When the Implication Is Not to Design - Discussion

(cross-posted from my academic/professional site)

Last month, I presented a paper at CHI titled When the Implication Is Not to Design (Technology). This paper was intended primarily to facilitate a conversation, so my co-author and I are organizing a discussion on the sustainable-chi mailing list. We'd like to invite you to join the discussion. Below is a copy of the post starting the discussion.

Last month at CHI, there was a paper by myself and Six Silberman titled When the Implication Is Not to Design (Technology). The basic premise is that there are some situations where a technological intervention may not be the most appropriate. The paper provides specific ways of articulating when this may be the case, as well as practical recommendations for applying this perspective. Copies are available at http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1978942.1979275 or http://ericbaumer.com/publications/impl9-rev.pdf.

We would like to take this opportunity to solicit comments and critiques. This paper was intended first and foremost to be part of a conversation, and we believe that some of that conversation should happen here on the sustainable-chi list. We hope that members of the general HCI community will join us in this discussion.

~Eric and Six

alternative carbon footprint calculators

how do you determine your impact on climate change? perhaps you use a carbon calculator, a nifty tool that asks for a bunch of stats about how you live your life and spits out a number indicating how many tonnes of CO2 are released as a result of your activities. the less CO2, the less your environmental impact. or at least, that's the theory.

I've been thinking about these carbon footprint calculators quite a bit recently, since some folks in my research group have been working on the Better Carbon Calculator. the premise is that filling in all the details about yourself necessary to calculate your carbon footprint--your home energy bill, how much you drive, your car's gas mileage, how much you fly, how often you buy new clothes, how much meat you eat, etc.--is not only tedious, but many people don't have that info ready at hand. Better Carbon uses collaborative filtering to make best guesses; think Netflix's movie recommendation system, only for your consumption patterns. don't know how much meat you eat? chances are you eat just about as much meat as other people who are like you. if you know you happen to eat less meat (e.g., you're vegan) or more meat (e.g., you're a body builder trying to bulk up), you simply change the suggested defaults. pretty clever.

however, most carbon calculators (including Better Carbon) are about individual behaviors, specifically, individual consumption choices. however, there are lots of things you do other than buy/eat/consume stuff that impacts the environment. what about a system that could calculate the carbon footprint of a vote? based on the legislation for which senator so-and-so has voted and her/his position on upcoming bills, your vote for that senator has the following carbon footprint. you could envision similar tools for domains. what's the carbon footprint of my 401k, based on the companies in which I'm invested? what's the carbon footprint of an average semester's tuition at a given university? what's the carbon footprint of my health insurance? the idea here is to get people thinking at scales beyond individual consumption patterns and considering alternative community, organizational, and/or political means of enacting environmentally sustainable decisions.

in some ways, this could be a useful exercise. on the other hand, carbon footprint is only a small component of one's larger environmental footprint, and can be somewhat opaque at that. what does it mean that I cause 13.39 tonnes of CO2 per year? even if that's better than most people near me or in my peer group, is it sustainable in the long run? is tonnes of CO2 even a sensible figure on which to focus? granted, greenhouse gas emissions are a major contributor to climate change, which is probably one of the most pressing environmental issues, but it's certainly not the only issue. footprint calculators are nice, because they make readily quantifiable one's impact. however, they also distract from the complexities behind why some actions are more sustainable than others and thus, I argue, don't do a great deal to help foster debate about improving the situation.

(acknowledgment: many of these thoughts were highly influenced by insightful conversations with Paul, Six, Catherine, Bill, Joel, and many others)

hybrid design practices - ubicomp 2009 workshop

some friends and I recently had a proposal for a workshop on hybrid design practices accepted to the workshops program of ubicomp 2009. whatever are hybrid design practices, you ask? here's a snippet from our cfp:

Current Ubicomp research and practice often go beyond interdisciplinarity. New hybrid practices are created, by synthesizing methods from multiple disciplines, such as design, ethnography, engineering, and sociology. This does not only imply crossing of disciplinary or epistemological boundaries, but also engagement across diverse cultural sites and perspectives. We take hybrid practices to mean day-to-day interdisciplinary practices that are often established beyond pre-designed institutional, disciplinary, or transdisciplinary boundaries. This hands-on workshop will focus specifically on hybrids that involve the design of ubiquitous computing systems, drawing together both individuals who have experience developing and using such hybrids, as well as those who have an interest in applying hybrid practices to their work.

