Last Thursday I attended ‘Flaneurs: The Network is the City”, an event organised by Nico McDonald, Tobi Schneider and Solon Sasson at the London School of Economics. The aim of the event was to explore the role mobile technologies, in particular, mobile services, might play in the London 2012 Olympics (though we weren’t allowed to mention the Olympics as the event hadn’t been passed by the Olympic brand management team in time). As the organisers write:
“London 2012 has often been discussed in terms of challenges rather than opportunities. Worries about budgets and architecture, the fate of the Lea Valley and post-2012 reuse of the site, edge out excitement about the biggest opportunity for London since the Festival of Britain and the wonder of the world’s greatest athletic event. And, in the context of the 2012 Games, design is still considered by commentators only in terms of identity, architecture and the built environment, rather than interaction, experience and service design.

Yet for Beijing 2008 mobile platforms are being deployed in roles such as multi-lingual information systems and non-Chinese to Chinese translation for transport services, building on around remote sensing technologies, geographical information systems (GIS), and global positioning (GPS). The 2012 Games presents an inspiring, novel and high profile opportunity to explore and experiment with mobile services for positive ends, and to research applications that might be commercialised on a larger scale. London could and should be a testbed and a showcase for new services in this area.

The workshop will investigate the possibilities for service design and creation around mobile platforms, through the presentation of exemplary work in these areas, and will explore how mobile services might enhance the experience of the 2012 Games.”

The workshop brought together an impressive list of participants (see who, here) including a large number of people from business, albeit mainly from research and development rather than engineering or business. Sarah Robinson (Future Foundation), Matt Adams (Blast Theory), Rory Hamilton (Live/Work) and Neil Churcher (Orange) presented overviews of their research and projects before the workshop broke up into eight groups to brainstorm designs for mobile services specifically for London 2012.

I enjoy design-based workshops and do believe they can be both creative and inspiring. One of the things I’m interested in is how the framing and scope of the workshop affects the outcomes. In this case, each group picked a person, a place and an action/situation at random from a selection prepared by the organisers. My group got a policeman, Heathrow and crime. Each group also had an A1-sized piece of foamboard, a map of London (each group had a different scale), a further selection of people, places and situations for extending or inspiring the narrative (these were presented to look like polaroid images). We also had pens, stickers, string and so on. And an Industrial Design student from Central St Martin’s to take notes and visualise ideas. We were asked to come up with a design for a mobile service for the scenario inspired by our person, place and situation. We were to use existing technologies rather than come up with anything radically new or far-fetched. And we had 45 minutes in which to do this.

In the end there were similarities between all of the designs; each of the groups designed a service or application to run on existing mobile technologies (usually mobile phone). There were no wearable designs, nor any designs embedded into the environment or furniture. Many of the designs focused on connecting people, forging links between remote and local (proximity-based) communities with, for example, designs linking a ‘group from Beijing’ to the London-based Chinese community and designs offering a ‘lonely danish tourist’ a service to connect to Danish people living in London. The first might simply be because of the range of skills represented at the workshop, that is, that there were no architects, fashion, textile, furniture or urban designers present. The second might be a result of the times; two years ago would the services all have revolved around the then-popular subject of navigation and way-finding? Also, I have to say the designs didn’t seem particularly inspired. Maybe this is something to do with the use of interdisciplinary groups and the (very) limited time available for design. Perhaps if inter-disciplinary groups don’t have previous knowledge of each other and each others work, the tendency is to begin with reasonably obvious designs as these are the ones which quickly get group concensus. Then limited design time, means that these simple designs don’t have the time to be developed further, to get the benefit of the variety of skills around the table.

Thanks to Fabien I’ve had some interesting responses to the Fried Egg diagram for which I’m very grateful. It’s always good to get feedback and be challenged on this kind of speculative project.

Fabien made a couple of suggestions for further practices that might be included in the diagram;
“With my perspective, Geography/Cartography might be missing in this picture. As well as sensors, data mining and agent-based modeling could added to Computer Science and Information Visualization to the HCI potato.”

I’ll try to fit most of these into the second draft of the diagram though information visualisation I feel is already represented by ‘Information Design’ in the Design ‘potato’. Maybe there is an argument for time-based or responsive information visualisation to have its own heading but I would still float it on the HCI side of Design. (though here we are getting into classification issues which raise a whole raft of issues.. see below..!) and perhaps this is already covered by the proximity of responsive graphics to information design.

