School of Computing and Information Systems

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FamilyName: Reichelt_____ GivenName:Jesse______________

UnitCode:KIT311____UnitName:SocialandCulturalIssuesofDigitalInteractive
Media
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Individual Assignment 3 / 3 - Lifeworlds

In this essay I will be elaborating on the concept of the lifeworld as used in philosophy
especially by Husserl, and how the concept of lifeworlds can be used in thinking about
design issues in socio-computer interfaces (SCIs).

Firstly, a brief history and context of Husserls lifeworld. Husserls concept of the
lifeworld, although it makes its first appearance in one of his earlier texts dated 1917, it
is most commonly associated and understood in the context of his 1936 work The
Crisis of the European Sciences. In this work, Husserl (as the title testifies), attempts to
show that modern science is in a crisis, a crisis which is a direct result of the forgetting
of its own foundations. The main historical pivot which he chooses to focus on in this
work is developments in the world of Galileo Galilei.

In an article published in the American Philosophical Quarterly, David Carr elaborates

Galileos proposal is that exact and intersubjectivity valid knowledge of the real world
can be attained by treating everything about this world as an example of a geometrical
object or relationship. If every physical shape, trajectory, vibration, etc., is seen, after
being measured as accurately as possible, as a version of a pure geometrical shape,
geometrical statements about the properties and relationships among these pure shapes
will turn out to provide us with information about nature which shares in the exactness
and universality of pure geometry. This leaves untouched of course, certain properties
which do not seem directly measureable in geometrical terms: color, warmth, weight,
tone, smell, etc. Galileo notes, however, that changes in some of these properties
correspond exactly to measureable changes in geometrical properties In his boldest
move of all, Galileo proposed to treat all such secondary qualities, as they were later
called, exclusively in terms of their measureable geometrical correlates with the idea
that all will be accounted for thereby. 1

So basically, (and of most importance for the latter part of this essay), Galileo, as
Husserl saw him, divorced knowledge of the real world gained by the system of science,
and the everyday world of people existing within it. In Galileo the former gained preeminence without a predecessor and the latter was relegated to irrelevance. However, as
Husserl himself states,

1. (Carr, 1970, p. 333)

We become aware that we scientists are, after all, human beings and as such are among
the components of the life-world which always exists for us, ever pre-given; and thus all
of science is pulled, along with us, into the-merely subjective-relative-life world. 2

Husserls main point here is to show which world is primary, (which is a corollary into
his notion that science has forgotten its foundations). We do not abstractly and rationally
approach Galileos mathematician of all life from nowhere, but rather, science comes
out of (and is symbiotic upon) our very basic everyday being in the world and its
background.

Now that we have situated the context for Husserls life-world, its also important to
define adequately what it is. And here we come across an important ambiguity. Multiple
papers on Husserl point to an important duality in Husserls conception of the lifeworld.
Eran Dorfman, in a paper entitled History of the Lifeworld: From Husserl to MerleauPonty states

2. (Carr, 1970, p. 336)

The lifeworld is treated throughout Husserls writings with an ambiguity attested to by

the gap between, on the one hand, the earlier Ideas II, in which the notion of the
lifeworld is anticipated by the personalistic, everyday active attitude, and, on the other
hand, Experience and Judgement, where the lifeworld is presented as the passive
background of primary experience, as a vague, pre-given, silent world, serving as the
foundation for any subsequent linguistic objectification. Husserl seems to vacillate
between these two notions of the lifeworld: one of a pre-given level and another of a
world of action; one of a foundation of everyday life and another of everyday life
itself. 3

So we have this two-fold conception as foundation of everyday life, and everyday life
itself. As the above quote recognizes, one of Husserls main objective was to discover a
secure foundation for the scientific enterprise. Seeing the failure Galileos
mathematization divorced from life, Husserl sought to secure science in another
unchanging, secure area. In his latter writings, particularly The Crisis of The European
Sciences and onwards, he tends toward the unchanging, transcendental foundation of
everyday life. However, there is an important link between the two.

David Carr, in his article Husserls Problematic Concept of the Life-World looks at
ways in which to understand Husserls fitting together of numerous concepts under the
single term, lifeworld.

3. (Dorfman, 2009, p. 296)

In the first point, Carr harkens back to Husserls claim that one unifying feature of the
two conceptions of the lifeworld that have been discussed are that the both underlie any
coherent account of science, as science depends both on the immediate foundation of
experience, but also needs to exist within a cultural, linguistic community with shared
values and concepts of relevance and irrelevance. In the second point, Carr notes that
both the immediate foundation and the cultural and linguistic community in which we
are born into (something that Husserls latter pupil Heidegger would reformulate as
thrownness), are things that are generally passively received and accepted and form
the background underlying much of our conscious experience.

