Strangeness Wears Down
In the previous post, Gaver and Sengers’ concept of “alien presence” served as a way to leave room for interpretation—in other words, a manner of handing the user permission to interpret. Yet there is a single problem here.
‘Strangeness wears down.’
Gaver himself defined ambiguity not as a fixed property of an object, but as a relationship that emerges between the interpreter and the subject. Relationships change through repetition. What was strange at first grows gradually familiar by the second time, eventually becoming a habit.
In my last post, I found it unfortunate that Gaver did not sufficiently address the problem of repetition in his 2003 paper. Because he defined ambiguity as a relationship yet analyzed mostly the initial moment of encountering an object, the process through which ambiguity diminishes within repeated relationships remained outside the discussion.
The partner against whom ambiguity wears down fastest is an entity encountered frequently, intimately, and repeatedly. With repetition, human perception becomes automated, and at a certain point, the cognitive effort spent on the object drops close to zero. And this is precisely one of the paradoxes of AI interaction.
AI companions are designed so that users remain long and engage in repeated relationships. Yet as the relationship deepens, the initial strangeness disappears. The AI that was once an alien presence soon becomes a familiar interface with predictable speech and response patterns.
Even so, I have a reason for writing this post. Because an “at once familiar yet strange” experience surely exists.
A moment when an expression used every day suddenly turns strange. A moment when an alleyway passed dozens of times strikes one quite differently on a certain day. A moment when one discovers a facial expression never seen before on a face looked upon every day.
Familiarity does not necessarily exclude strangeness. Rather, certain strangeness reveals itself only after growing thoroughly familiar.
Russian Formalist Viktor Shklovsky captured this phenomenon as a concept in 1917.
‘Defamiliarization.’
He began with the same problem we are facing here: the way perception becomes automatic.
His starting point was the very problem we face now: the “automation of perception.” He viewed habitualization as devouring objects and life. The path walked every day, the smartphone held constantly in hand, the familiar faces. Upon repetition, we no longer truly perceive them. We merely recognize what they are; we do not look at them again.
To Shklovsky, the task of art was to break this automation. To make what became invisible through familiarity strange once more, causing it to be perceived as though met for the first time.
Here, one thing he added is decisive. The method is to make form difficult, thereby lengthening the duration of perception.
Defamiliarization is not a technique that helps one understand an object faster and easier. On the contrary, it is a technique that delays understanding, twists familiar paths of cognition, and causes one to linger longer before the object.
Then the question changes.
It is not how to inject strangeness from the start, but how to make what has already grown familiar feel strange again.
Defamiliarization
I recently met with an old mentor over a meal and shared the background behind my graduate school preparations along with my ongoing thoughts.
To briefly introduce my mentor, he is a professor who taught me at the Academy for Art Gifted Children in the past and has long researched child art education and child psychology. Before I knew it, our connection has spanned nearly twenty years.
Upon hearing my concerns, the professor offered two examples.
René Magritte. And **K-Pop Demon Hunters.**
Magritte was immediately understood. One can recall The Castle of the Pyrenees. A massive rock floats in midair, topped by a castle. The rock, the castle, the sea—each in itself is something we already know. Nothing new has been invented. The rock simply does not rest where it ought to be.
Through that single shift, we look at the rock again. We think again about what it means to be heavy, what it means to be anchored to the ground, what it means to belong to gravity. What Shklovsky explained in words, Magritte showed through painting.
Yet regarding K-Pop: Demon Hunters, I was a bit puzzled at first.
“Is K-Pop Demon Hunters really strange?”
But I soon realized. I had been looking at it solely through Korean eyes.
The movie draws various motifs from Korean shamanism, folklore, and traditional painting. The realms of the dead and the living, unresolved rancor, exorcism through song and dance. To me, these concepts were things encountered repeatedly across media since childhood, so I merely recognized them without active perception. But how would it feel to someone encountering them for the first time? Even the fact that the entity leading away the deceased takes the form of a young man wearing a black horsehair hat might strike them as strange. And because it is strange, they see it with a fresh gaze.
The format of K-Pop is the same. I do not find it in the least strange when idols perform perfectly synchronized choreography on stage or when fans chant in unison while waving lightsticks.
Yet the movie overlays that familiar stage onto the ground of shamanic ritual. A concert becomes a kind of gut (shamanic ritual), and the chants of the fandom become a force maintaining a barrier.
