexible world of interactions between human and non-human actors in which the connections
can always be disconnected by the actors involved in the world. The making of ICT-
representations, based on theories and methods, is using ICT-representations. Doubting the
obvious use of ICT-representations can uncover this projective acting into the future. ‘Being-
in-interaction’, our horizontal and vertical movements towards actable actors means that the
activities of use and design are always intertwined in a process of learning. In this view,
designing can be conceptualized as changing and changed acting, as a projection to future
acting.

9. Disclosing ICT-Representations

Open ICT-representations are ‘mutual actable’ for an actor. Actability is not a condition of the
ICT-presentation. Mutual actability is the process in which the intertwining process of use
and design can be based on doubting the obvious way of interacting and the ready-to-hand
routines of the ICT-representation. Mutual actability is a process between an actor and a
representation and depends on the presence of an ICT-representation for an actor. The

19
Heidegger expresses the essence of modern technology as a challenging-forth or challenging-
revealing. “This challenging sets upon what is, nature, the genetic profile of the individual human
being, the graphic imagination of the human relationship to the cybernetic domain, and so on and
reveals it on the terms of that same technical challenge or set up.” (Babich, 1999). According to
Babette Babich, Heideggers questioning of technology reveals that questioning is more than a
“calculative convention (namely that of question and answer)”. It is “an open- ended or attentive
project”.
process of intertwining design and use is always individual and situated in the interaction. It
depends on the affective disposition and the state of mind of the actor.
Therefore, the intertwining of use and design needs the presence-at-hand of the ICT-
representations. Their readiness-to-hand should not be fixed. ICT-representations are
present in a world of actors if they cause doubts and if the representation is at the same time
‘leavable’ and reliable. The doubt in acting should be possible but should not lead to
desperation or to a forced routine acting. ICT-representations have a presence of leavability
if representations allow the user to use the ICT-representations as a routine but also give the
users the opportunity of learning in which situations the ICT-representations are adequate
and in which situations they should be abandoned.20
The acting and interacting of people will be influenced by the acting of the ICT-
representations which are made ready. Using an ICT-product is negotiating not only on the
content of the product but also on what actions of the ICT-product are suitable in the actor’s
situation. Processes of negotiation and construction are necessary not only with the contents
of the representations but also with the behavior and memory of ICT-representations to make
the range between desperation and obvious acting leavable, useful and reliable. Translations
and replacements of ICT-representations must not fit smoothly without conflict into the world
they are made ready for.
A closed readiness is an ideal, which is not feasible because in the interaction
situation the acting itself is ad-hoc and, therefore unpredictable. The ready-made behavior
and the content of ICT-representations should be differentiated and changeable to enable
users to make ICT-representations ready and reliable for their own use. Users should not be
hampered to design their own future by repeatedly giving meaning to ICT-representations.
The means of interaction with ICT-representations should be as diverse as possible and the
presentation of the ICT-representations’ behavior must not determine the acting of users.

10. Interaction of Gender Studies and Informatics on the Method OO: A Critical
Transformative Room21

The object-oriented approach (OO) is used in the Informatics discipline as a method for
interpretation and representation, especially when analyzing worlds of interaction,

