Reflective Design
Phoebe Sengers, Kirsten Boehner, Shay David and Joseph ‘Jofish’ Kaye
Culturally Embedded Computing Group, Cornell Information Science
301 College Avenue, Ithaca, NY 14850, USA
sengers at cs.cornell.edu, kab18 | sd256 | jofish at cornell.edu
ABSTRACT
As computing moves into every aspect of our daily lives,
the values and assumptions that underlie our technical
practices may unwittingly be propagated throughout our
culture. Drawing on existing critical approaches in
computing, we argue that reflection on unconscious values
embedded in computing and the practices that it supports
can and should be a core principle of technology design.
Building on a growing body of work in critical computing,
reflective design combines analysis of the ways in which
technologies reflect and perpetuate unconscious cultural
assumptions, with design, building, and evaluation of new
computing devices that reflect alternative possibilities. We
illustrate this approach through two design case studies.
Keywords
Reflective design, critical technical practice, participatory
design, critical design, value-sensitive design, ludic design,
reflection-in-practice, critical theory
INTRODUCTION
Information Technology (IT) is everywhere, shaping the
way we experience our lives, the world, and each other.
For many of us, the texture of our work lives has long since
been steeped in a symbiotic relationship with the
technologies that shape and sometimes define our work
practices. In the last 15 years, we are seeing similar shifts
in all areas of everyday life. Passersby hooking into their
iPods and chatting on their mobile phones, coffee shop
patrons transfixed with their laptops, business travelers
squatting on airport floors tethered to power for the gadgets
that organize their lives: as technology designers it can be
both exhilarating and unnerving to see how the design
decisions we make, consciously or unconsciously, shape
the micro-texture of people’s everyday experiences. As
people adapt to the opportunities and constraints provided
by our technologies, their everyday practices, feelings,
even their identities and sense of self may shift, often in
unanticipated ways. As designers, we are left to wonder:
what values, attitudes, and ways of looking at the world are
we unconsciously building into our technology, and what
are their effects? How can we find and address blind spots
in our approaches in order to make design decisions that
may lead to improved quality of life?
Indeed, over the last 30 years, recognition of critical blind
spots in human-computer interaction (HCI) has opened
new design spaces and led to improved technologies. For
example, researchers have argued that HCI’s perspective
on automating work practices was blind to IT’s role in the
politics of the workplace and to the complex organization
of apparently routine activity. Developing an awareness of
these factors led to new strategies for democratic design of
IT and for integrating ethnographic insights into new
technology design [e.g. 14, 43]. In another example,
researchers argue that HCI’s focus on cognition has
inadvertently led to a discounting of emotion in interaction,
and are developing methods for bringing a sensitivity to
user emotions into interface design [e.g. 36]. In the most
recent example, researchers are raising questions about the
centrality of work as the object of HCI’s study, arguing that
HCI methods developed for workplaces are risking making
all of life like work [e.g. 4].
In each of these cases, researchers identified values,
practices, and experiences that were unconsciously, but
systematically, left out of HCI. The ways of viewing
human activity that they criticize were so naturalized, i.e.
so much a part of our HCI worldview, that it was often
hard, at first, both to understand that something was
missing and to imagine that HCI could be meaningfully
pursued in another way. These critiques made it possible to
question why particular aspects of human life were left out
of design, to discuss whether or not they should be, and to
begin to imagine new HCI methods that could more
adequately address important parts of human experience.
In each of these cases, critical reflection identified
particular unconscious assumptions in HCI that might
result in negative impacts on our quality of life. In this
paper, we build on this critical tradition within HCI to
develop a systematic approach to folding critical reflection
into the practice of technology design. Rather than focusing
on a particular assumption, we argue that critical reflection
itself, can and should be a core principle of technology
design for identifying blind spots and opening new design
spaces. We start by defining critical reflection, its
importance, and its influences in HCI. We argue that
ongoing reflection by both users and designers is a crucial
element of a socially responsible technology design
practice. We demonstrate how reflective design can work
through two case studies. We end with a discussion
drawing from our theoretical grounding and case studies to
enumerate principles, strategies and challenges for this





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practice in HCI.
DEFINING REFLECTIVE DESIGN
What is reflection? Why reflect?
Our perspective on reflection is grounded in critical theory,
a Western tradition of critical reflection embodied in
various intellectual strands including Marxism, feminism,
racial and ethnic studies, media studies and psychoanalysis.