Secondly, Fabien writes that Urban Computing is “a name nobody seems comfortable with.” and goes on to say that “I guess we have to live with it until the restrictive term “computing” gets replaced.” Funnily enough when I wrote that I dislike the term Urban Computing it was the word ‘urban’ I was mostly objecting to (is the defining feature of this work really the location in which it takes place?) so I’m curious about Fabien’s objection to ‘computing’.

Further interesting comments are made by the Near-future Laboratory. In this post the author writes:

“What I find most compelling here is the absence — difficult to capture, to be sure — of the messiness that is definitely part of what is referred to as “urban computing”, which I wouldn’t even try to define, except in a rather messy diagram, much messier than Karen’s valiant work.”

they continue “but I’m much more agreeable, and prone to appreciate the messy illustration of what are complex engagements of social practices. This was my one effort to represent the military-industrial light and magic complex — the swirl of history, time, politics, national security and the entertainment enterprise. No attempt to be orderly and legible in the Tufte sense of things. It’s a complex “eco-system” with layers and knots and disorderly eddies (not flows..please..) of power and aspiration and money. Why organize that with bullets and linear connections? Simplifications erase the beast, leaving just shards of bone to be imaginarily cobbled back into a fictitious whole. What produces meaning, in my mind, is not so much names of practices, or companies or individual participants, but rather the ways in which the imbroglios form, power is manipulated and deployed — the process of deploying “resources” to create the names and to give them “stickiness” and the holding power that then makes them, you know — a “given.””

As a trained dancer with a degree in art who moved into web development and is now in both an architecture school and a computer science department I’ve worked quite hard over time to avoid classification, and I certainly know there is always more than one way to view any topic. However, as a research student I feel there is pressure to define my subject area and this was my first attempt to do this through visualisation rather than words. The Near-future Laboratory post raises beautiful images in my mind (the current one took inspiration from landscape contour maps) and I would certainly like to attempt a more complex diagram in the future, though I wonder how well any static diagram can represent the constantly shifting dynamics of these systems. And, even as I write, I realise I have left out one enormously important ‘potato’ - potentially a potato that encloses all other potatoes - that is, the occupants, inhabitants and participants of these systems. Which includes the people involved in each of the other systems. The inhabitants of the houses built by the architects include ethnographers and computer scientists, mobile phone calls are made by installation artists and usability consultants, city signs are read by cognitive psychologists and information designers and so on. Hmm.. time to get messy I think..

I made a first attempt to visualise the relationships between the various disciplines and sub-disciplines that I consider to make up the field of ‘Urban Computing’ (though currently I do not like this name, I feel it curiously limits the type of projects that can fall within its scope). This is probably a very subjective view reflecting my own personal journey and interests.

Comments on content or visualisation are very welcome. Download the full-size diagram here..

Very briefly, and still from Where the Action Is, here are three consequences for design and designers of taking a place-centred, rather than space-centred, view.

For more on Paul Dourish’s distinction between place and space see this paper, and then perhaps this paper for the re-visited version he wrote last year.

Place and Space

Same activity, different spatial design; A street urinoir and the toilets in a café, all in Amsterdam.

1) Importance of action “activities take center stage, and the structure of the space in which they happen falls away except in as much as it features as a part of those activities.” This is not to deny the effect that spatial design has on the types of activities and interaction that take place but that taking this view would “emphasize not how to design the space, but how to design for the interaction.” [p90]

One space, two places; A cricket match and a birthday party in a park in Tustin, CA

2) You cannot design for place “Place reflects the emergence of practice” and that “these practices emerge not from the designers of the system, but from the actions of its users.” [p91].

Specificities of waiting on Tottenham Court Road, London. 1) Tube Station 2) Bus stop furniture (not to mention the golden statue of Freddy Mercury in the background)

3) Communities of practice “an idea of place is relative to a particular community of practice. The practice that constitutes the place is shared by a particular set of people. The community of practice might be defined by a particular set of skills or training; it might be defined according to a particular point in space and/or moment in time. But places will be different for different communities in the same setting.” [p91]

The photographs illustrating each of these concepts were taken during the fieldwork sessions of our workshops.

