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###### tags: `UX Research`
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# DAOhaus Pluriversal UX Design-Research Overview

[Miro Board for the UX Initiative](https://miro.com/app/board/uXjVOFB9klY=/?invite_link_id=788136154815)

## TL;DR
- Combination of the following initiatives:
- Recent [Talent Acquisition & Diversity discussion from the Denver working session.](https://hackmd.io/@daohaus/rJaqFjKJ9)
- War Games: battle testing V3 with intentional game design that moves towards positive-sum and non-zero sum games (and others).
- Initiating a dedicated UX research team to supplement and provide evidence for Magesmith product work flow.
- Generation of 3 key components:
- [triage list of topics to test](https://hackmd.io/@daohaus/Ske3427b9)
- [a clear process for conducting the first round of research](https://hackmd.io/@daohaus/rk7uPt6e9)
- adaptation of human-centered design ethos towards embodying the radical inclusivity we desire to foster as a team (the content that follows)

## Context
**Ontologically oriented design necessarily has a critical impetus. It involves "rethinking the way society is organized, shifting values, and significantly altering business models and economic thinking."**

*How do you translate a new cognitive paradigm into material environments and everyday practices?*

Can design contribute to fulfilling the historic, perhaps vital, task of catalyzing forms of collective intelligence that attend to the kinds of choices confronting us, including design's own role in creating them?

Ontologically oriented design is necessarily both reflective and political, looking back to the traditions that have formed us but also forwards to as-yet-uncreated transformations of our entangled lives. The emergence of new tools come to change our awareness of human nature/action, which in turn leads to new technological development. Design is part of this *dance* in which our structure of possibilities is generated. We are doing more than asking what can be built. **We are engaging in a philosophical discource about the self - about what we can do and what can be,** part of a continuing evolution of how we continue becoming the beings we are.

> "Our tools are part of the background in which we ask what it is to be human.""

## Key Points

### Away from the Universal
Thinking decolonially indicates a critique of the notion of a world made of One World and, conversely, upholds the notion that "while the planet is singular, world is plural - for it is formed and seen in difference - as are we." The sensitivity to difference is crucial here. What needs to be sustained is a pluriversal perspective.

### Embodied Reflection
A change in the nature of reflection from abstract, disembodied activity to an emobided (mindful), open-ended reflection. Reflection is not just *on* experience, but reflection *is* a form of experience itself. Done in this way, it can cut the chain of habitual thought patterns and perceptions, opening possiblities other than those contained in one's current representation of the space.

### Tranformation
The practice of transformation takes place in the process of enacting other worlds/practices, ie: radically changing how we see and interact with each other.

### Relationality
Away from dualism, the procession towards interdependence

2 Phases:
1. From considering things in isolation to considering things in interaction.
2. From considering things in interaction to considering things as *mutually constituted*, things existing at all only due to their dependence on other things.

- *Nothing preexists the relations that constitute it.*
- *All doing is knowing, and all knowing is doing.*
- *Every act of knowing brings forth a world.*

### Ontological Design
- **The opposite of human-centered design** with its timid (liberal) version of the human concerned with consumer desires and instrumental rationality. **Rather, becoming (post)human by design.**
- A call for a self-conscious and responsible invention of our own posthuman (user) notion of the human (user).

*In designing tools we are designing ways of being.*
- The interaction between understanding and creation.
- Addresses the broader question of how a society engenders inventions whose existence in turn alters the society.
- Every tool inaugurates a set of rituals, ways of doing, and modes of being that contribute to shaping what it is to be human.

*In designing tools, we design the conditions of our existence and, in turn, the conditions of our designing. We design tools, and these tools design us back.*
- Goal = **redirection.** To avoid *an implicit understanding of design,* as this makes it impossible to invent new approaches to designing machines that are better suited to human purposes and pose an obstacle to the creation of the open domains of possibility enabled by computer-mediated neworks of human interaction.
- **To develop a new ground for rationality** - one that is as rigorous as the rationalistic tradition but that does not share the presuppositions behind it.
- Engage in conversation and interventions *that change the ways in which we deal with ourselves and things.*

### Practice-oriented
- When meaningful change is needed, then disharmonies will be of the non-standard situational kind that is usually passed over by both common sense and theory. In these cases what is required is intense engagement and involved experimentation.
- **Engaged, experimental, open-ended practices of research**, including:
- Prototyping
- Scenario building
- Identifying *breakdowns* (moments in which the habitual mode is interrupted) rather than *problems* to exposing our customary oractices and allowing new solutions to appear.

### Operational Effectiveness
*Since all cognition brings forth a world, our starting point will necessarily be the operational effectiveness of beings in their local domain.*
- Ontological structure is the interrelations among **tool**, **user**, and **task/purpose**, all of which are brought together by the **interface**.

### Defuturing
- Definition: *The systematic destruction of possible futures by the structured unsustainability of modernity.* Must be destroyed, calling for an explicit ethics of what to destroy and what to create, materially and symbolically. **Involves destroying that which destroys.**
- *Futuring* is intended to convey the opposite: a future with futures. Indicates a move from Enlightenment ideals to *Sustainment* (not to be confused with sustainability) = where different ways of thinking, being, and doing become possible.
- Implies actions towards the relational development of a new human being (or at least sociality) by considering the ontologically designing forces that constitute subjects with diminished agency and the reverse.
- "Dwelling" in another way brings sharper recongition of what we acutually are, *so that we can be otherwise.*

### Sustainability / Sustainment
- Current proposals at best amount to reducing unsustainability rather than creating true sustainability.
- A framework for the redesign of tools, infrastructure, and social institutions as a means to foster changes in consciousness and practices based on an ontology of care.
- Sustainability in this sense = "The possibility that humans and other life will flourish on the planet forever."
- Flourishing = the most basic foundation of human striving, the strongest possible driver towards true sustainability.
- "The key to sustainability is the practical truths that each of us discovers in our daily life and that contribute to the collective activites of our culture" through our **devices.**

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