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"We are developing tools that apply findings from the fields of cognitive psychology and behavioral economics to the design process. These tools provide a head start on framing research as well as developing new strategies for solving user problems."
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"But what if we did take a single step further out? What if we imagined that the citizen-responsiveness system we’ve designed lives in a dense mesh of active, communicating public objects? Then the framework we’ve already deployed becomes something very different. To use another metaphor from the world of information technology, it begins to look a whole lot like an operating system for cities."
April 2010 Archives
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"39. We do not admire Picasso’s Guernica or Goya’s The Third of May 1808 solely because of the techniques used, yet we are often invited to admire computer art for just that reason. Art that is deliberately content-free is one thing. Art that is accidentally, lumpenly content-free is another."
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"The following two case studies demonstrate the struggle youth groups face when trying to promote sustainable, healthy, local food systems; they represent attempts by youth to access power over urban space via state structures. The information in the following came from informal interviews with project members."
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"More than 80 groups, schools and other organisations expressed an interest in participating in a ‘soil to table’ project devoted to finding a healthier, more sustainable local food system. These included primary and secondary schools, pre-school groups (Sure Start), residential homes, allotment associations, mental health units in local hospitals, residents’ groups, voluntary organisations and even the staff of a smart department store in a main shopping street in the town centre. The local council chipped in by agreeing to dig up part of the main local park so the Urban Farming teams could grow specialist plants and food there. "
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"Mobilizing around the food garden supported bonding among homogenous but separate third-sector organizations, through increased opportunities for networking which built trust, reciprocity and resource exchange. The project also provides a model for a community–university partnership providing opportunities for service learning by students and for social investment by the university."
Richard Beckwith
Tappan Parikh
Eli Blevis
Phoebe Sengers
Tad Hirsch, moderating
Tap: Avaaj Otalo
- organic certification is NOT about standardization
- small farmer's voices need to be heard in global supply chains
- using text and structured data is like "threading an elephant through the eye of a needle"
-- difficult to have grounding happen in the context of standard data
- voice is a better medium for expression and engagement
- communications, not data integration
Phoebe's research in Newfoundland
Tad: underlying thematics
- situatedness of food production, but at the same time involved in global commerce of trade
Q: additional thoughts about balancing those things? what are the key problems? esp if urban consumers are driving changes in farming communities. How can HCI play a role in mitigating that discussion?
Phoebe: John Thackara on sustainable fishing practices. The dispersal of information about where fish comes from into supply chains. So for example there are sustainable populations of cod, but you don't know whether YOUR cod comes from those populations. It probably doesn't just look like a "technology." there are policy issues.
Richard: locavores -- certain things you might want to do, like support farmers in emerging economies are more difficult then. so thinking about how and where we buy. it's a different side of the same problem but a different thing
Tap: intermediary organizations that control chokepoints have little incentive to change -- how do you deal with that? they don't respond to emails. maybe create intelligent backchannels for the exchange of information and money. proposing to push a lot more information through the pipe. certification works because it doesn't require a lot of attention. so as we push more information we may be hitting the limits of people's attention and capacity for empathy.
Tad: representation of communities in agriculture -- from Farmville to the Deadliest Catch
Richard: "Paying back" farmers for the risks they take in farming partially (in the US) through higher costs
Tap: exactly. the life of a small farmer is about risk. what we do is often a bandaid to try and get farmers a little more sustainability
Q: policy issue here about how to incentivize healthy eating -- isn't in the best interest of the insurance companies to advocate for a tax on soda?
Phoebe: not eating processed food is probably better for your health. but it's not clear that it's better for the fishermen. It's not enough to talk about producers; you also talk about food distribution.
Eli Blevis: Leo Bonanni's talk. Ben Rosenberg at ?. technologies to track where food comes from.
Q: role of information technology. Are there places where it makes more sense NOT to do something?