Thinking about it, it is not an entirely distant pairing. The sight of thousands facing a single direction, waving lights, and repeating identical songs and chants can already look sufficiently ritualistic from the outside.
Because I was on the inside of K-Pop culture, I did not perceive that it resembled ritual. By placing K-Pop into a different spot called shamanism, the movie rendered visible the ritual quality already existing within it.
And then there is the tiger. The tiger in K-Pop: Demon Hunters is blue.
Why blue? It is a color unseen even in traditional Hojak-do (tiger and magpie folk paintings). Precisely because of that mismatch, we look at the tiger once more.
It is not that the physical fact of blue is special. It is because a color that would not sit in the tiger’s familiar place has been placed there. Gaver’s definition—that ambiguity arises not from the properties of an object, but within relationships—is reconfirmed here.
What I gained from this conversation was two things:
- Strangeness stems less from the object itself than from the place where the object is set.
Neither the rock in The Castle of the Pyrenees nor the blue of the tiger in K-Pop: Demon Hunters was newly invented. A familiar thing merely departed from its original relationship and was set in a different place.
- Because strangeness is a relationship, I cannot fully judge my own strangeness.
I failed to recognize that K-Pop: Demon Hunters was strange. Because I was living inside that world. It became visible only after my mentor pointed it out from a different position.
And at this point, a concept built up across previous writings returns.
‘The Witness.’
I have drawn the witness as an entity that observes and reflects the child’s actions. Yet the conversation with my mentor revealed another role for the witness. A witness is not merely an entity that remembers and reflects what a child has done. It is an entity capable of pointing out, from a different position, the familiarity that the child cannot perceive on their own.
The agent of defamiliarization has mostly been the creator until now. For Magritte, and for the creators of K-Pop: Demon Hunters, the act of moving the familiar into a strange place occurred beforehand, outside the work. Yet as stated earlier, a place prepared in advance eventually becomes a new familiarity. Strangeness wears down.
A witness within a relationship is different. A witness stands in a position to see what the child has grown accustomed to, sooner than the child. Just as I failed to see the strangeness of K-Pop: Demon Hunters, a child does not know what they pass by like habit within the system. Pointing that out is possible not from a gaze outside the system, but only from a different position within the relationship. What my mentor did for me was precisely that.
And thinking about it, the work K-Pop: Demon Hunters itself was born from such a position.
Director Maggie Kang is a Korean-Canadian who was born in Seoul and emigrated to Canada as a child. To her, Korean culture was likely neither entirely inside nor entirely outside. Something familiar, yet simultaneously something to be explained and translated. A part of oneself, yet something that can be looked at again through a different gaze.
Of course, one cannot say that only the experience of diaspora enables cultural reinterpretation. Yet the position she stood in resembles the position my mentor took for me. A position where one maintains a relationship with the object, yet without being fully submerged in that relationship. Certain familiarities become visible only at that boundary.
Originally, in the latter half of this post, I intended to lay out at length a framework built by integrating my past writings. Summarizing the relationship between system, state, and labor to answer where strangeness can be replenished once it wears down.
Yet after writing the story about K-Pop: Demon Hunters, my thoughts changed. It seems better to leave the hypothesis I built as a single diagram for now, and hold off for a moment.
flowchart LR
A[Permission·Interpretation] --> B[Labor·State] --> C[Witness] --> D[Twisting·Gap]
D --> AThe point is this.
The basic rules of the system do not change. What changes is the state that the child has built within it. When fixed rules act upon the new state created by the child, a result returns that the child did not precisely predict.
That is the ‘gap.’
However, the occurrence of a gap alone is not enough. There are, of course, gaps that a child notices on their own. Moments when a child pauses before an unexpected result, thinking “Huh?”, certainly exist. Yet as familiarity deepens, the portion of gaps self-perceived in this manner diminishes. Just as I could not judge the strangeness of K-Pop: Demon Hunters on my own, a child in a deepening relationship is prone to passing by their own gaps like habit. At that very point, when witnessing that has watched the child’s trajectory refracts the result into view, a gap that was about to be passed over is experienced as a gap. Witnessing is not a gateway to all gaps, but a position that complements the place where a child’s self-perception is submerged by familiarity.
