July 2011 Archives

• Kevin Slavin: Those algorithms that govern our lives | Lift conference, what can the future do for you?
  "Digital technologies and on-line platforms are essential to the way we work and live. Interestingly, they are defined by algorithms which are not neutral. Kevin discusses how they define new social norms and how our culture is affected by the possibilities embedded in the software we use."
  (tags: algorithms)

I've been studying interaction design practice at San Francisco consultancies for my dissertation, and I'm beginning to publish. In the interests of making my work available to people who don't go to academic conferences and who don't read academic papers, I'm going to try to translate what I publish into more general-audience-friendly blog posts. I realize that it usually goes the other way for academic work, with blog posts serving as a way to work out arguments pre-publication, but that's not really how I work. So instead of moving from more casual writing to more formal, I'm actually going to move from formal to casual.

As a first offering, here's the blog-ification of my new interactions article, for those of you who do not subscribe. If you do subscribe, I encourage you to read it!

This article emerges from a conversation I had while observing a six-week website redesign project. I wasn't spending full days at the office, since it was a smaller project and the team members had other clients to worry about. So I felt like I'd lost touch with what my study participants were up to. I especially was a little unclear about what one of the project leads was doing on the project. When I asked him, he said:

"Oh, I'm not doing any real work on the project any more. I'm just showing up at client meetings and hand waving."

Which sets the stage for this article. At the time, I took what he told me for granted. But when I typed up my fieldnotes, it struck me: Why is handwaving not "real work?" And what is "real work," in interaction design, anyway?

If you do interpretive research, that's the sort of definitional question that should grab your attention. When people say that something isn't "really art", or that someone isn't "really white," they're defining a category by what it excludes. They're naming outsiders and insiders. In this case, my participant was defining "real work" by what it's not: hand waving.