Phoebe: here comes the true confessions! I'm interested in a lot of things that are not IT related, and I have tenure and so it's okay for her to do history of technology and not make new technology. The tenure mechanism is one way people can do these things. Building IT for fisheries in Newfoundland was never the purpose of this project -- it's there to provide a frame for critical research. We don't have to apply the "technology hammer" to everything.
Tap: not feeling inclined to build complicated technology -- in CS there's an implicit idea you should build something fancy and complicated. Never written about his organic certification project in CS because it was essentially a fancy spreadsheet.
Eli: it is as interesting!
Q: discourse of labor involved in production and distribution -- global and local. what is our role in changing those patterns?
Richard: Interested in how training and certification for high tech jobs is actually not going to get a job for most people who do them. There are 100x as many agriculture jobs as high tech jobs. If we want to think about sustainability at the country or local level for maintaining or improving lifestyles, we need to figure out how farmers can make more money. Which is why locavorism needs to shift a bit.
Q: tangential strategies -- victory gardens and guerilla gardening -- commentary on ownership. draw rhetoric from nonfarmers into farming dialogue through street farming?
Eli: guerilla style gardening brings you closer to a sustainable lifestyle
Richard: then you realize how difficult it is and how much risk is involved.
Q:
Tap: working with farmers in Central Valley. farmers started farming because they didn't want to work in front of a computer, so there's a tension between getting farmers to publicize their work online and why they got into farming in the first plce.
Richard: FarmIgo - a tool for CSAs.
Q: from SAP, on sustainability projects at SAP. Janaki Kumar
Q: describes a project she went into with "naivete." Everything you attempt to do is so politically charged, and so complex. What they haven't worked out is how to deal with the naivete of the farmers, it took 9 months going up the chain in the supermarket to talk to the importers, to talk to the suppliers, to talk to the farmers -- BEFORE they started the project. how do you work with very different values?
Q: studying ufarm.org -- analyzing type of usage going on. types of posts very quickly changed from question and answer to a small but very dedicated group of farmers blogging about their experiences.
Phoebe: there's no community supported fishery, but our experience on the ground is not that fishers have no digital savvy. Especially in Iceland, fisherpeople pride themselves on their high tech skills. So we need to be careful about stereotyping farmers.
Panelists
Elizabeth Churchill
Ame Elliott, senior human factors researcher at IDEO
Patrick Larvie, user research manager at Google
Susan Dray, president of Dray and Associates
Elizabeth Churchill
seeing, understanding, and explaining
are you there to design something new from scratch? are you there to understand an existing feature?
notion of translation: said vs embodied
translator vs interpreter
explication: the process of making the implicit, explicit
who to bring onto a team? $120/hour for an interpreter, not a translator, is worth it. and the interpreter should be part of the team because they need to understand what YOU want
more hours at more dollars/hour for a guide to the situated questions is worth it
also have that person help with the presentation - how do you artfully make something rich and deep, not just a touristic image
you have the interpreter there to facilitate the conversation
Patrick Larvie
started by studying Brazil, now studied
a recurring challenge that is part of the historical legacy of our field
what we lose sight of
"when we say international user research we are shooting ourselves in the foot. because we don't really understand what it means"
because international means "crossing political borders"
there are no specific methods associated with crossing political borders
we like to use "international" to mean a comparative model, but it's not clear if you're comparing anything of interest
just because you're studying email in two countries doesn't mean you're comparing anything of interest
what are the parameters of comparison?
privacy and research ethics as a mechanism
need to understand expectations, institutions, groups, which allow some people to make claims of ownership over things, and not others
vital to have more detail and a finer grain of understanding about what we are comparing
international user studies can be conducted without leaving the country
as a discipline HCI we do ourselves a disservice by not making explicit the parameters
Ame Elliott
lots of international travel, specifically Vietnam and Japan
very difficult for people to become culturally calibrated quickly
tension around HCI
"actual ethnography" involves relocation
Ame is a practitioner. People ask her to understand the difference between urban and rural middle class consumers in China for 3-5 days.