A short while back Reginé Debatty at we-make-money-not-art wrote about the surely excellent talk by Molly Wright Steenson at IDXA in Savannah on the subject of ‘Strategic Boredom’. In her talk Molly drew on projects by second-order cyberneticians such as Gordon Pask, Cedric Price and John Frazer to illustrate how boredom can act as a provocation within design and architecture.

Sketch for Fun Palace

Musicolour (Pask, 1953), Fun Palace (Price, proposed 1960 - 61, built in reduced form as Inter-Action Centre, 1971) and Generator (unbuilt, Price and Frazer, 1976 - 79) all use boredom as a trigger for action and change. In each case, the system (or building) has the ability to become ‘bored’ with its current situation. It will then try to engage with the participants in the system (or occupants of the building) attempting to stimulate change.

Model for Generator project. via conceptualdevice

You can read about how this boredom manifested itself and each systems response to it here (Regine Debatty) and here (Molly Wright Steenson).

The legacy of this work can be found today in projects such as SkyEar by Usman Haque and Performative Ecologies by Ruairi Glynn and more generally in the work of Unit 14 at the Bartlett.

You can read more about Gordon Pask’s views on interactivity here.. and about how I feel this differs to other views of interactivity (in particular to the view put forward by Malcolm McCullough in Digital Ground) here..

Yesterday I took part in the Performance Methods Workshop day. This was part of the Democratising Technology research project, coming out of Queen Mary University of London, involving Pat Healey (Department of Computer Science), Ann Light, Lois Weaver (Department of Drama) and Space Media Arts. Democratising Technology is one of twenty ‘Designing for the Twenty First Century‘ projects funded by the AHRC and ESPRC to investigate how research will inform our future understanding of design. (Information on the other projects funded can be found here.) This workshop, going under the fabulous title of the ‘NotQuiteYet‘ series, is one of a number of events taking place at at Space Studios in Hackney, London until the end of February.

The organisers suggest that; “Drama moves between the abstract and the concrete, helping us to turn unknowable tools into everyday objects. We present some techniques that address the design of computer technology and the connections it enables between people and things. Using envisioning, play, associative thinking and other means of overcoming self-censorship, we tackle possible new forms of relationship in a creative and constructive way.”

Twelve participants took part in the workshop which was similar to our in-between-ness workshops with it’s emphasis on action and communication. We began with a few exercises using movement and sound where we had to either copy or respond to the action that had gone before. Lois explained that the purpose of these warm-up exercises, which she called Body Hoo-Ha, was to get participants used to acting instinctively and without cognitive thought. Still standing in a circle, we then had to name something we had always wanted to be. Answers ranged from a figure skater to a little kid. These answers were developed and fleshed out on and off during the course of the day until we had a name, movement, sound, characteristic and clothing that went with them. While this sounds quite scary and intimidating Lois and Ann managed to create a surprisingly relaxed atmosphere. As good participants we all tried our best to set our self-consciousness aside and take full part in the workshop, however we were very curious to know how Ann and Lois dealt with situations in which people refused to take part in some of the exercises.

While they said they had never encountered a situation where people actually refused to participate, each set of participants, as well as individual participants, entered into things to a different level. Lois described how she constantly monitored the participation and interaction of the participants to ensure that everyone was as comfortable as possible. If she saw signs that people were not engaged she would drop planned exercises, extend exercises or add new exercises - whatever was required to maintain the engagement and interaction of participants with the process.
Design and technology came into the workshop late in the day when we were asked to work in pairs to come up with a new technology taking some of our answers from previous exercises as ‘ingredients’. In my case this gave us honesty, present and future, curiosity, white and travel as our ingredients. Again, similar to our workshops, these designs were viewed as sketches and speculations and not serious proposals for design products or services. These designs were then presented to the rest of the group after which Ann would ‘interview’ the designers as if they were on TV to draw out motivation, inspiration and further design details. The use of the TV interview metaphor, they told us later, was because this is a technology that older people (the original target audience of the workshops) found accessible and familiar, putting them at ease to discuss their designs.

Many of the designs sketched out in our workshop were technologies for exploration, search and memory. It’s a difficult question to answer but I wonder how much of this was to do with the methods and exercises we experienced through the day. At one point we each brought an object to the table and made a map of words we associated with it. These objects were simply things we had naturally brought with us to the workshop; keys, a torch, a glove and so on. Yet the stories and associations that emerged were remarkably personal. I am curious to know what effect this had on the outcomes compared to our workshops for example, where the focus is on the world immediately present around us rather than our personal experiences and stories.