Thus, this workshop explores questions such as:
• How might ethnographic field work be incorporated into design practice?
• How might design practice work be incorporated into ethnographic field ?
• How might fieldwork or design sketching be integrated more closely into the process of theorizing?
• What might theory-oriented design or design-oriented theorizing look like?
• What role can Ubicomp design practice play for cross-cultural and multi-sited explorations?

sound interesting? check out more at the hybrid design practices workshop webpage.

position papers due June 25 via email to Silvia (lindtner [at] ics.uci.edu).

newest tinkering toy: NodeBox

I've been spending a little time over the past two days playing with NodeBox, a suite of graphical utilities for programmatic image creation. it's based largely on python and uses a bunch of the graphical innards available with Cocoa (thus, it's specific to Mac OS).

thus far, it's pretty awesome. it's pretty straight forward to understand and rather powerful with even simple commands. not only is there a super helpful tutorial, including primers on many programming concepts for non-programmers (variables, lists, loops, etc.), but it's very easy to quickly creating striking, perhaps even compelling images. in just a few minutes, I was able to throw together this image, based on random placement and coloring of all the tags I've used on this blog:


the sizes, positions, colors, and even which tags to use are all random (not all tags are used, and some are used more than once, e.g., "iTunes" shows up twice near the lower left corner). I realize that this does not adhere to more "traditional" approaches to tag clouds, where in position is based on alphabetical order and size is based on frequency of use, but for now I just wanted something fun. for example, the way that "iTunes" overlaps with the first three letters of "oxymoron" make the "-moron" part much more noticeable.

if you're at all interested in programmatic image generation (or just like playing with fun, designer-y toys), I highly recommend you check NodeBox out. I'm planning on using it to create some images based on the data behind metaViz, so keep an eye open for that in the next couple days (hopefully, before the election).

demos remixed

I recently picked up a copy of Tom Erickson and David McDonald's (eds) HCI Remixed, which, while I've only read a few chapters, really seems like a fabulous collection of essays by some super cool people. I can't tell you how excited I was looking through the table of contents, not so much at the chapter titles as at the authors. I kept thinking, “ooh, he's in here. oh, and a chapter by her! hm, I wonder what he'll talk about.” so far, it's been pretty interesting.

one chapter that really got my interest was Wendy Ju's on The Mouse, The Demo, and the Big Idea. in it, she mention's the Media Lab's “demo-or-die” culture, something on which I have previously noted mixed feelings. from my experience, demoing forces you to be able to articulate your ideas, helps you refine your ideas by needing to present them, and gives you a good sense for what flies with which sort of people. on the other hand, some great ideas are not really demoable, and an overemphasis on demoing might lead to such projects not being developed as fully as possible. however, Wendy notes a couple important and interesting aspects of demoing that I hadn't considered.

one is a quote from her advisor Michael Hawley that “the true role of research is to flop bits in people's heads.” while certainly true, in practice, this becomes somewhat more specific; exactly which bits do you want to flip in which direction and in which people's heads? demoing is great, because you get a chance to flip bits in the heads of people beyond those whom you are targeting and with whom academics might not otherwise interact on a regular basis: business folks, politicians, government officials, public school students, public school teachers, foreign dignitaries, and other people. even if they never “use” what you're demoing, you get the opportunity to plant your ideas in their heads, and hey, maybe it ends up changing the way they think about something just slightly. we usually think about dissemination of research in terms of conference or journal publications; demoing can provide an opportunity to disseminate to a much broader audience.

something else Wendy notes is the way that demos can end up feeling like a sales pitch. “a great demo creates converts; people are not just knowledgeable about your ideas, they are sold on them.” I suppose this could be construed as a negative, since it really does end up making demos often feel like sales pitches. as a counter example, though, she cites the example of Engelbart's mouse demo, describing how he comes off as nothing like a salesman but instead a knowledgeable, passionate, sincere researcher. “a great demonstration,” she says, “is not hype, but proof.” I'll admit that I'm not quite ready to buy this assertion, probably because it strikes a little too close to that part of me that really vibes with Latour's work. people will believe in the device when the device works; the device will work when people believe in the device. it is not necessarily the case that a successful demo means a working idea, and a working idea does not always mean a successful demo.