Now having successfully unpacked Husserls lifeworld explaining both its situated
context and its meaning, Ill move onto question of socio-computer interface (SCI)
design. Specifically looking at the questions of, what does it mean for SCI to be used by
actual people who are situated in their own, individual lifeworlds? What can SCI
designers do to ensure SCI technologies fit into individuals lifeworlds? What should
designers aim to avoid? What should they focus on?

First, what does it mean for SCI to be used by actual people who are situated in their
own, individual lifeworlds?

This primarily means that any given SCI used by a person does not exist in a vacuum,
disconnected and situated apart from the rest of their life. The concept of the lifeworld is
a holistic one in which a multitude of parts are constantly affecting all other parts of the
lifeworld. It rejects reductionism, which, in the words of Daniel Chandler, aims to
reduce a complex whole to the effects of one part (or parts) upon another part (or
parts). Rather, everything is constantly in a situation of effecting everything else. This
means that, in their designs, designers should take into account possible political, social,
cultural, historical, racial and gendered aspects which their SCI may influence. The
concept of technological determinism has, of course, been around for a long time.
Indeed in Platos Republic, Plato argues that the ship, merely by the way it is designed,
must have a single captain and therefore is inherently non-democratic. Or on the other
hand, things like the internet, or renewable energy, where and are thought by many to be
inherently democratizing technologies because of their decentralizing properties.

In more personalized SCI systems such as customer support, platforms involving

representation by avatar, or more fully interactive systems such as video games, this also
raises concerns of online (or offline), racism. Lisa Nakamura outlines five types of
racism in these areas as visual profiling of users, voice profiling of users, racism against
avatars, identity tourism (perpetuating specific racial, often quite demeaning
stereotypes), anti-immigrant racism in virtual communities (such as the case of the PinkHaired Dwarfs in the game Diablo, which came to be associated with using the game for
real world profit, and thus because almost a pariah race in the game). The link between
these more personalized systems and Husserls lifeworlds is especially clear as,

especially in the case of video games, they incorporate a great number of features of our
lived experience.

What can SCI designers do to ensure SCI technologies fit into individuals lifeworlds?
Firstly, this means that SCI designers must make some effort to familiarize themselves
(if only vicariously), with the lifeworlds that their potential audience inhabits. This can
take the form of some form of liaison with your target audience, whether this be
something on the informal side of recorded and documented conversations or interviews
or more formal and structured questionaries or doing research into similar usage data
and trends.

This also means that designers should utilize prototypes and customer feedback and
suggestions, as this is a great way of getting a snapshot of what it means to be in your
audiences lifeworld.

What should designers aim to avoid? What should they focus on?
As far as general rules go, designers should always make sure they have clear and
available customer feedback. This was something that was a weak spot in the Amazons
Mechanical Turk system, because the labor was so small (and repetitive), and the pay so
minimal, customer support took much more time and value than the minimal labor and
so was rarely implemented. If customer feedback is not available, there is clearly a
fundamental disconnection from the lifeworld of your audience. Large disparities in
power are also far more often than not unhealthy.

Once the SCI has been released, work with prototypes to gauge how adequately you as a
designer are fitting in with the lifeworld of your audience, to avoid a large number of

changes. As before, this will help you as the designer, and your target audience more
easily arrive at a system which works for both parties.

Bibliography

Smith, Merritt Rose and Leo Marx. 1995. Does Technology Drive History? The
Dilemma of Technological Determinism. The MIT Press, Cambridge.
McLuhan, Marshall. 1964. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Gingko
Press, U.S.A.
Flynn, Thomas. 2011, 'From Husserls Lifeworld to Heidegger and Twentieth-Century
Existentialism, https://jacobrump.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/lecture-from-husserlslifeworld-to-heidegger-and-twentieth-century-existentialism1.pdf
David Carr, 1970, VI. Husserls Problematic Concept of the Life-World, American
Philosophical Quarterly Vol. 7, Num. 4. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20009365
Dorfman, Eran, 2009, History of the Lifeworld From Husserl to Merleua-Ponty,
Philosophy Today.
New World Encyclopedia Online 2014, Lifeworld,
<http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Life-world>.
Internet Archive Wayback Machine2015, Technological or Media Determinism by
Daniel Chandler - Reductionism,
<http://web.archive.org/web/20120527154720/http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents
/tecdet/tdet03.html>.
Ekbia, Hamid and Bonnie Nardi, 2014, Heteromation and its (dis)contents: The
invisible division of labor between humans and machines, First Monday: PeerReviewed Journal on the Internet, Vol. 19, Num. 6,
<http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/5331/4090>