Matters of Explanation: Rethinking Explainability with Tangible, Embodied, Material Interactions

This paper explores how the notions of explainability and understanding in explainable AI (XAI) and its design can be re-thought with embodied, tangible, and material interactions and related theories of new materialism. Contributing to the emerging 'tangible XAI' and 'graspable AI' frameworks, we suggest that XAI design can and should leverage material, tangible qualities, and embodiment to address the emergent and process-oriented approach to understanding and explainability in XAI design. We present two examples that help illustrate this approach: an artwork, created as part of collaborative research that engages affective and felt modalities of AI, and a paper prototype of a pinball machine built during workshop that explored tangible explainability for large language models. Through these examples, we also show that materiality and embodiment are important agents in the emergence of explainability and understanding and invite to consider ethical explanation design as a material practice of care.