Ambiguity as a resource for design

This 7,500-word refereed conference paper is a conceptual piece arguing that ambiguity, traditionally considered anathema in work on Human Computer Interaction, can be a positive resource for Interaction Design. The paper reflects collaboration across Design, Literature and Computer Science. It differentiates three kinds of ambiguity – of information, context and relationship – with illustrations from the arts (e.g. Duchamp's Fountain; Atelier Van Lieshout's Bais-ô-Drôme), and these forms of ambiguity are used to analyse recent interaction design examples. Finally, the paper offers a series of tactics (e.g. “implicate incompatible contexts to disrupt preconceptions”) for creating useful ambiguity in design. This paper represents a step towards recasting interaction design as providing resources for user interpretation and exploration rather than solutions to articulated problems