tactics that she has used to expand the footprint of these one on one interactions
"faceporn" - one to one mapping -- one upmanship of getting a "bigger n in your sample" bc each finding is tied to a person
Susan Dray
early experiences of terror are enlightening
keep track of them
expecting to learn the hard way
learning how to learn
learning about implicit assumptions
what kinds of experiences do we need in order to take advantage of being in a different context
maybe you "need" to go internationally at first, in order to learn about what it's like to be in a different context
turning issues into a research plan for a community you're unfamiliar with
panel back and forth
EC: you need to ask clients "what is your question?" "what are you trying to achieve?" "what is it that you think is so different there?" there's a lot of work you can do before you even get there. but sometimes you do need to be *surprised* -- push back before you go, as opposed to going and then coming back and figuring out how to get people to really *listen* to your answers
SD: often the people who need to have the experience are the people doing the designing - they will make assumption about what they see - ie, what a McDonalds is. Loves best about intl work when they go and their assumptions are shattered
PL: doesn't want to be characterized as the "guy who doesn't think you need to travel." lots of multisite research. "what's the form we use for France?" narrowed down the parameters of comparison -- places that use forms and places that don't. it is unreasonable to expect if you go to another place that the form can substitute for rituals and practices we have already created. He has no idea what people expect him or Google to be. Need to be very explicit. "International" blinds us to the differences we see everyday, without crossing boundaries. And blinds us to what we need to do -- and what we can know. Profound insight: "insights are seldom about the place or the people you visit. The insights that have the greatest shelf life are the ones you have about your product, yourself, your assumptions."I go to Mexico with the idea that Mexico will teach me something about me -- I won't be qualified to write a book about email in Mexico.
moderator: contrasts along fundamental differences in which
PL: assumptions we make about agency and users. we ask these innocuous questions for a usability study. "do what you would usually do if someone from Google weren't watching you with a camera" - as if that's possible. What if we restructured our global project to differentiate by user expectations? Privacy is an interesting problem because it's most noticeable when it's deficient or absent. It's an affective state of ownership or control over your stuff. So we've identified a dimension. To what extent do people exert control over your stuff?
AE: expanding the "template" of the in-home interview. Visiting another place and having free time for meals that are then hyper touristic. Techniques. Relying on the artifacts on the home as a treasure hunt for examining the nearby environment. Translators are hyper audio. Not aware of visual cues in environment. Taking photos can help. But starting conversation with partcipant and finding what most recent article of clothing they bought is and going to that place. Unpacking brands. Like outback steakhouse and ruth's chris steakhouse. planning an anniversary outback steakhouse? Hard to ask questions about class, money, pricing. Ask about special and everyday meals, then go there. Work in India. Very little experience working in slum, village, and peri-urban communities around gathering water. Took her several days to figure out that she didn't know what a fancy vs an ordinary water jug is -- so ask about reference pricing!
Question
SW: what are outcomes of your work?
EC: deliverable matters a lot. for the purposes of this panel, she was thinking about talking strategically to executives. EC and AE wrote a paper for EPIC conference about data flexibility. "I'd really like to get a CHI paper out of this" vs powerpoint understanding. They're often very different. What is it I need to see to talk to the technologists, and how do I see FOR them, if they can't come with me. The politics of exchange. Different heads about what I deliver to.
PL: design specs. "we deliver emotion." ex from Yahoo! Personals from many years ago. They're just inventory. Hong Kong has the world's largest population of bisexuals. What in the UI was creating the issue? Because everyone said that they were looking for "friends," and then people said they were looking for "both." [POTENTIAL BOOK EXAMPLE]. He also tries to deliver happier researchers. Need to engage questions that are meaningful to us, need to be better at client management, figuring out what kind of questions we can and should answer.
EC: finds it hard to think with "CHI head" and "executive head." can be seduced by questions relevant to either side. An orientation to how you see. Needing to remember which role you're following.
Q: what about concept of informed consent?
