Technical Mentality

2024

This paper explores the philosophical and design implications of Gilbert Simondon’s concept of technical mentality for HCI research and practice. Simondon argued that the dominant relationship with technology in contemporary culture is one of alienation, stemming not from the machines themselves but from a lack of understanding of their operations. To counter this, he proposed technical mentality—a way of engaging with technical systems that emphasizes direct knowledge, modification, repair, and stewardship rather than passive consumption.

Building on this framework, we critically examine the black-boxing of technical systems and its ethical implications. We discuss how automation and seamless design often obscure the human labor and decision-making embedded in technology. Instead, we advocate for open, extensible, and legible systems, drawing from Simondon’s vision of open machines—systems designed for modularity, and continuous actualization.

This work was made possible by the NSF grant #2007045 and the Sloan Foundation.

Gabrielle Benabdallah and Nadya Peek. 2024. Technical Mentality: Principles for HCI Research and Practice. In Proceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '24). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 283, 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642720

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