this brings a the third interesting point, the Big Idea. Engelbart's “central goal in his research was augmenting human intellect.” at the time, most people were largely interested in either office automation or artificial intelligence, and the focus of his work didn't really fit into either of those categories. furthermore, people doing research in those areas didn't immediately, if ever, see the value of Engelbart's contributions, because they couldn't figure out how it would apply to, or help them solve, the particular batch of problems in which they were interested. however, Wendy asserts that this is often the nature of such big ideas. similar to Arthur C. Clarke's assertion that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from madness, she says that “any sufficiently advanced vision is indistinguishable from madness.” furthermore, the Big Idea itself “doesn't even have to be right, it just has to compel us to want to go out and do stuff, stuff that is different from what everyone else wants to do.” personally, I found this greatly encouraging. I'd been feeling recently that my research didn't really have a home. some of the stuff on which I'm working [LINK] draws on and uses a lot of AI and computational linguistic methods, but it really doesn't fit into any pre-existing box in those field (stuff like parsing, sense disambiguation, sentiment analysis, topic extraction, or the like). I think there's a place for this work in HCI, particularly with an educational focus, but there again it's sort of coming out of left field, not solving any particularly well-defined problem in those areas (such as supporting learning communities, providing constructionist toolkits, studying group cognition, etc.). while some of this research doesn't currently have a home as such, it's heartening to think that this lack of a home does not necessarily mean that it is not worthwhile; though at the moment somewhat homeless, it still has the potential to be valuable, compelling, and, moreover, make an impact.

techno-values

I recently came across a quote from Ursula Franklin (via Kevin from Question Technology) about a donation of computers for an educational institution. to her colleague who had just negotiated the donation, she asks, "Think about the analogy between your computer gift and the gift of free Bibles" (the link above has a more extended quote). bibles were once used to teach people to read, but obviously more was learned than just how to read. Franklin calls for greater, more reflective awareness of, and explicit dealing with, "the social assumptions that are embedded in every design." Kevin connects this to the $100 laptop project, and an important connection it is. I however, am left thinking of other connections.

Ong's Orality and Literacy examines the cognitive, social, and cultural impacts of the technology of writing. oral cultures have certain aspects to their communication: anything that needs to be remembered must be said in a memorable way, otherwise it will be forgotten due to the ephemeral nature of speech; speech is heard and sometimes felt, internalizing it, while written words are seen, making them external and objective; speech requires narratives to be of a very formulaic character, so as to be memorable by the bard and comprehensible by the audience, while writing allows for more complex narrative structure because the reader can refer to what was said in the last paragraph. these are just a few of the interesting implications of the adoption of the technology of writing. Ong goes on to discuss the "second orality," communication media that resemble speech but also have characteristics of writing. while he had in mind media like TV and radio, much of what he said applies to email, IM, txt, etc. what unintended results will come from use of digital media?

I'm also reading Weber's Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, so I can't help but make a connection there, as well. Weber's thesis is that the protestant ethic (a moral calling to hard labor, the accumulation of wealth for its own sake, that an individual "exists for the sake of his business, instead of the reverse") results largely from the doctrines of several protestant sects, particularly Calvinism. I'm only part way through, so I can't yet sum up his whole argument, but this is another interesting example of unintended outcomes. Weber goes so far as to say that the worldly spirit of capitalism is in some cases in opposition to the beliefs of those from whose teachings that spirit derives.

in these cases, it's possible to conjecture about potential consequences and implicit values, but one cannot always make entirely accurate predictions or account for every possibility. I don't think this means that we should throw up our hands and abandon hope of responsible use of technology. however, it does leave me somewhat unsatisfied. must we just be reflective about the values we are incorporating into our designs? while awareness about factors such as gender bias are certainly important, I doubt that introspection is not enough. can we be explicit about the values in our designs? I'm not sure that explication will help, either. how does one say to the average consumer something like "this device incorporates the semiotic notion that a sign can stand in for the thing being signified" without having their eyes glaze over?

what's a socially conscious (technology) designer to do? I suspect that part of the answer is certainly a raised awareness on the part of designers. however, I think an important, but often overlooked, factor is raising awareness on the part of the consumer/user/prosumer(/wrangler ::shudder::). I would love to see technology that not only causes the user to consider the values explicitly or implicitly incorporated into the device, but furthermore causes that same user to consider the technology itself, to question it, to ask, what does this technology do? what does this technology do to me? how do I use the technology? how am I intended to use the technology? how do I actually use the technology? what does this tell me about the designer? what does this tell me about the marketing/manufacturing of this technology? what does this tell me about me? obviously, in order to make such technology requires socially responsible designers. however, technology has far more capacity for impact in the hands of socially aware, critically reflective users of the technology. the very use of a technology should cause the user to question her or his use of that technology. I want to see technology like that. I want to make technology like that.

conceptual HCI

a couple weeks ago, I was in a workshop at CHI on HCI and New Media Arts focusing on methods and evaluation. the whole thing was very interesting and brought out some interesting tensions between what it means to evaluate HCI and what it means to evaluate art. one of the more interesting notions that came up drew on the notion of conceptual art to ask if something similar could exist in HCI. could you have conceptual HCI, or a conceptual UI, that wasn't just bad HCI?

the one example of which I thought was a click-free interface called don't click it (thanks Matt), that is, a GUI where one doesn't click at all. if there is such a thing as conceptual HCI, this probably comes pretty close. I don't know if it could ever work on a large scale, but the whole point of rethinking the modality of point-and-click interfaces to just a point interface is, I think, a potentially useful one. in a point-only interface, what other interesting methods of interaction might you have? does this possibly open up more space for gestural inputs? are there existing devices that don't offer an input analogous to clicking that could benefit from such a framing?

if something can get us thinking along lines like these, I suspect it qualifies as conceptual HCI.