Different methods of evaluation; 1. Evaluation in sport by competition

I’ve been doing some background reading on approaches to evaluation in HCI, especially approaches which combine or borrow techniques from other fields. In doing this I came across a paper by Kristina Hook, Phoebe Sengers and Gerd Andersson published at CHI 2003, called ‘Sense and Sensibility: Evaluation and Interactive Art’. The two questions they hoped to begin to answer were “First, what role could or should user studies play in the evaluation and development of interactive art? Second, how should user testing strategies be altered to be appropriate to the concerns of artists?” They explored these questions through the application of user-testing techniques to an interactive artwork; The Influencing Machine, by Phoebe Sengers, Rainer Liesendahl, Werner Magar, and Christoph Seibert.

The Influencing Machine was set up in a room arranged more like a home than a research lab or art gallery, and groups of between two and four people spent between twenty and forty minutes playing with it. These groups were then interviewed about their experience. Extracts from these interviews are presented in the paper along with interpretations by the authors as to what the individuals meant. For example;

“During this, the dominant woman made an interesting comment: she pointed at the computer under the table with the table cloth, and asked the man whether this computer was in fact connected to the machine. She meant that if it were connected, then the Influencing Machine was just a computer – not a machine in its own right. It seemed that to her a computer cannot be what she perceives that the Influencing Machine is (according to the man’s theories). If it is a computer, it must be predictable, not influenced by them.”

Evaluation in music by sales figures

Throughout the paper the authors appear to have two goals, one, to evaluate the extent to which the artists’ purpose in creating the Influencing Machine is understood by it’s ‘users’ and secondly, to assess the interaction design of the artwork.
In the conclusion they write; “we want to develop an understanding of some of the ways in which HCI and art can productively come together. Here, we are interested in how to adapt usability techniques, goals, and methods in order to be more compatible with the goals of artists.” My interpretation of this would be that the authors are seeking to enhance and extend existing techniques of evaluation by borrowing methods from related disciplines. In this case, applying methods from HCI to the evaluation of interactive art.

The major criticism I have of this is seen in the abstract I quoted above; that is, that the authors are aiming to IMPROVE the system. But improve for whom? In this case it seems, improvement is understood to mean prolonging participants engagement with the system, and the more accurate communication of the artists intention. The implication is that there is a message to be communicated by the system which is ‘right’ and the work of the designer or artist is to make this clear and legible to the audience. Obviously the difficulty here is that it leaves little room for deliberate ambiguity or misinformation.

Evaluation through preservation and heritage; St Paul’s Cathedral is valued as an historic building with a significant place in the London skyline. This photograph of St Paul’s by Bill Brandt is valued as a work of art and displayed at the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Three years after this paper was published, Phoebe Sengers, with Bill Gaver this time, presents an alternative perspective on evaluation in HCI. In their paper ‘Staying Open to Interpretation; Engaging Multiple Meanings in Design and Evaluation’ Sengers and Gaver explore how different approaches to evaluation might be compared and contrasted rather than combined. Describing how evaluation in HCI often involves selecting and promoting one particular vision of a technology they suggest that it might be possible, even of benefit, to allow space in evaluation techniques for multiple interpretations - including those of users, designers, technologists, ethnographers, documenters, critics and so on. Gathering all of these interpretations together, evaluation of a project come from a meta-level interpretation comparing and contrasting all of these perspectives.

As they put it; “Incorporating user interpretations and running long-term studies are understood techniques within HCI, compatible with the assumption that evaluation should compare actual understandings against preferred interpretations.
Acknowledging the potential value of multiple interpretations, however, may lead to a more radical reformulation of what it means to assess the success of new systems. In this view, systems might best be evaluated by gathering and presenting a variety of assessments from a diverse population of interpreters, allowing outsiders to get a rich and layered view of how the system is used, the roles it plays, and the cultural implications it suggests.”

Evaluation through popularity; The Weather Project was valued as a work of art by curators at Tate Modern. This evaluation was reinforced by it’s popularity with gallery visitors.

