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The Design Stance in User-System Interaction

Introduction Ideas about what users think and do have always had an important place in the theory and practice of design.1 These ideas are especially important when trying to understand how users interact with designed systems, whether those systems are physical products, digital interfaces, or more abstract services. In recent years, traditional concerns for the users’ efficiency, safety, and satisfaction have expanded to also include issues like meaning, engagement, and fulfilment.2 Consequently, attention is now focused on how interactions are situated in contexts of use,3 how users are constructed during interaction,4 and how interaction can itself be aesthetic.5 These broader concerns reflect a more humane approach to users, respecting them as active, aware, and intelligent people rather than just viewing them as being less predictable than the designed systems with which they interact.6 This article suggests that fully respecting users’ sophistication means acknowledging that they have the capacity to recognize that designed systems have been designed. That is, as users interact with systems, they may reason about the design processes from which these systems result. Such reasoning may help users predict the behavior of systems, especially when they consider how designers might have expected users to act. Furthermore, this reasoning may also influence other aspects of how users experience a system, including the meaning that it holds for them, their engagement with it, and the fulfillment that it brings. This article refers to these phenomena as users adopting a design stance towards the system. The term “design stance” was coined by philosopher Daniel Dennett, who proposed that an effective way for users to reason about how a system will behave is to think about what it was designed to do.7 The design stance and other related concepts have received a great deal of attention from philosophy, psychology, and a broad range of other disciplines that are concerned with the interpretation and use of artifacts. Despite Dennett’s prominence, and despite the relevance of the design stance to how people interact with designed systems, this concept has attracted relatively little discussion in the literature on interaction and design. This literature also contains very few empirical studies that can be related to the design stance, and in any case, those studies that are relevant primarily focus on other phenomena. Consequently, the role of the