Design for engagement

Traditional system design and HCI favor accuracy and efficiency. These are values derived from task oriented and engineering tradition of computing design that are largely originated and take place in work places. As computers continually spread into other places of everyday lives, where computers are embedded in settings not just physically different from work places but also culturally, socially and historically different. It challenges these underlying values and approaches inherited from engineering tradition.

Built on Philip Agre's notion of critical technical practice which proposes that practices of technology design should incorporate philosphical and critical reflection , Pheobe sengers and her students propose a program called "cultural embedded computing", with its aim of building technologies not just for people to use, but also for people to think about technology and themselves. In this program, they turned the role of user studies from straight technology evaluation towards sociocultural research, where the goal was not just to improve understandings of people and technology, but also encourage participants to rethink their own experiences in light of their participation; they also designed systems to trigger people to interpret and reflect on the relationship between machine and emotions (the influencing machine), and interpret and reflect on a group;s ongoing emotional experiences.

Therefore, the way of measuring the success of system turned away from measuring efficiency towards concerns with how people worked with the display and what meaning they attributed to it. So the technology is not just a tool to inform affection or others, but what experiences that display can evoke.