Processlessness: staying open to interactional possibilities

Technologies increasingly inhabit evermore mundane and personal settings, a fact that has caused some designers to reflect upon the emergent, inaccessible nature of context. We present the notion of processlessness as a design value. The examples given here are intended to provoke thought about current design priorities and practices, and spur design discourse regarding the issue of context. Two cases illustrate how the absence of process in mediating artifacts can make room for users to discover, construct, and reconfigure context through and around their technologies. This argument is related to the notion of Zensign, that what we omit from technology designs is as important as what we put in; by adding features to computational systems, designers might be removing interactional possibilities.