Cyranic contraptions

Understanding contexts is an important challenge that is made harder for designers by the increasing speed at which contexts change. To assist designers, three types of contextual dynamism are distinguished: physical, ontological and social. To inform understanding ontological dynamism and social dynamism, "social contraptions" - a form of socially interactive design experimentation is proposed. This paper focuses on cryanic social contraptions in which unseen users interact through a human surrogate that they guide via radio transmissions. Observations from initial trials are reported along with a discussion of themes arising for design and an appraisal of this approach's potential as a design tool