Dear Felienne,

“What is your favorite flower?” — You asked me this question at the beginning of our podcast episode on Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison’s book “Objectivity” (2021)1, and we then discussed science, objectivity, and truth. Your opening question reminded me of something the physicist Richard Feynman said in a BBC interview2. In this interview, Feynman mentions a disagreement he had with an artist friend. The artist believes that Feynman is unable to appreciate the beauty of a flower because science takes it apart, thereby transforming it into something dull. But Feynman disagrees! He points out the “beauty of the smaller dimension, the inner structure” and argues that he can appreciate even more about the flower, such as “the complicated actions inside which also have a beauty”.3

The Beauty in Science

I am not sure whether Feynman is right about being able to appreciate more about the flower. At least, I do not think scientists see everything artists see and more. But I do think that a scientific perspective will reveal different things than other perspectives. And I agree with Feynman that scientific knowledge “adds to the excitement and mystery and the awe of a flower”.3 Yes, I believe the scientific lens allows us to discover beauty or aesthetic qualities in things. I would go even further and say that when conducting research, we often search for beauty. At least for me, the aesthetic quality of academic insights is a major motivation for my daily work. Yes, I get excited when I construct or see a beautiful argument, or when I find an elegant solution to a problem. And I have a hunch it’s not just me. I certainly have overheard colleagues describing certain proofs as “way too ugly” and others as “just so beautiful!”.

How Things Could Be

Yet, I expect most of us researchers are not in academia solely to find beauty. So what are we after — are we seeking truth or are we seeking objectivity — you asked. To be honest, for me personally, it is neither. While, of course, I can’t speak for other computer scientists or for computer science as a field, I personally do not identify as either a truth-seeker or objectivity-seeker. Instead of describing how the world is truthfully and/or objectively, I want to sketch out how things could be. I generally wonder not about how things are but how they can be. Sure, I might study how people do certain things (e.g., how they encrypt their email4 or sign digital documents5), but mostly because I am curious how they could do these things differently instead. If I really have to pick one single thing I am after, I’d say I care about obtaining knowledge that helps us to figure those things out. To put it more scientifically, the people I work with and I often care less about descriptive knowledge and instead seek normative, prescriptive, and conceptual insight.

Let me make this abstract thought more concrete with examples. In one of our papers, we are wondering how interface design can be done ethically, given that a design is never neutral and will always influence people’s behavior.6 Arguably, such knowledge about how to design ethically can never be objective or represent ‘the truth'.

Sure, in other papers, we are indeed after more descriptive knowledge. For example, we have an article on newspaper subscriptions and cancellation processes.7 In it, we report the number of clicks required to subscribe to newspapers online and contrast it with the higher number of clicks required to cancel these subscriptions. Even here, where one might think ‘these clicks are just objective numbers’, so many subjective decisions, opinions, and values are at play. In fact, for me, the entire study was motivated by the belief that it is ethically wrong that canceling newspapers is so much more difficult than subscribing to them and the conviction that this should change.

I understand that such prescriptive and normative knowledge is not considered scientific. That is fine with me. You do not have to call me a scientist; you can call me a researcher instead! In the end, I am just glad that the broader Computer Science community has always been very open to this kind of knowledge and has embraced it alongside the other types of knowledge it pursues.

Computer Science Knowledge

If I look back at what attracted me to join Computer Science in the first place, it is the variety of knowledge and methods that are welcome in this field. Flipping through computer science proceedings, I see work that is formal, and in which knowledge takes the form of proofs. But I don’t have to look far to also find empirical knowledge from carefully constructed experiments with precise measurements. And then there are qualitative studies that include quotes about the subjective experiences of both users and developers at work. On top of that, one also finds conceptual work, with new frameworks, taxonomies, and classifications. No, Computer Science is not a clear-cut science or a single discipline, but rather an interdisciplinary field with a shared interest in computing.