CHI - experience evaluation SIG

last week was CHI, and there are about a bajillion things that came up that I really want to blog about. the first one that's actually made it out of my head and onto my keyboard was about the SIG I went to on evaluating experience-based HCI, organized by Joseph 'Jofish' Kaye, Kirsten Boehner, Jarmo Laaksolahti, and Anna Ståhl. due to delayed Caltrains, I didn't get there until a half hour into the SIG, so I missed pretty much all of the introductions. however, it was a nenjoyable, exciting thing of which to be a part, and I feel like there was some truly useful discussion. the participants at the SIG broke up into 3 small groups, each of which chose to address one particular question. my group (including, among others, Michael Muller, Janet Vertesi, Ryan Aipperspach, and Sara Ljungblad) took on, "What are good criteria for an evaluation of experience-focused HCI?" essentially, this is a question of meta-evaluation, that is, how do we evaluate our methods for evaluating experience-focused HCI. the first bit below is a number of criteria that our group thought would be good for evaluating evaluation methods. below that is just a transcription of my notes from the SIG. most of these are from little comments jotted in the margins of the sheet of paper they gave us, so they come in no particular order. the regular type face are my actual notes, and the italics are comments I added after the fact.

What are good criteria for an effective evaluation method?

- Does it highlight the role of the researcher? of the observed?

- Does it elicit rich stories? think descriptions? (I think there are interesting problems with elicitation here that tie back into the first point)

- Does it help to construct a faithful analysis or account or report?

- Does it inspire users/designers/researchers/companies?

- Does it open up interpretations? (closing out isn’t necessarily bad)

- Does it make sure not to generate graphs?

historicizing objectivity – Daston and Galison (Representations, 40, 81-128) describe how objectivity means different things at different times

standpoint epistemology and The Voice from Nowhere

experiences in the moment vs after the moment. how to get people back into the moment after the fact? can use reflective visualizations. rather people to discuss around an artifact

highlight the reflexive nature of technology (is/can technology itself be reflexive? reflective?)

challenges and opportunities for subjectivity

expose subjectivity

the process of an experience vs the product of an experience (I suspect this might be a distinction between having an experience and the memory of the experience. hm, is the act of remembering an experience itself, possibly quite different and distinct from the original experience being remembered? in experience-focused HCI/design, perhaps we could/should support not only having experiences but also the experience of remembering those experiences)

evaluating experiences as storytelling, plumbing a collection of episodic memories (the notion of stories and narratives came up a lot in our small group)

elicit multiple, different stories. different experiences for different users. retain multiple persectives. (emic perspective, multiple realities. there’s almost certainly a connection here to something a whole lot bigger about multiple thought styles, epistemological pluralism, different cognitive framings, etc.)

literary theory often evaluates texts over and over. why do we not return repeatedly to the same UX to understand it more fully or in different ways? (perhaps this connects to the above point, in that HCI doesn’t particularly value having lots of different perspectives, so studying the same thing again is seen as a waste of time)

often talk about the “representative” user. how is a particular user representative? statistically? politically (e.g., elected union representative)? who chooses the representative and how?

different criteria to evaluate different evaluation methods for different experiences

evaluation as developing a sensibility rather than determining progress – “the tyranny of progress” (a distinction that came up in the HCI and New Media workshop in which I participated was that of evaluation vs analysis, that evaluation might be more along the lines of judging something as good or bad, while analysis is more about understand something. those perhaps might not be the right terms, but I suspect it might be an important distinction to make)

process of presenting results of experience evaluation: exposure -> awareness -> empathy -> advocacy -> change

a member of another group said “when we’re in flow, we’re having an experience,” that flow can be one indicator of an experience (this raises the interesting notion that we might sometimes be having an experience and might at other times not. I’m not sure how much I’d agree with this notion that we might at some times not be having an experience, but I’d certainly agree that we have different types of experiences at different times, and that when trying to evaluate experience you might only be interested in certain types of experiences.)