As an example Sengers and Gaver describe the evaluation of the Drift Table which included the views of the families who ‘hosted’ the table, the designers of the work and a film-maker employed to photograph the participants. In answer to the potential criticism that this leads to an ‘anything goes’, or ‘every project is successful’, approach the authors suggest that evaluation will be rigourous so long as the criteria are carefully considered and appropriate for the person making the evaluation. For example, for designers this might mean instead of asking - do the users understand what we wanted? - the question might become - how many different interpretations has this design enabled? As the authors say “This suggests opportunities for evaluation which are aimed, not at finding a final answer of what worked and didn’t work, but at supplying data in a form which expert readers can interpret for themselves.”
It seems to me that this approach is more sustainable and desirable than the one put forward in Sense and Sensibility. The work we have done on in-betweenness revealed that overlapping and simultaneous multiple perspectives already exist in our understanding and use of everyday spaces and situations. The interesting part is how they all fit together.

(Well, what’s the point of having a blog if you don’t do some shameless self-promotion every now and again?)

Following on from Why Wait? and Betwixt we are organising the third in our series of workshops on ‘in-between-ness’. It is on the subject of public toilets and will take place at the Waag Society in Amsterdam this October 26 / 27.

All the information is at www.inbetweeness.org/apublicinconvenience

This time, Arianna, Johanna and I are also collaborating with Valentina Nisi and Martine Posthuma de Boer of Fattoria Mediale. It will be fun! Go, submit!

A PUBLIC INCONVENIENCE

Technologies designed for the city often try to abstract away from the inconvenient necessities which our bodies require; or, when they are designed explicitly for public toilets, the focus is on supporting the cultural values of hygiene and privacy. What do we miss by ignoring the fact that public toilets are also the site for a variety of social practices?

‘A Public Inconvenience’ will explore the experience and affect of public toilets in an urban environment, in this case Amsterdam. Through observation and engagement we will consider how public toilets are shaped by, and themselves shape, cultural practices, values, and attitudes. And further, how this essential part of the urban fabric contributes to the everyday experience we have of our cities.

‘A Public Inconvenience’ is the third in a series of workshops exploring in-between-ness in urban environments. We define in-between-ness as the places and times that are often on the periphery of everyday life - the journey to work or the time spent queuing in a shop.

As in the other workshops, the intention of ‘A Public Inconvenience’ is not to produce implementable designs for public toilets. Instead we prefer to make speculative and exploratory design scenarios that might act as future inspiration or critique for us as urban technology designers and bring together a group of people around a common interest in ‘in-between’ spaces to support further investigation and collaboration on the topic. By focusing on the experience of public toilets we hope to extend designers thinking of urban lifestyles beyond current categorisations of space and activities.

A double toilet found in a pub in South London. But why?

I decided to visit the current exhibition at the RIBA in London,  ’Asmara: Africa’s Secret Modernist City’, after reading this review on City of Sound. To be honest, I was curious how an architecture institution would approach curating an exhibition of an entire city with all the intricacies and inter-twining of social, political, spatial, historical, infrastructural and economic contexts that that implies.

The short answer is that they didn’t really engage with these questions. They ignored most contextual factors to concentrate on the celebration of Asmara’s (quite stunning) modernist architecture.

It is a fascinating history, with a fascinating architectural (and, I suspect, social) legacy. Asmara is the capital city of Eritrea on the East Coast of Africa. In its unsettled past, Eritrea has been subsumed as a province of Ethiopia and occupied by Italy from 1889. It was liberated by Britain in 1941, who then remained in the country for the next 20 years until Eritrea won independence in the 1960’s.

The exhibition focuses on the many modernist buildings including service stations, hotels and cinemas, that were built during the 1920’s and 30’s under Italian rule. These are shown through a series of models (reconstructions rather than original), drawings (printed directly onto the exhibition boards) and photographs.

Alongside this there is a display of stories and drawings by inhabitants of Asmara on their favourite building in the city. And an LCD screen shows an excellent (from the section I saw) documentary about the role that these European-style buildings play in the life of the city and its inhabitants.

