A socio-material ecology of the distributed self

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Abstract

When distributed to different artefacts, the self appears in a multitude of shapes, characterized not only by its materiality but also by the necessity to preserve at least an illusion of a core self. The experience of a continuous evolution of these overlapping “selves”, many of which are materialized together with others’ overlapping selves, cannot be captured by traditional design approaches, nor can ethical aspects and conflicts of the right to express yourself through artefacts. This article, with its empirical basis in an interdisciplinary EU funded project, PalCom, is an attempt to test both ecological concepts and relationships and sociological (actants, actor-network-theory) ones. No meaningful separations are observed between the human ecology and sociology and the artefactual ones. Instead, it is the whole system of people, practices, values, and technologies in a particular situatedness that is meaningful to pinpoint and elaborate.

In this text, the notion of the distributed self will be discussed. By this I mean the way artefacts are included in the study of an individual. There are many things to be considered when thinking of the socio-materiality of this distributed self. Here, two different approaches are tested, separately and intertwined: a sociological and an ecological.
Original languageEnglish
JournalDesign Philosophy Papers
Issue number2
Publication statusPublished - 2008

Subject classification (UKÄ)

  • Human Computer Interaction

Free keywords

  • metaphor
  • artifacts
  • actor-network-theory
  • health care
  • use case
  • ICT

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