Moving Forward

At last - everything must come to an end. However, and instead of concluding this book with a final chapter that summarizes some of the main arguments presented here, I see this final chapter as an opportunity to look back, and as an opportunity for thinking about how to move forward. The focus for this book is on the ‘material turn’ in our field – how it has played out historically across the history of computing, how it has fueled a discussion on materiality in HCI, and how now sets the scene for a material-centered approach to interaction design. With one such focus I think that its important to understand that a turn is not a state, but rather a movement, and accordingly a process we should not just follow, understand and describe, but something that we should follow, probably try to trace the origins of, and probably also a process that we should try to make some predictions about in terms of where we are going. In short, how did we end up here? And where are we going next? So, in line with these lines of thinking, I suggest that it is now time for us to look back, in order to move forward.