And an experienced gap becomes permission for the child to attempt the next interpretation. The child interprets the returned result, acts again, and alters the state within the system. Then, the same rules meet a changed state, creating a result different from before.
Unlike a pre-arranged place that eventually grows familiar again, the strangeness generated by this loop can continuously occur as long as the child creates new states. It is a structure where strangeness is not stockpiled like content, but generated anew within the shifting relationship.
Yet having drawn this structure, one question remains to be asked of the witness itself.
Let us return to the starting point of this post. It was said that the partner against whom ambiguity wears down fastest is an entity encountered frequently, intimately, and repeatedly. What, then, of the witness? The witness is also within the relationship, and relationships grow familiar through repetition. A witness remaining long beside the child will gradually fail to see what about the child is strange. Who makes the witness strange?
I think about the conditions that allowed my mentor to stand in that position for me. Though a relationship spanning nearly twenty years, our meetings were ‘intermittent.’ Because there was distance, the boundary position was maintained. For Maggie Kang, the physical distance of migration created that position. Yet AI companions are the exact opposite. They are designed to be constant, close presences.
To maintain the position of a witness, shouldn’t some intermittency or distance be designed into the structure instead? It is a question that collides head-on with the current companion design grammar, which takes being constantly by one’s side as a virtue. I will leave this question for the next post.
Still, saying that strangeness arises from relationships while attempting to trap it once more inside a fixed diagram is a comical thing.
Before explaining what kind of strangeness arises between the child and the system, I need to look back at what I myself was passing by out of familiarity.
A Long Way Back
Preparing for graduate school, my reading naturally revolved around the ACM Digital Library. Following papers in ACM, one can relatively easily find studies published by the same researcher across different times and conferences within the topic I seek.
These connections are certainly useful. One can see how a researcher’s problem statement developed over time, and trace how a concept was inherited and transformed within HCI.
And searching to verify after writing this paragraph, a fact was discovered.
Shklovsky, whom I addressed in the introduction of this post, had already entered HCI long ago.
「Making by Making Strange: Defamiliarization and the Design of Domestic Technologies」
Published in 2005 by Genevieve Bell, Mark Blythe, and Phoebe Sengers, “Making by Making Strange: Defamiliarization and the Design of Domestic Technologies” is a paper that brought defamiliarization in as a methodology for domestic technology design.
They argued that because the home is too familiar a space, one must make it strange to discover the hidden cultural assumptions and design possibilities within it.
And look at the third author’s name.
Phoebe Sengers.
The first author of “Staying Open to Interpretation: Engaging Multiple Meanings in Design and Evaluation,” which I discussed in the latter half of my previous post.
Literary theory from 1917 entered domestic technology design in 2005, and that researcher spoke of openness to interpretation again in 2006. And twenty years later, reading those papers in reverse order, I returned to Shklovsky.
Among the smart home design strategies presented in that paper, what particularly caught my eye was not overestimating efficiency, re-questioning the initiative between technology and user, and separating play from passively consumed entertainment.
The authors state that home rituals should not be eliminated in the name of efficiency, and that technology should support user activity without imposing unnecessary constraints. They also argue for leaving space for ‘serious play’ as distinct from passively consumed entertainment.
Things I had grasped in past posts as questions of labor, initiative, and play were already placed side by side within this paper.
Yet this paper does not connect them into a single structure either. Each is presented as a separate strategy for rethinking the smart home. Defamiliarization is also used primarily as a method for designers to break familiar assumptions and discover new design possibilities. It does not address how strangeness is regenerated after wearing down within repeated interaction, or how that process connects to user labor.
Having come full circle back to Shklovsky, the spot I stand on is not the same as the beginning. Because the question has changed. From how to supply strangeness, to how to create and maintain a position that lets a gap about to be passed over be experienced as a gap.
Closing Notes
As realized in the conversation with my mentor, strangeness begins when a familiar thing departs from its original place.
Yet as stated at the start of this post, a shifted place eventually grows familiar again. What the conversation with my mentor showed was a different kind of possibility.
A structure of strangeness that does not wear down might reveal its form little by little when perspectives from different fields—such as literary theory, aesthetics, child psychology, and art education—are placed beside the same problem, rather than seeking it solely within the language of HCI. Placing different fields side by side is also a way to let each field become a witness pointing out the other’s familiarity.
I, too, want to try placing familiar concepts in a different place.