Human and Machine in Formation: An Ethnographic Study of Communication and Humanness in a Wearable Technology Laboratory in Japan

This dissertation reports on an ethnographic study of human-centered technology researchers, conducted in Japan between 2010 and 2012. Researchers in this field—a multidisciplinary group mostly of computer engineers, as well as complex systems scientists, biologists, and psychologists—claim that existing “machine-centered” technologies require users to behave like machines, resulting in burdensome and brittle social relations. In contrast, they attempt to create “human-centered technologies” that humans can interact with “naturally,” which they believe will facilitate the creation of resilient and comfortable societies. HCT researchers believe that the key to understanding natural human interactions lies in how humans “read ambience.” Reading ambience is the process through which a social actor identifies and acts on the aspects of its self and surroundings that inform it of what behaviors are appropriate in a given setting. They work to reverse engineer how humans read ambience to create technologies that humans can interact with naturally. This dissertation argues that HCT researchers efforts to understand humanness through reverse engineering elucidate dimensions of human relations that have been suppressed in conventional discourses on the human. Anthropological understandings of the human have been predicated on the notion that the human is a form of life. Instead, HCT researchers’ work shows that the human is a system of communication. The human is defined by how it interfaces and exchanges messages with other systems of communication. Their perspective shows the human as a system defined by the relations it maintains among its body, its social and material surroundings, including technologies and other humans. By following HCT researchers’ attempts to create human-machine interfaces, this ethnography attempts to offer an approach to the human based in communication that challenges atomistic understandings of the human still latent in anthropology.Ph.D