The Emergent Rhythms of a Robot Vacuum Cleaner—An Empirically Grounded Account of Agential Realism

This article builds on the argument that design for complex interactive systems should shift from creating transactional interactions to ’organizing relational complexity’. Grounded in Karen Barad’s agential realism, we have argued that a designer’s role can benefit from not defining interactions, but to curate the material-discursive conditions under which meaningful relations can emerge. To address the underexplored empirical and temporal dimension of this practice, we conducted a workshop to stage emergent gameplay dynamics and discussions on agential realist anticipation. The workshop featured a custom-designed game where participants built their own controllers to anticipate and adapt to shifting gameplay conditions. The results show how alterations in relational constraints, rather than explicit goals, caused the emergence of distinct, non-predefined gameplay rhythms. Our findings provide empirical grounding of an agential realist interpretation of these dynamics and we argue that a system’s identity lies in its unfolding pattern rather than a final state. Based on the findings we introduce three design principles: Design for relational emergence, Design for re-membering, and Design for emergent patterns. Consequently, we conclude by outlining conceptual specifications for a computational model we are developing, capable of supporting such non-linear emergent dynamics