PL: great question. esp when we are asking people to consent to things they could not possibly understand. Do they understand what it means to have their image and voice recorded? to be used in product development. it's his job to warn people of any negative consequences. it forces us to put ourselves in the shoes of people who do not see negative outcomes, and there may well be negative outcomes. sometimes people say that they agree, and we have to know that they cannot possibly agree. Awareness of subtleties of informed consent 1. makes us better researchers 2. we need to become sharper consumers of research services. Times told by agencies "we get informed consent by phone" and if they don't have a process for it, it's a good way of "weeding out incompentent agencies." 3. this will really raise our awareness and out ability to speak about the kinds of nuances that inform technology usage. If we don't understand them, we will misunderstand what is really at stake.
Q: some things relatively more universal and others relatively more specialized? like, say, Jaws. If you showed that to someone living in the desert, they'd have a similar fear reaction.
Paraphrase: how to help you prioritize?
AE: Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
SD: lots of universal feelings, but cultural specifics
Q: Nic Bidwell - advice about "taking home" the Internet and how distracting that can be. Are we not engaging with the environment?
AE: well, you need to tell the story to a colleague immediately afterwards. sometimes better served by leaving the collection mechanisms aside and just paying attention.
SD: affect on having technology when you are immersed in a culture when it is not the norm -- as she is living in rural South Africa
AE: privileging the artifact over the language. the mania for quotation and transcription "to prove that you were there" takes away from actual insight.
EC: Sontag - the camera can take away from your being there.
EC: in a shorter time frame, capture less, and look and listen more. You are the instrument of capture. Also: talking about it after, before you forget. The debrief session is the best bit, it's the most important bit.
Q: perspective on doing intl research from your office. remote international. how much can you really do?
PL: I actually don't mind. makes boundaries explicit but reduces them. Questions about visual design, latency, and langauge. It won't offer more than that.
AE: webex freaks me out less than facebook. like being behind a half-silvered mirror. facebook "ickier" because natural interactions repurposed for marketing. As a designer, my answer would be "the artifacts" -- have people bring things in. At least people know they're performing for an audience.
EC: diary
SD: try to make sure people don't overinterpret what they get -- the limitations
SD: you should never do a remote session as your first session, EVER. you should start by being in context. the late summative stuff, but not the early explorative stuff.
Q: How do you know you've gained enough trust? People answer what they think you want to know.
PL: that takes a lot of experience. some techniques are projective: you ask somebody what they might do in a certain situation, and then you ask them what someone else would do. but the techniques are only as good as the person using them. you can "bake in methodological autocorrection," but it takes time and experience as a researcher to know when to use them.
EC: to allow yourself to be accessible outside the group setting. going to the bathroom. going to the bathroom and having "the ladies tell me what was really going on." make opportunities for people to exhibit trust.
Q: from U of Cape Town. evaluating a mobile digital storytelling application in rural Kenya. abandoning the plan. how much do I steer it back to my original questions? how can I realign things to my research questions?
AE: craft of fieldwork is a performing art. different roles: like, the designated interference blocker to remove the person who is blocking the research.
PL: that's a sign of being aware - being open to revision. sticking blindly to the plan. and sometimes naivete.
Q: talk a bit more about how you lay the groundwork and find participants.
SD: you have to have a local partner to do recruiting. and you need to vet that partner carefully. the logistics of recruiting varies wildly.
PL: there is no substitute for people with experience and knowledge. you can't walk into someplace where you don't know anyone and start talkign to peple. because then you're a weirdo. so you have to choose that person carefully.
AE: people come with an entourage behind them. that can be a good way to do snowball sampling. and it can be a way to do a performance of research.
Q: do you tend to use a moderator along with a simultaneous translator? sometimes nice to have two people to know what's going in business, but want a leaner team for home visits.
EC: two is always better, if you can afford it. if you can't afford it, the translator handles moderation and translation, and the collaborator handles watching the body dynamics.
PL: no single right answer. often people have no idea what HCI research is, so training two people can be more difficult.
AE: training an interpretor is important. I dislike simultaneous translation. different to train someone to let uncomfortable pauses hang in the air and not fill in. then review later about accents and about the nuances of vocabulary that YOU care about.
