User

RELATED TERMS: Actant; Actantiality; Lack, Loss and User-Centred Design Practices; Participant; Protagonist;

In the understanding of design action and interaction being developed here, the term ‘user’ is situated in the context of the theory of actantiality. Actantiality is a theory of the situated and situational condition of any action. Actions are provisional: conditioned and conditional. The utilitarian ‘I’, the ‘I-as-user’, is therefore considered as part of the dynamic processes whereby the personal formation of the self and the socio-cultural operation of the subject take place and then take their place, that is, become part of ongoing situated conditional interaction.

In this way, while utilitarian actions may be seen as responses to affordances, they may also become part of the creation of opportunities, an inaugurative or inventive action. In this context, utilitarian actions may be part of a transcendence of their place or part of a transgression of their place in a complex dance of placing, displacing, orienting and disorienting.

The term ‘user’ may be valuable for acknowledging, perhaps unintentionally, the repetitive and/or ‘addictive’ qualities of some forms of interactivity within the consumer economy and the more recent attention economy.

One question that arises in the context of online environments is: What is the status of the ‘multi-user realm’? Is it a realm in which individual users come together as an aggregate, remaining separate; or do they come together to form a community? Or, does this distinction depend on the design of the environment itself? This discussion mirrors and extends that within the realm of the public and the creation of publics.

For a longer consideration of the relationships among user, self and subject, the entry for Lack, Loss and User-Centred Design Practice is a useful place to start.