Implications for Design: responsibilities and framing

In “Responsibilities and Implications: Further Thoughts on Ethnography and Design continues to elaborate on the use of ethnography in human-computer interaction and the “implications for design” issues he addressed at CHI2006 (see my notes here).

In the CHI paper, he argued how the use of ethnographic investigation in HCI is often partial since it underestimated, misstated, or misconstrued the goals and mechanisms of ethnographic investigation. Which is problematic since researchers aims a deriving “implication for design” from these investigations. The DUX paper continues on that topic to show how ethnography is relevant but not in the bullet-point “short term requirements” way some use to think about. As he says, “the valuable material lies elsewhere” or “beyond the laundry list“, which is described through 2 case studies about emotion and mobility.

Then what should be these implications for design (voluntarily skipping the examples, see the paper pls)?

“The implications for design, though, are not of the “requirements capture” variety. They set constraints upon design, certainly, but not in terms of operationalizable parameters or specific design space
guidance. What they tend to do, in fact, is open up the design space rather than close it down, talking more to
the role of design and of technology than to its shape.
(…)
A second observation about the implications is that they are derived not from the empirical aspects of ethnographic work but from its analytic aspects. That is, the ethnographic engagement is not one that figures people as potential users of technology, and looks to uncover facts about them that might be useful to technologists (or to marketers). Instead, ethnographic engagements with topics, people, and fieldsites are used to understand phenomena of importance to design, and the implications arise out of the analysis of these materials.
(…)
the theoretical contributions that the studies provide have a considerably longer shelf life, and a relevance that
transcends particular technological moments.

Is it a cop-out to say that what these studies provide is a new framing for the questions rather than a specific set of design guidelines? Hardly.

In addition, his discussion about the responsibilities is also important:

“The engagement between ethnography and design must be just that – an engagement. Ethnography and
ethnographic results are part of that engagement.
(…)
I’d argue that it is no more the ethnographer’s responsibility to speak to design within the context of each specific publication than it is the designer’s responsibility to speak likewise to ethnography. Rather, the responsibility for ethnographically grounded design results is a collective one.

Why do I blog this? This is a topic Paul Dourish will address at LIFT08 in Geneva. Beyond that, this article echoes a lot with both reviews I received from academic papers (criticisms towards implications for design that are too broad and not short term requirements) and what can be observed from designers’ practices at the Media and Design Lab I joined 6 months ago.

Closer to my own research, I like the way he frames this notion of implication; and indeed ethnography can bring more than sort term recommendations as it can uncover motivations for action, needs and deeper human rationale. In my research about location-awareness, we explored the differences between self-disclosure of one’s location and automatic positioning; in this case, the crux issue was not to oppose the two sort of interfaces but rather, to show how each of them was different and had different implications in terms of human motivations (for example, self-disclosure of one’s location is linked to communication intentionality).

Dourish, P. 2007. Responsibilities and Implications: Further Thoughts on Ethnography and Design. Proc. ACM Conf. Designing for the User Experience DUX 2007

J.G. Ballard and empty swimming pools

Reading Ballard lately, I am always struck by his fascination with empty swimming pools. See for example in “Notes Towards A Mental Breakdown” (1967):

“Usually accompanied by Leonora Carrington, he visited the Mullard radio-observatory near Cambridge and the huge complex of early warning radar installations on the Suffolk coast. For some reason, empty swimming pools and multi-storey car parks exerted a particular fascination. All these he seems to have approached as the constituents of a mental breakdown which he might choose to recruit at a later date.“

And much later in “Super Cannes”:

“Ten thousand years in the future, long after the Côte d’Azur had been abandoned, the first explorers would puzzle over these empty pits, with their eroded frescoes of tritons and stylized fish, inexplicably hauled up the mountainsides like aquatic sundials or the altars of a bizarre religion devised by a race of visionary geometers.“

Why do I blog this? this is related to some current train of thoughts about representations of the future.

Well, maybe it’s not important at all, and spotting 2 references to empty swimming pool may seen weird. However, in the context of J.G Ballard’s work, it makes sense and I find intriguing this sort of recurring representation of the future.

Why is that so? First because it may represent the future of a distopyan future one would fear. Second because an empty swimming pool is no longer used by humans, as if that facility was left for other inhabitants. What remains is the empty infrastructure, with its shape and emptiness. I am personally more interested in this second issue and what it tells about infrastructures.