However, what was missing, in my opinion, was any engagement with questions of how this architecture was integrated into the existing city. We get a glimpse of this during the documentary when a man describes how access to the new, modernist buildings was strictly limited to Europeans, but surely there is more to tell? What about the relationship between the vernacular architecture and the modernist? Was there ever a time when they began to inform each other? Eritrean homes taking on modernist design features - and vice versa. And what about the social implications of these buildings. A few weeks ago someone was telling me how the layout of the family compounds in Nigeria reflect the social structures of the family. Just as the social structures of Western Europe can be found reflected in its own domestic and civic buildings. What happens when one type of architecture is placed onto another type of social structure? Do social structures change, or is the architecture adapted to fit?

It was also interesting that while there were many ways in which individual buildings of the city were represented, when it came to representations of the city as a whole, the only forms used were street plans and aerial photographs. Of course, the layout of the streets is important, and possibly the most visible form of a city’s structure, but there are many other man-made, city-wide layers that can help build up a more complete image. For example, awareness of the sounds of a city, it’s smell, its taste, the movement of its inhabitants, its infrastructures and their representations all add to our understanding of the city as a system made up out of inter-connected elements.

I’m now extremely curious to see the Global Cities exhibition at the Tate Modern to see how these questions have been dealt with there.

‘Asmara: Africa’s Secret Modernist City’ is on at the RIBA, 66 Portland Place, London until the 18th August. 

Today, I continue the series of posts about Where the Action Is by Paul Dourish and look at the methods used in Social Computing and the implications of this for the evaluation of projects. Bet you can’t wait..

Last time on Mr. Watson social computing was defined as an approach to technology design that “attempts to incorporate understandings of the social world into interactive systems.” This has huge implications for the design of interactive systems. Paul Dourish writes that ”Advocates for socially based studies of work have found that ethnographic approaches can be used to uncover requirements for a system design through the detailed observation of the working setting. In contrast, more traditional approaches - based perhaps on functional specifications or on laboratory-based usability studies - tend to be disconnected from the lived detail of the work.” [p62] 

Eniac Computer; From www.computermuseum.li,

Ethnography

Ethnographic methods are used by various strands of the social sciences including cultural and social anthropologists, and urban sociologists. Ethnography, according to Wikipedia,   “provides an account of a particular culture, society, or community. The fieldwork usually involves spending a year or more in another society, living with the local people and learning about their ways of life. Ethnographers are participant observers. They take part in events they study because it helps with understanding local behavior and thought.” This approach is founded on the idea that a system’s properties cannot necessarily be understood when studied independently of each other. The most common ethnographic techniques are participant observation and interviews and on completion of this fieldwork, the ethnographer will use the collected information to interpret cultural diversity in the group studied.  

Ethnomethodology 

Ethnomethodology is a branch of ethnography that originated with the work of Harold Garfinkel (Studies in Ethnomethodology. 1967). Dourish summarises ethnomethodology as the “study of commonsense methods by which people manage and organize their everyday behaviour.” [p74]

Ethnomethodology has a subtle but important distinction from other ethnographic methodologies. While some approaches to ethnography take the view that the social theories explaining the actions of individuals in society are invisible to the very individuals taking the action that gives rise to the theory (de Certeau’s view of the impossibility of understanding a city by being in it?), ethnomethodology says that people not only have their reasons for acting the way that they do, but that they also have an understanding of these reasons. In other words, “in the course of everyday life, everyone, always, is engaged in “practical sociological reasoning,” when, as part and parcel of what they do, they have to figure out what other people mean and in turn figure out how to act themselves in order to get things done.” [p75] 

What this means (the other important thing about ethnomethodology) is that “the knowledge that people bring to bear in carrying out this practical sociological reasoning is no less valid than the theoretical models that professional sociologists might offer when they try to figure out what “society does.” We are all ethnographers, woohoo! 

Technomethodology

Paul Dourish and Graham Button use the term ‘Technomethodology’ to describe their approach to system design. They wanted to offer a model for development that reconciles human action and motivation (as recognised by ethnomethodology) with the technical processes found in conventional system design. The problem as they saw it was “that there are a number of systematic ways in which conventional system design undermines or removes the resources upon which human interactional behaviour is based” and one solution might be ”to address the problems in an equally systematic way, considering not just this design or that design but the basic models around which those designs are built.” They were also concerned to do this “in a way that preserves the distinctive character of ethnomethodological reasoning, rather than simply the ethnographical observations of particular working settings.” This approach argues that the relationship between technical design and social understandings should be made “at a foundational level, one that attempts to take sociological insights into the heart of the process and fabric of design.” [p87]

Univac-1; From www.computermuseum.li, Photo Courtesy of Hagley Museum and Library and UNISYS

The two areas they focus on are accountability and abstraction. These two areas already feature in the design and development process of interactive systems, but as properties of a system have become isolated then this has led to various problems in considering, and developing and evaluating, a system in its entirety.