I'd love to hear others' thoughts/comments/questions about this stuff. I feel like it's an important direction for HCI to pursue, and I think that having discussions about how to pursue it most effectively is an important aspect of making experience-based evaluation more accepted and central to the HCI community.

on what we should spend our efforts

a little while back, I got into a conversation with a friend, Alex, about research. we were both sort of bemoaning the directions that AI is pursuing/has pursued. I was making the argument that building a general learning machine, or general human-like intelligence, or whatever you want to call the grand vision for AI, isn't necessarily the best use of our time. not only does it seem (at least currently) like an untenable goal, but I'm not entirely convinced that creating such an intelligent machine would be of use. Alex then asked on what research efforts we should be spending our human, monetary, and temporal resources. after a bit of consideration, I came up with three things. what follows is roughly a transcript of the chat log from our conversation. I've added a few things, but this is largely how my side of the conversation unfolded.

ok, I think there are three main areas where I'd like to see work done

1) the mind-body problem, reconciling objectivist/subjectivist myths, and breaking out of Cartesian dualism

2) interdisciplinarity and epistemological pluralism

3) sustainable design, environmental psychology, and reducing/reversing global climate change

1) is something that's sort of plagued science for hundreds of years - how does our subjective experience of consciousness arise from the physical reality of our brains. we've done lots of brain mapping, but we're still pretty far off from understanding how what we experience as daily life is linked to our physical world. I might posit that the physical world can only explain so much, and that seeing a strong Cartesian split between the mind and the body (me in here vs the world out there that I'm studying) as science tends to do might be harmful in gaining a better understanding of the world. we should look for ways to advance our understanding that might not fit into the traditional scientific paradigm. this is sort of a segue into 2).

2) has to do with advancing knowledge. any theory is a lens; some theories put certain aspects of a situation into focus while they blur or entirely occlude others. rather than trying to come up with a single theory or model for the entire world (quantum-gravity in physics (or string theory or whatever), a theory of complex systems, etc.), we should look for ways that different theoretical approaches can complement one another. all models all wrong, some are just more wrong than others (that's a quote from some George Box, a statistician).

3) is really, to some extent, the moral imperative of our time. there absolutely no doubt that we are very rapidly nearly destroying the livability of this planet. if we want a home for our children and the future of our species, we absolutely need to put as much effort as possible into salvaging the environment. this is both from a technical standpoint and from a social standpoint. video cameras are smaller, lighter, faster, have more battery life, take higher quality pictures, and are cheaper than they were even 2 or 3 years ago, yet we don't see this level of innovation with cars. other countries have improved fuel efficiency, but in the US... let's just say that the model-T got 28 mpg. we can do better. cars are a convenient example, but it's not just cars, it's alternative energy in general. but it's not just a technological solution for the problem. society has to support this and, as a whole, think it's really important. I bike almost everywhere that I can; I choose dr's offices and stores that are within biking distance; I live close to campus. my girlfriend bikes to work at least 3 days a week. if everyone made small changes like this, it would have almost as much an effect, if not more so, than government regulation. if every person changed one bulb in their house from traditional incandescent to energy efficient, it would reduce annual emissions by something like 10%, and that's just one bulb. understanding individual and social motivations to engender these sorts of changes will, I believe, be crucial in preserving the environment.

after that, we got into a discussion about how the general thinking machine of AI's grand vision might be a useful, integral, or possible necessary part of achieving parts of each of those goals. however, that unfortunately got cut short and we never resumed the conversation. however, I thought that archiving the above here would be sort of a good way to capture/archive what I think is important right now, as well as hopefully generate some discussion with those who might (dis)agree.

someone with a clue

I just read a great piece about the horrible VA Tech shootings (via Liz Losh). the author, Siva Vaidhyanathan makes some great points.

As a culture, we are very bad at thinking about technology. We look to it either as something to fear or as a panacea for the flaws of the human condition. Technology is neither. It is merely an extension of our own wills and capabilities.

this is great, especially since I'll be presenting a paper in a couple weeks entitled "Questioning the Technological Panacea" that critiques a rhetorical trend to portray technology for the solution to any sort of problem, be it social, economical, educational, whatever. I'm not arguing against technological solutions, but rather that we might be better served by a pause for consideration before blugdeoning every problem we see with the technology hammer. not only as a culture are we bad at thinking about technology, but perhaps even the technology designers are rather bad at it in their own way.

it goes on

After 9/11 we wasted billions on biometric and data-mining technologies to protect ourselves from rare and limited dangers like hijackings, anthrax epidemics and chemical weapon attacks. Yet we defunded efforts to attack real killers like cancer and real lifesavers like public transportation.

beautiful. I don't know if the point could be made better.

go read the rest of the piece, it's all good stuff.