20
Heidegger calls this “Verläßlichkeit”. He used it in two meanings: leavable and trustworthy (reliable)
(1936, pp. 28-29.)
21
For the construction of such critical transformative rooms on OO in Education see: Crutzen, 1999;
2000a; Crutzen2000b, pp. 368-91.
representing design models and producing hardware and software systems. By applying
critical views developed in Gender Studies on ‘subject-object’ relations the opposition ‘use-
design’ in Informatics, especially OO, can be deconstructed. One of the most dominant focal
points in Software Engineering is the production of unambiguous software with mastered
complexity. Based on the habits and routines of this focus for controlling complexity and
reducing ambiguity within software, software engineers master the complexity and ambiguity
of the real world. With abstraction tools such as classification, separation and inheritance,
they colonized real world analysis processes. This colonization from ICT-system realization
into world analysis is dictated by the analyzing subjects’ focus of avoiding complexity and
ambiguity by selecting the most formalized documents, texts, tables, schemes in the domain
etc. which are close to the syntactical level of object oriented programming languages and by
transforming natural language into a set of elementary propositions. This colonization results
in hierarchical structures and planned behavior to be enlightened, and in ad hoc actions and
interactions to be darkened. This use of OO in Informatics is exemplary for the ontological
and epistemological assumptions in the discipline: not only is it possible to ‘handle the facts’
but also to handle and therefore control real behavior itself. The expert users of the object-
oriented approach suggest very heavily that OO can objectively represent the total dynamics
of reality with its method to create OBJECTs: artificial representations.
Feminist theories can give arguments for doubting the assumptions within the OO
approach because they are always based on the same illusions of objectivity and neutrality
of representation, the negation of power and dominance by its translation into something
‘natural' and 'obvious’. Leaving OO means to use it only for the purpose it was originally
meant for: the production of software. OO-based software, which consists in predictable and
planned interaction, cannot be the fundament of the representation of humans, otherwise
humans become an available resource, which can be ordered repeatedly. However, a total
rejection of OO cannot be the answer to the doubts. The presence of OO-based products
enforces the disclosure of some unwanted consequences of OO. In OO ambiguity and doubt
are hidden, but they are not absent. Human actors may be re-abled to design the way they
want to use OO-based systems. As a starting point, a comparison with the theatre metaphor
is useful for changing the position of the user.
The OBJECT22 is the basic unit in a description of an OBJECT world, which functions
as a SCRIPT for an ‘interaction play’ of cooperating OBJECTs. A presentation of an OBJECT
world is like the performance of a theatre play.

22
With the word ‘OBJECT’ in uppercase is meant a constructed artificial entity within the ontology of
the object-oriented approach. The word object in lowercase is an entity in reality which can be
observed and represented by a subject.
 In the position of Audience or ACTOR (the intended roles of the user) humans can
enjoy the OBJECTs playing in the OO world. The OBJECT's play can be a useful tool
integrated in our daily life. Even more, if we could change our position of only being a
passive Audience member or a forced ACTOR to the position of being the Director or Author
of the play. If we are, as users, just ACTORs in an OO play, then we are determined to play
as OBJECTs, with no doubt, and follow the prescriptions of the pregiven SCRIPT without
thinking.
Functioning as an OBJECT, we cannot escape the life cycle of states and transition
rules. As a Director or Author, we could create out of ROLEs new ACTORTYPEs or
aggregate old ones to a new surprising play. We could solve the conflicts within the
aggregated ACTORTYPE so that they can cooperate in a way that is suited for special
situations and act in a way that gives priority to our purposes, even if this could make our
self-created ACTORs unpredictable or unreliable. As humans, we would like to create new
interaction worlds out of the present-at-hand ROLEs.
Moreover, plays of which we do not know the plot we enjoy the most. Open OBJECTs
can give us the opportunity to edit the OO play and to replace parts with our own actions and
(inter)action. Use and design can only be intertwined in OO-representation if humans are
allowed to rehearse experiencing the leavabilty of the OO-software: OO as it is used for the
representation and presentation of the dynamics of interaction worlds leads us beyond the
data-oriented approach and makes room for the opportunity to discuss the character of
human behavior. Knowing that the essence of human behavior is not predictable and is
situated in the interaction itself we can discover that OO will only disclose planned action.
ACTORs cannot be representations of humans or act in the same way as humans. And that
is precisely the essence of their attraction. OBJECTs are aggregated ROLEs in a play or are
things to use and integrate in acting. People (users and designers) are Authors and Directors
creating the play; rewriting the ontology of the OO-approach to make it possible to look at
OO realizations as plays of artificial ACTORs directed by users.

11. Conclusion

To ignore ICT-products is impossible. Therefore, one should be pragmatic and live on the
borders between the binary oppositions, recognizing that these borders cannot be found at
the border of the Informatics discipline but only within the discipline itself. Through living on
the borders, women can cultivate an erotic relation to ICT-representations, feeling attraction
and antipathy simultaneously by creating transformative critical rooms, which are leavable. In
that relation women can blow up the separation of use and design, and intertwine use and
design through doubting the ready-made interactions. Through the creation of an opening in
this cleared room between use and design processes of intertwining use and design and of
changing interactions and representations can be started.
Transformative critical rooms are in my opinion the necessary condition for making
visible the gendering of the Informatics domain and for presenting and allowing a mutual
dialogue between the female and the male in which differences can continue to exist. This
answer is not a closed solution. It is the designing behavior of women and men which can
vivify the differences in future worlds of interactions.

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