Dourish and Button define accountability as being the ability to make an action understandable to others and in particular that the “methods of understanding and making sense of action and the methods for engaging in it are the same methods.” The difficulty in incorporating this into system design is that “Users may have different goals in mind, different reasons for using the system and different ways in which they want to use it. In just the same way as they approach all other activities, they need to be able to decide what to do in order to get things done.” Dourish and Button believe that “In everyday interaction, as we have seen, ethnomethodology argues that accountability is the key feature that enables them to do this” that is “accountability lies in the reciprocality of action and understanding.” [p79] The benefit of achieving this is that interactive systems and technologies become more in tune with existing uses, behaviours and desires and more adaptable to future changes in behaviour and context.

Abstraction, for Dourish and Button is understood as hiding of the details of implementation.  This is a fundamental concept of system design and does have benefits; “Hiding the implementation and dealing with something in terms of its abstraction allows us to isolate one piece of a system from all the rest, and so to adopt a modular approach to design that sees the system as an assembly of interoperating components, with all the advantages alluded to earlier.” [p82] However, it also results in an incompatibility with designing for accountability;  ”The way that activities are organized makes their nature available to others; they can be seen and inspected, observed and reported. But this feature - the way that actions are organized - is exactly what is hidden by software abstractions.” [p83]

Process and Practice

Ethnographic methods offer HCI a way to distinguish between process and practice. The distinction between these can be seen by looking at the work environment where “processes are the formalized or regularized procedures by which work is conducted; procedures for authorizing payments, for ordering supplies, for repairing machines, or whatever. Work processes are captured and codified in rulebooks, manuals, recipes, and similar artifacts.” and practice is ”the informal but nonetheless routine mechanisms by which these processes are put into practice and managed in the face of everyday contingencies. Work practice is frequently informal and seemingly innocuous, but often provides the lubrication that prevents formalized processes from seizing up.” [p62-3]

Practice develops in response to process and is essential for the purposes of ‘getting things done’. No amount of technology can replace the ‘approximation, invention, improvisation, and ad-hoc-ery‘ of practice. “Practice is always dynamic, arising as a way to mediate between processes and the circumstances in which they are enacted. The reason to study practice is to understand how this dynamic mediation takes place.” This is especially and increasingly important in the design of interactive systems when the setting and use of the system cannot be predicted by the designer beforehand. [I have a paper by Mark Burry on his work with the Segrada Familia which is relevant here. I’ll write about it soon]

Evaluation

The same disconnection from the direct engagement and experience of people which can be seen in the design of interactive systems, turns up again when considering the evaluation of these technologies, “Usability evaluations are generally concerned with the detail of interactional features of software systems, are carried out in laboratories in controlled conditions, and measure performance on artificial tasks across a range of subjects; … From an ethnographic perspective, these sorts of questions are meaningless when decontextualized and examined in the sterile confines of a laboratory.” [p62] as Dourish concludes, “the only way to come to a good understanding of the effectiveness of a software system is to understand how it features as part and parcel of a set of working practices, as embodied by a group of people actually using the system to do real work in real working settings.”

Fig. 1. HCI Test Station; Fig. 2. HCI Test Subject

Obviously this critique can be extended to projects that explore topics other than work, and six years later it seems to be causing real problems and great discussion within certain fields of HCI judging by the number of papers at CHI this year dealing with the subject of design or evaluation of ubiquitous, and in particular urban, computing technologies.

Implications for Design

Since the publication of Where the Action Is, user-centred and participatory design techniques have become more common in the design of interactive systems, however I wonder how far designers who use these techniques consider the context within which they are carried out. Taking the ethnomethodological approach, it seems that the context in which the design is carried out will effect the final outcome. For example, the location, tools and skills of a design team would influence the range of systems that it is possible for a particular design team to envision.

I’m not sure how much work has been done in this area but the first half of Hillier and Newman’s paper ‘How is Design Possible?’ seems relevant.