Glossary

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Perpetual Contact

Perpetual contact is a sociological term coined by James Katz and Mark Aakhus to describe the state, enabled by mobile phones and later by ubiquitous internet messaging, in which people maintain constant availability to their social network regardless of physical location. For…

Persona Design(also: Design Personas, User Personas)

A user-centered design technique in which designers create fictional but grounded profiles of representative users — demographics, goals, context, pain points — to guide design decisions when direct user involvement is limited. In accessibility and HCI co-design workshops,…

Point of Infrastructuring(also: PoI)

A concept from Pipek and Wulf's infrastructuring theory naming the moment at which users become aware of the technology they depend on - typically when it breaks, behaves unexpectedly, or no longer supports their task - and begin to adapt, configure, or work around it. Points of…

Positive Computing(also: Positive Technology)

A design approach articulated by Rafael Calvo and Dorian Peters (2014) and extended by Riva, Gaggioli and colleagues that intentionally orients information and communication technology toward supporting psychological wellbeing, human flourishing, and positive emotion — rather…

Posthumanism(also: Posthumanist Design, More-than-Human Design)

A theoretical orientation in design and HCI that decenters the human as the sole agent of value and instead considers nonhuman animals, plants, ecosystems, and even technological artifacts as participants in design contexts. Posthumanist and more-than-human framings push…

Practice-based Learning(also: Iterative Practice)

An approach to learning that organises instruction around short, repeatable cycles of attempting a task, receiving feedback, and refining performance, rather than around passive content consumption. Practice-based learning is well suited to embodied skills - sign language, motor…

Provocation (HCI)(also: Design provocation, Provotype)

In human-computer interaction, a designed artifact whose purpose is to unsettle assumptions, provoke debate, or surface hidden values rather than to solve a defined problem. Provocations draw on traditions of critical design (Dunne and Raby), adversarial design (DiSalvo),…

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