EC: very different btw doing interview and observation. not a simultaneous translation in home. but business difference. simultaneous translation can disrupt rapport.
SD: simultaneous translator can be fine in the home, esp. if two different people are talking to each other. it's amazing how quickly people ignore simultaneous translation.
moderator: using a local moderator as well?
Q: bring insights to live - "acting out" - but how to do it for an audience of remote, unpaid volunteers while still doing informed consent?
PL: can you bring them to the field? the "jarring experience" of realizing your expectations were incorrect. theatricality of delivering outcomes. they need to experience them in some way.
EC: recommend Nina Wakeford's writing. Not just emotion but "atmospheres" into which you can get the listener involved.
Q: writing research on Anglo-Americans and Latinos, but he's from China. It's getting easier, but he's wondering if he's getting blinded? Also, how to apply finding to design? Systematic methodologies?
SD: both. that's why you need the interpreter.
PL: no position of universal access. you should be open to NOT finding profound difference. Sometimes we believe we need to see profound difference, and we don't.
Q: b2b product - is it reasonable for her to do field research herself, or should she hire researchers in local contexts?
PL: going on your own is a lot of work
SD: the question of sales is a classic problem. if you go on your own, you can help educate the sales force about what you need, what is different than what they need. local person might not be able to do that.
More unnecessarily detailed notes! You know I don't remember *anything* unless I write it down.
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reconfiguration
- cultural imaginaries ("the resources we have to think about the possibilities of the world") and material practices
- starts with the figural, as we think metaphorically, so what are the concepts that are available to us
- haraway: technologies materialize imaginaries: "materialized figurations"
- how persons and things are *con*figured
- so what possible *re*configurations might there be?
- shows slide: "guns don't kill people" image of Lee Harvey Oswald assassination "people kill people" & reads from Pandora's Hope? "You are different with a gun in your hand. The gun is different because you hold it."
- so what is the unit of analysis? when we think about people and things, instead of thinking of either as having intrinsic attributes, what happens when they get joined together? What new capacities for action happen when they are joined together? we should be thinking of configurations: of assemblages between people and technology
- some more examples from STS
-- Dawn Goodwin, Acting in Anesthesia: a 3 stage process of redistribution of agency from a person to the machines to the person again - in the middle, the person is still active, but that information is effective only as it is read through the machines.
-- Rachel Prentice, The Anatomy of a Surgical Simulation: surgeons operating through robot arms - how is proximity and distance articulated through digital mediation?
-- Natasha Schull, Machine Life, Design, and Dependency in Las Vegas: the design of gambling into addiction - looks at industry to design of casinos to talking to gamblers: articulating what they call "being in the zone" - the idea is not to win but to be in an incredibly intimate relationship with the machine.
- image from work practice study of civil engineers
-- Susana Bodker, Through the Interface -- we become aware of the interface when it is broken or down -- when it's working we work through it, as if we are directly manipulating the objects.
-- So, CAD as an example. It seems abstract -- but it is tied to many forms of knowing the object
- Gell: "Since the onset of the discipline, anthropology has been signally preoccupied with a series of problems to do with ostensibly peculiar relations between persons and 'things' which somehow 'appear as', or do duty as, persons." Art and Agency, p 9.
- Stelarc's prosthetic head, installed in a gallery in Toronto 2003
-- plays an interaction with Stelarc's head, with Stelarc coaching her
-- ex: Sha Xin Wei, TGarden
--- respecting the capacity for action in the technologies he is working with -- rather than trying to create "human-like" responses, he lets humans and machines each do what they are best at, but makes new capabilities possible through combination
expanding frames and accountable cuts
- we recognize our own participating in constituting in any given moment the relevant units of analysis, in recognizing the boundaries we have to draw, and our accountability in doing so
- we think about our analyses in terms of understanding both our frames and understanding what happens when we look outside them.
current project
- warfare and healthcare: action at a distance and bodies in contact
-- the co-existence of development of technologies that enable projection of action at a distance and the continued salience of embodied co-presence
-- Dutch documentary: robot love (!)
