Unavailability and Holism: Rethinking HCI with Concepts from Theology

Current trends in technology suggest that making everything available (e.g., services, products, other people) is a valuable end in itself and that the whole person can be understood and addressed if only enough data is collected and processed about them. Our work in projects with HCI researchers and Protestant theologians made us question such assumptions. In this position paper, we share two themes that emerged from our interdisciplinary work on technologically-mediated religious communication, namely unavailability and holism. We argue that unavailability is an essential condition of being human and that being human consists of more than just a static sum of its parts. We present related examples from our work and detail the Protestant theological perspective on unavailability and holism. In doing so, we hope to bring new impetus to HCI and to stimulate reflection.

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