Assumptions of future studies

I already mentioned how “Foundations of Futures Studies: Human Science for a New Era: History, Purposes, Knowledge (Human Science for a New Era, 1)” by Wendell Bell was a relevant reference about future studies/foresight.

One of the book chapter deals with the assumptions of future studies:

“

1. Time is continuous, linear, unidirectional and irreversible (…) the continuum of time defines the past, present and future.
2. Not everything that will exist has existed or does exist. Thus the future may contain things that never existed before.
3. Futures thinking is essential for human action.
4. In making our way in the world, both individually and collectively, the most useful knowledge is “knowledge of the future”. In making plans, exploring alternatives, choosing goals, and deciding how they ought to to act, humans have a need to know the future and how past and present causes will produce future effects.
5. The future is non-evidential and cannot be observed; therefore there are no facts about the future. Nonetheless (…) it is possible to have ‘conjectural’ knowledge.
6. The future is not totally predetermined. It is more or less open.
7. To a greater or lesser degree future outcomes can be influenced by individual and collective action.
8. The interdependence in the world invites a holistic perspective and a transdisciplinary approach both in the organization of knowledge for decision making and in social action.
9. Some futures are better than others

“

Why do I blog this? these assumptions give an interesting frame as they give rationales and directions for future studies. As the author mentions, it’s a selection of them that he exemplifies in his book in more actionable ways.

Urban decay

The last two days have been very fruitful in terms of urban decay. Yesterday, in Lyon, there were these fantastic two encounters:

And this the morning in Lausanne:

Why do I blog this? why being passionate about this sort of things? about creeping infrastructures? simply because it reveals interesting aspects of how we behave. Sometimes it’s even more explicit with signs that express how this our “own decay” (although I am not sure about it). Also, I am find important to think about the history of these things. Every week I take that street in Lyon and encounter this bench which obviously was in its last stage. Every week I see this man sign that is disappearing as Marty McFly’s hands in back to the Future. And of course, it’s about chaos.

What about urban computing and decay?

New LIFT visual

The new poster design of LIFT is out:

It’s actually made of 150 drawings from Gaël Vuillens composing a network of Lift people and moments.

The Economist about the future of futurology

Just found this article about “the future of futurology” in The World in 2008 of The Economist. It starts of by describing how the word “futurologist” has disappeared from the business and academic world, so has the so-called “futurology” discipline (although “there are still some hold-outs prophesying at the planetary level“). The new thing is rather about scenario-building and storytelling, which is not a surprise.

What is interesting is the underlying reason proposed by the author:

“We can see now that the golden age of blockbuster futurology in the 1960s and 1970s was caused, not by the onset of profound technological and social change, but by the absence of it. The great determining technologies—electricity, the telephone, the internal combustion engine, even manned flight—were the products of a previous century, and their applications were well understood. The geopolitical fundamentals were stable, too, thanks to the cold war. Futurologists extrapolated the most obvious possibilities, with computers and nuclear weapons as their wild cards. The big difference today is that we assume our determining forces to be ones that 99% of us do not understand at all: genetic engineering, nanotechnology, climate change, clashing cultures and seemingly limitless computing power. When the popular sense of direction is baffled, there is no conventional wisdom for futurologists to appropriate or contradict.“

The author also points out to some advices:

1. the next rule lays in thinking short term (“Microtrends”… “nanotrends”)
2. “ say you don’t know. Uncertainty looks smarter than ever before“
3. “for the budding futurist: get embedded in a particular industry, preferably something to do with computing or national security or global warming. All are fast-growing industries fascinated by uncertainty and with little use for generalists. Global warming, in particular, is making general-purpose futurology all but futile. When the best scientists in the field say openly that they can only guess at the long-term effects, how can a futurologist do better?“
4. “talk less, listen more. Thanks to the internet, every intelligent person can amass the sort of information that used to need travel, networking, research assistants, access to power“

Why do I blog this? quite interesting food for thought here, and I agree with the rules.