(The potential of Eastern reflective traditions such as
Buddhism for HCI is beyond the scope of this work; see
e.g. [44].) Critical theory's roots lie in the philosophy of the
Enlightenment, which argued that the world should be
understood, not by accepting unthinkingly the teachings of
authorities such as the Church, but through individual
reasoning. In doing so, they laid the foundation not only
for the scientific tradition but also for criticism of formerly
sacrosanct institutions such as religion and the state.
Later thinkers began to realize that individual reasoning is
not always enough to identify and find alternatives to
common cultural, social, or political assumptions. This is
because our very way of reasoning about the world is based
on unconsciously held assumptions and perspectives that
strongly condition what we see happening around us before
we even begin to reason about it. Critical theory argues
that our everyday values, practices, perspectives, and sense
of agency and self are strongly shaped by forces and
agendas of which we are normally unaware, such as the
politics of race, gender, and economics. Critical reflection
provides a means to gain some awareness of such forces as
a first step toward possible change.
In the previously listed HCI examples, we can see similar
issues arise. HCI as an intellectual field shapes what we as
practitioners believe is technically feasible and desirable,
while sometimes blinding us to other possibilities. Critical
reflection on the limitations of the field's methods and
metaphors can help us to see the world in a new way,
identifying and weighing new technical possibilities.
But given critical theory's emphasis on critical reflection as
an essential tool to allow people to make conscious value
choices in their attitudes and practices, the value of
reflection for HCI goes beyond simply opening new
options for designers. It can support new awareness and
freedom for users as well. We believe that, for those
concerned about the social implications of the technologies
we build, reflection itself should be a core technology
design outcome for HCI. That is to say, technology
design practices should support both designers and users in
ongoing critical reflection about technology and its
relationship to human life.
We define 'reflection' as referring to critical reflection, or
bringing unconscious aspects of experience to conscious
awareness, thereby making them available for
conscious choice. This critical reflection is crucial to
both individual freedom and our quality of life in
society as a whole, since without it, we unthinkingly adopt
attitudes, practices, values, and identities we might not
consciously espouse. Additionally, reflection is not a
purely cognitive activity, but is folded into all our ways
of seeing and experiencing the world. Unconsciously
held assumptions are not things we rationally know; they
are part of our very identity and the ways we experience
the world. Similarly, critical reflection does not just
provide new facts; it opens opportunities to experience the
world and oneself in a fundamentally different way. Even
in mundane activities such as shaving one’s legs, shopping
for meat products, or navigating busy urban streets, critical
awareness of feminism, factory farming, or racial issues
alters our perception and interpretation of what is going on
around us and the implications of our actions.
Foundations of Reflective Design
To make reflection, in this sense, a central part of our
technology design practices raises several questions. How
can designers become more aware of the blind spots in the
structure of HCI as a field? How can we help users be
reflective about the role of technology in their lives? How
can users and designers move reflection beyond a
superficial intellectual awareness to new lived experiences?
How can reflection become a not only desirable but also
useful part of technology design? In answering these
questions, we have been strongly influenced by existing
critical approaches in HCI. Here, we describe how we
draw on these trends to develop an approach to HCI to
support ongoing critical reflection.
Participatory Design
Our approach is made possible, first of all, by the
foundation laid by participatory design (PD) [e.g.
5,24,34,38]. PD advocates changing not just systems, but
also practices of system-design and -building, in order to
better support democratic values at all stages of the design
process. For example, members of the joint
Swedish/Danish UTOPIA project worked closely with the
Nordic Graphic Workers’ Union to develop the TIPS
system, a computer-based tool to aid skilled workers in
page layout and image processing for newspapers. The
UTOPIA researchers used several now-iconic participatory
design strategies, including low-fidelity mockups and work
organization games to gain a deep, contextual
understanding of users’ potential interactions with new
technologies while leveraging their existing skills and
experiences [14].
From participatory design, we draw several core principles,
most notably the reflexive recognition of the politics of
design practice and a desire to speak to the needs of
multiple constituencies in the design process. Participatory
design has, of course, been taken up more broadly in HCI
as user-centered design, which also informs our approach,
although, as Asaro points out [2], user-centered design
does not necessarily follow the political strategies of
'classic' PD.
Compared to PD, however, reflective design must make a
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