This article describes the story of pragmatism and its transformation into symbolic interactionism at Carnegie Mellon University and Aalto University. In both universities, design researchers were interested in user experience in interactive systems. John Dewey's pragmatism taught them to study how experience sometimes transforms into an experience and occasionally into stories. Herbert Blumer's interactionism had its roots in Chicago School sociology, and it developed in association with pragmatism. His interactionism gave these researchers tools to study Dewey's concepts empirically. We show in the article how this theoretical connection came about after 2000 and how it has shaped research programs in these two communities since then. We also discuss the relevance of pragmatism and interactionism in our current technological landscape, dominated by social media and artificial intelligence.

This article contributes to methodological studies of constructive design research by explicating its underlying epistemological foundations. At the heart of this article is the notion of drifting, defined as those actions that move design from its original objective or question to sometimes unanticipated results. The article explicates four traditions of knowledge production as derived from a corpus based on PhD theses. These traditions relate knowledge production to methods, research programs, design experience, and to a dialectic between researchers and user communities. As a result, they form epistemological traditions.

This paper explores aesthetics in what it calls new social design. It asks, “How can designers work with aesthetics when the main design object is social, and traditional object-bound aesthetic concepts lose their validity.” It describes three approaches to aesthetics: agonistic, which sees aesthetics as a way to lure people to interact with controversial content; convivial, which finds aesthetics in community interactions; and conceptual, which does away with aesthetics. All these have precedents in art.