What we do, in my opinion, is most accurately described by what Max van Duijn calls “topic-oriented scholarship”. This, as he writes:

[…] takes a topic as its starting point and then seeks for the right combination of methods and expertise across multiple disciplines for approaching it, instead of starting from the set of questions and assumptions customary in a particular discipline. Thereby, it aims at making progress not just by contesting existing findings, but also by adding new perspectives on these findings. (van Duijn, 2016, p. 19)8

While this might not be the approach of individual Computer Science researchers, I think this reflects our collective approach as a field. And while we are at it, we get to tinker, explore, and build things. Isn’t it amazing that in Computer Science, we are allowed to work like this?

Changing Things, Understanding Things

Maybe, with all this programming, tinkering, and prototyping, it might seem like we are after changing things rather than understanding things. But for me, these two go hand in hand. To underscore this point, let me cite Kurt Lewin, sometimes called the father of modern social psychology. He stated: “If you want truly to understand something, try to change it.”9. I think that’s an excellent approach! This is very much in line with the concept of “Research through Design”10, where practices like prototyping have scientific value, and which builds “on the premise that when we go through design processes we often learn things about the world”11. It also fits beautifully with what we discussed in our episode about Peter Naur12: when we program, we engage in theory-building13 — so through programming, we also learn things about the world. And I know I said I am not only in academia for the beauty, but I certainly think there is great beauty in that!

Cheers, Hanna

  1. Daston, L., & Galison, P. L. (2021). Objectivity. Princeton University Press. ↩︎

  2. BBC. (2008, May 10). The beauty of a flower [Video]. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p018w2zl. Also available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbFM3rn4ldo ↩︎

  3. I also mention this interview in some of my earlier writing, e.g., the blog post The Beauty of a Flower. ↩︎ ↩︎

  4. Botros, L., Brandon, M., Jacobs, B., Ostkamp, D., Schraffenberger, H., & Venema, M. (2023, April). Postguard: towards easy and secure email communication. In Extended Abstracts of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1-6). ↩︎

  5. Last, Y., Schraffenberger, H., Ostkamp, D., Geels, J., & Cabarcos, P. A. (2026). IdentitySign: Design and User Study of a Prototype Application for Digitally Signing Documents Using an Identity Wallet. In Twenty-Second Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS 2026) (pp. 487-505). ↩︎

  6. Simon, M. S., Schraffenberger, H., & Gellert, R. (2024, October). Influencing user decisions: Dilemmas in designing online interfaces. In Adjunct Proceedings of the 2024 Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (pp. 1-6). ↩︎

  7. Sheil, A., Acar, G., Schraffenberger, H., Gellert, R., & Malone, D. (2024, May). Staying at the roach motel: Cross-country analysis of manipulative subscription and cancellation flows. In Proceedings of the 2024 CHI conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 1-24). ↩︎

  8. van Duijn, M. J. (2016). The lazy mindreader: A humanities perspective on mindreading and multiple-order intentionality (Doctoral dissertation, Leiden University). ↩︎

  9. Lewin, K. cited in Tolman, C. W., Cherry, F., van Hezewijk, R., & Lubek, I. (Eds.). (1996). Problems of Theoretical Psychology: ISTP 1995 (p. 31). Captus University Publications. I found the quote in an article by Stappers and Giaccardi (2014).10 ↩︎

  10. Stappers, P. and Giaccardi, E. (2014, January 1). Research through Design. IxDF - Interaction Design Foundation. https://ixdf.org/literature/book/the-encyclopedia-of-human-computer-interaction-2nd-ed/research-through-design ↩︎ ↩︎

  11. Research through Design (RtD) - Design Research Observatory. (Accessed 2026, August 9). https://observatory.designresearch.works/glossary/research-through-design ↩︎

  12. See episode 1 of our Computer Science Of Course podcast, which discusses Peter Naur’s paper Programming as theory building (1985)13: https://rss.com/podcasts/computer-science-off-course/2968986/ ↩︎

  13. Naur, P. (1985). Programming as theory building. Microprocessing and microprogramming, 15(5), 253-261. ↩︎ ↩︎