"Agency is not an attribute but the ongoing reconfigurings of the world" Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, p 141
the room is packed -- much more so than for international research
liebhold's matrix
Paula Bach: how would we talk to each other?
Steve Jackson (?) 5 questions for a really good paper:
How do we grant users and usability experts legal standing? Because that plays an enormous role in changing telecommuncations policy
Is infrastructure a thing or a relation? This paper pulls back from the STS relational conception, which would say that the infrastructural qualities are not embedded in the quality of the thing but are produced in the relationship between the thing and the user. Ie, stairs. For someone in a wheelchair,
Do we want to privilege or prioritize the concerns of some users over others? Leigh Star: the problem of infrastructural orphans
When is a tool? Infrasturcture opens itself to engagement in different ways at different times. History of technology and economic history. At certain moments of making, infrastructure may be amenable to certain kinds of intervention, which raises the stakes
What does this look like in practical, organizational terms? First steps towards that in terms of metrics. But there's a lot more to be said. Does this mean systems people come to our conferences?
Mark Ackerman:
great to bring in discussions of time and technology
caveats
1) STS literature brings lots of depth!
2) IEAs only will be filled out at gunpoint by request of someone with a seat at the table - need to ground in organizational and institutional format
3) reflects a standard American fascination with progress and improvement and the closing of the frontier (Turner)
where they could push
- HCI has an obligation to cover what code does as a design need Norman Meyerwiss's 1985
-- invisible technologies -- like grading, which was invented in 1792. what does that mean for recommender systems?
-- pushing on what code does in respect to design
- software as infrastructure - what it abstracts, with respect to whom
-- how can we do research on technology that increasingly becomes *other people's technology*
--- like, for example, very large systems. like facebook. you could build an online community, but his grad students are not going to do that in their spare time [
Gregory Abowd
- what do you mean by infrastructure? what you want infrastructure to be is that what you don't have to worry about.
- what people at CHI are upset about is that the systems people don't play attention to THEM
- systems people like infrastructure when some of it is exposed so they can use it
- most of you spend your time solving the wrong problem - trying to patch those problems is a waste of time when you should be trying to fix the infrastructure
- if you want to reach out and hear what the systems people have to say, maybe you should get speakers here who speak from that community -- there are more systems conferences that invite HCI people than vice versa
Dan Olsen: we have infrastructure problems bc HCI abdicated the issues -- we walked away -- somebody else invented the web, and how cell phones work -- "we abdicated because we assumed that the infrastructure was done and we just had to put a pretty face on it." also done bc we think infrastructure is too hard. "these things are not too big unless we have an ignorance barrier." "we have calculus phobia." "If you put an algorithm into a CHI paper it's like the kiss of death" "the user study drug" "not because it's a bad thing but because it's so easy to evaluate" "we don't get these papers in here, skip to the user study, oh there isn't one, NEXT!" "I think we have to partly fix our education and partially fix how we think about it."
Q: wants to echo what Gregory said. when she presents what she does, practitioners are thrilled because they don't have to do that work. she has been continuously asked to give tutorials at the conference, but has given up on trying to get papers in after. So what makes it different today that we can have a panel of researchers talking about this, when 8 years ago everyone said it was too boring and should go to the software engineers?
Mark Ackerman: within CSCW, people are asking what the role of technical research should be. so this was a timely papaper.
Newman: the systems that we're building are more infrastructure-dependent than they were in the past -- cloud computing, etc. Multiple layers of infrastrcuture. The software industry is able to move faster than research is. Not as many UI toolkits now at CHI because they're already being built by manufacturers.
Q: but the timeline of product line architecture is 10-15 years!
Dan Olsen: Don't see anything on the iPhone we couldn't have prototyped.
Q: Why now? Also, crisis informatics. Disaster is interesting from an infrastructure perspective. ICT4D. Narratives of different kinds of infrastructure and infrastructural arrangements. Any bearing on why infrastructure is a problem, a challenge, and an opportunity?