Wrestling with what the [mobile phone] platform actually is

Reading the notes taken from Raph Koster’s thoughts at MIT’s Futures of Entertainment 2: Mobile Media, I ran across this:

“what’s kind of fascinating is seeing the wrestling with what the platform [mobile phone] actually is. (..) Broadcast? Input device? Truly interactive? Synchronous or asynchronous? (…) TV could have been far more interactive from an early stage, but it drifted into broadcast. The Internet could have been more about broadcast, but instead its DNA pushed it in a different direction. The reasons aren’t solely technological, I don’t think; some of it is network effects, some of it is about what businesses succeed early on.
(…)
Which makes me think that probably as we think of things like immersive gaming in the real world, ARGs, massively multiplayer geotagged environments, and virtual worlds on the phone, there may be a dedicated device that does it better. Most of these other examples have been of migrating capabilities to the devices. But the interesting stuff that will be the true core use of the devices will be the things that arise from the device — and it will be at its best when the other stuff isn’t there to serve as a distraction, in the way that the best GPSes don’t try to also be TVs but instead try to enhance the experience of geolocation.“

Why do I blog this? in a sense, he summarized one of the main mobile application/location-based services question: “what is the platform”.

Design research and social scientists

“Design Research for Social Scientists: Reading Instructions for This Issue by Hummels, Redström & Koskinen is an interesting introduction to the relationships between design research and social sciences. It’s actually the introductory paper of a journal issue about that topic.

A relevant excerpt:

“what determines what knowledge will be pursued within ‘design research’, is not necessarily what other research disciplines find to be scientific but what knowledge design researchers, design professionals, and perhaps especially design education find important, relevant, and even necessary for the advancement of their practices.
(…)
ambitions to completely fit within any particular existing framework is likely to be of secondary interest here although there are
strong ambitions to build on more general ideas about science and research as to foster a solid knowledge discourse. Within the fairly new field of design science, design researchers are still exploring the boundaries of what science means from a design perspective; for example, some researchers consider their products/ prototypes as being a physical hypothesis and testing them as a hypothesis-generating method.
(…)
Design researchers do not aim at advancing knowledge in sociology or management science, but utilize well-established theories and practices from those disciplines to advance technological development.“

Why do I blog this? coming from social sciences and working with designs led me to similar issues described here. The whole issue seems interesting to learn more about to find a common ground as well as processes that would be relevant for both communities.

Hummels, C., Redström, J. and Koskinen, I. (2007). “Design Research for Social Scientists: Reading Instructions for This Issue. In Hummels, C., Koskinen, I. and Redström, J. (Eds.) Knowledge, Technology & Policy, Special Issue on Design Research, Vol. 20, No. 1, pp. 11-17. Springer.

The use of wax

A bench in Zürich, conspicuously rubbed with wax by skateboarders… reduced friction, makes is easier to grind the bench.

Why do I blog this? The tweaking of urban elements in an interesting practice to observe. What does that say about urban computing? possibly that a certain audience can modify the infrastructure they need to operate with regards to their needs. At the social level, the presence of wax on curbs/bench is also a trace of people activity, a social navigation indicator that skateboard hang out there. I recently wrote a short article about that topic for a trend book for JCDecaux (the street billboard/furniture/toilet/biking company) on cities, mobility and new media.

“Remarkable hope in seams and scars”

As a complement to the discourse about showing the seams (and seamful design), I found these lines by Anne Galloway very relevant:

“seams and scars point to where we have in the past made or become something else—and yet they also remind us that we can do so again in the future. If we treat them not as irregularities to be hidden but as indicators of our abilities to intervene in the world, seams and scars offer us glimpses of how we shape and re-shape ourselves, each other, and the worlds in which we live.
(…)
I find remarkable hope in seams and scars. But because liminal spaces, like all potentials, are also rather uncertain I find good reason to proceed with care.
(…)
Who is making the cuts? Who gets left behind? What goes forward? Who does the suturing and sewing? Has there been
suffering? Healing? Are the seams ugly? Are the scars beautiful? What can we learn about ourselves and others by attending to the seams and scars our work creates and leaves behind?”“

Why do I blog this? “seamful design” or how to reveal the seams/limits of technologies is an interesting proposal in terms of design thinking. However, what it implies is often quite difficult to conceptualize in terms of consequences. The paper provides some elements about it.

Galloway, Anne. (in press) “Seams and Scars, Or How to Locate Accountability in Collaborative Work,” in Uncommon Ground, Cathy Brickwood, David Garcia and Willem-Jan Renger (eds.), Amsterdam: BIS Publishers.