Hierarchy-in-flux: Co-evolving a distributed user interface for orbiting robots

The role of context has been an important focus for Human-Computer Interaction research since the beginning of the Second Wave of HCI. While different theoretical frameworks within the HCI community have different approaches to analysing context, they do so always with the object of understanding its effects on human-machine interaction, often with the larger goal of generating insights into future designs. The forces that shape context itself are typically ignored in these analyses because they are not considered relevant to the interaction itself, which is the focus of HCI. Yet if these forces were to create different contexts for interaction those changes would be relevant to HCI research. This suggests that HCI might benefit from techniques that analyse and design for the creation of the institutional structures that constrain human-machine interactions. We present the notions of multi-scale analysis and multi-scale design as terms which describe approaches that seek to engage the different disciplinary proficiencies that create the context for interaction. In doing so we make the case for a new kind of design education that strives to create multidisciplinary designers capable of harnessing the dynamics of systems at different levels of abstraction to achieve outcomes that exceed what we might expect from HCI alone.