Performative Knowing proposes acknowledging and accounting for humans’ active role in constructing and performing their ontological knowledge of their ubicomp surroundings. A simulated ubicomp stage is designed as an investigative tool to explore how participants gradually generate mental models based on their relationality with the stage, their interpreted contextual significance, and situated values. Participants and the designer co-create a series of scripted performances and physical props as a container to carry and enact that situated meaning and knowledge in the individual’s body movements, spaces, and contexts to allow for the continuous construction and reconstruction of knowing. This project focuses on exploring the various constitutive conversations humans could build with a complex ubicomp system, not for utility but for a knowing that creates a consistently engaged future navigation.
Fei Wang is an interaction/experience designer and researcher. Her research is centered on people’s interaction and relationship with technologies and how to design systems and interaction models that could facilitate human-machine conversations. She believes a more dynamic human-machine relationship will bring richer human experience and create more space for our humanities in the machine/algorithmic logic.