Removal as a Method: A Fourth Wave HCI Approach to Understanding the Experience of Self-Tracking

In this Toolbox session Sarah Homewood, Tenure-Track Assistant Professor in Human Centred Computing at the University of Copenhagen, will present removal as a method; the deliberate removal of technologies as a research method. Her method builds on the belief that “you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone”. She will describe how she has used the method to understand the lasting effects of menstrual cycle tracking in two ways: 1. hypothetically by asking interviewees to imagine removing a technology from their lives, and 2., by literally removing technologies and documenting the effects of this removal through a duoethnography. She proposes that removal as a method is a great way to understand what technologies really mean to us, and especially how technologies continue to shape us, even after they are gone. She positions this method within the more-than-human, fourth-wave HCI where technologies are understood as being entangled with us at an epistemological and even ontological depth.