GA: Doesn't think that infrastructure is just surfacing now as a topic.
Dan Olsen: we just exhausted what we can do with one pointer and a keyboard.
Scott Klemmer: couldn't figure out the takeaway of this paper. paraphrases what he thinks they are. we're not in dialogue enough with the systems folks. social computing folks -- they all hang out and make progress on all fronts. a seachange in systems similar to that in chi -- classics systems work is performance oriented. but work people are submitting now has a metric other than speed. Eddie Coler's make your own router system. He argues it's more user-friendly. Also similar stuff happening in theory.
Newman: their goal: build a framework for an ongoing discussion. the takeaway is a framework for the discussion. an exposition of the shortcomings we currently have. he agrees we're short on solutions right now.
Q: disagrees about building infrastrastructure. would rather have spent 10 years of energy building the best interfaces I could for zoomable interfaces, I would have been more successful and the s the field would have been more successful. Build infrastructure because I didn't have the killer app! But no one came up with that killer app because of the infrastructure I built. Just build the kludged version you need in order to create the interaction you want in order to get people to understand why it's important. But if you don't built that app, you may well be wasting your time.
Abowd: tells story of student who couldn't come up with killer app. build the "context toolkit" -- 13 years later there are lots of killer apps relating to context, and people point to that piece of work as an inspiration.
Mark Ackerman: one problems is that we don't give people a lot of incentives for building the infrastructures for us. ie, physics: you get credit for building the satellite that other people use.
Edwards: lots of problems right now bc no input into infrastructure, like in security, which wasn't build to be usable.
Newman: what we need is not more toolkits. "things that we build that are playgrounds for us but they don't necessarily have the impact." what we need to do is engage in the process of building.
Ackerman: push back on it -- context project which wasn't published here bc we weren't interested in it "what are the next infrastructures we need" "are we going to give credit to the people who build them?"
Q: physics. I look at other disciplines. Why don't we have these larger projects that we work on together. Why is it that toolkits are just the property of one person?
Abowd: the physics community is self-contained. they work on similar problems. the problems that we work on are not self-contained. the big projects are people working on twitter and facebook, and they're relying on the people who create those phenomena. So the projects . Don't think it would be desirable for all the HCI folks to be working on the same project -- it wouldn't be all that meaningful.
Q: something missing: the constraints upon engineers. building on infrastructures now means building on the infrastructures which we have now. the thing that we love that has not been built cannot be used by anyone. so building something makes some constraints. building something that supports the use cases we know about eventually trumps what we don't know about. the same things come up in the built environment.
Ackerman: wants to take apart infrastructure and research infrastructure
Jackson: argument for thinking with care about the infrastructural moment we live in. very few infrastructures are built from scratch. so when can we have more of an effect?
Q: from someone from the Social Security Administration! working on user experience framework for SSA. problems with designers who don't take into account implementability, and engineers who don't take user experience into account.
Edwards: experience on research side, not so much on developer side. cultural differences, terminology differences, value differences. in collaborations with systems people, it seems like they often design for the things that are easiest to measure. the human stuff gets left by the wayside.
Q: a third choice. "the world is going to be real and you run into the wall" build into the infrastructure the capacity for the users of it to respond to unanticipated situations. is there in the infrastructures we're building the capacity to be growable for humans. to deal with the fact that we won't anticipate everything.
Newman: infrastructure as object, infrastructure as relation -- this is infrastructure as process.
Erika: incentives matter
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"They placed the Stranger Exchange box in Central Square during the late evening of October 25, 2009. Since then, either John or Chris tries to visit it every other day to see what has been left and taken. They’ve discovered books like A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, as well as movies, photographs, souvenirs, and even letters.
But what really has surprised the friends the most is the quality—and, in many instances, the effort—that has gone into some of the things that have been deposited. Plus, people are clearly making items specifically, for the box for no other reason than to share."
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"Window Farms are vertical, hydroponic, modular, low-energy, high-yield edible window gardens built using low-impact or recycled local materials."
