Article on Web Accessibility

If you are interested in learning more about perspectives on web accessibility, you may be interested in the article Web Accessibility: A Digital Divide for Disabled People by Alison Adams and David Kreps.

You can view the article by using an IU-networked computer or logging into the IU VPN. Here is the link:
http://www.springerlink.com/content/x835p22217q3t143/

Regards,

Bob

Among the Thugs

I just remembered that I wanted to post the link to that book Among the Thugs I mentioned in the lecture about complex systems.  It’s an interesting read of first-hand experience with crowds and violence and mob mentality kind of stuff.  Plus, it’s all about hooligans, and who doesn’t love that cuddly bunch?

DNA Differences

Some research is finding that people of different continental origins have different DNA. The article does give examples of products/designs that are already operating under that assumption (the heart disease drug for African Americans). Concern about “support” for racism is mentioned (if people really are genetically different, then…) and talk of this research leading to a tie between race and I.Q. I mean, there are all kinds of implications, I suppose, so let me ask what about the design implications (operating on the assumption that this research is valid and that folks from different continental origins do have different DNA)? And in a case where the role of environment and DNA were to be diametrically opposed, then what would take precedence?

Structuralist Design Methodology

While thinking about the strengths and weaknesses of the phenomenological, hermeneutic, and structuralists approaches (which I never got too far with), I was thinking about “What would be an example of structuralist design methodology?”

Today I found this pretty cool article (link via putting people first) that mapped the different use-centered design research approaches. Not surprisingly, the mostly seemed to be grounded in a phenomenological/hermeneutic tradition.

None of them appeared to be grounded in structuralist philosophy. However, several of the methodologies do seem to emphasize artifacts and meaning rather the people and their intentions (which were all ones I don’t know very much about).

probes

“Probes are ambiguous stimuli that designers send to people who then respond to them, providing insights for the design process. No attempt is made to understand or to empathize with the people probed; the objective is design inspiration.”

lead-user innovation

“In 1986 Eric von Hippel introduced the lead user method that can be used to systematically learn about user innovation in order to apply it in new product development. “

generative tools

“The landscape of generative tools is revealing a new language whose components
are both visual and verbal. These components can be combined in an infinite
variety of meaningful ways, much like the linguistic elements we use in speaking
and comprehending (Chomsky, 1965). The new language is, however,
predominantly visual, as opposed to verbal. We put a large number of components together into toolkits. People select from the components in order to create artifacts that express their thoughts, feelings and/or ideas. The resulting artifacts may be in the form of collages, maps, stories, plans, and/or memories. The stuff that dreams are made of is often difficult to express in words but may be imaginable as pictures in your head.

These collages and transcripts of the presentations are analyzed using
elementary statistical methods, such as counting the co-occurrence of images and
words. More sophisticated analysis, such as using multidimensional scaling to
reveal the patterns in chosen images and words, can also be performed.”

The above design research methodologies do seem to emphasize artifacts and meaning (and in the case of generative tools, languages) rather than people and intentions, but they don’t seem altogether structuralist to me. In fact, they actually seem to mix hermeneutic/phenomenological analysis with structuralist analysis. For example, generative tools is aimed at getting people to express their dreams, yet it suggests using simple statistical methods to uncover patterns, which to me sounds very structuralist. Lead-user innovation seems to be concerned with paradigmatic and syntagmatic differences in products, however, I would guess that in the end they would often relate these back to the goals and intentions of the lead-users who designed them. In the description above, the returned probe packets seem to be interpreted without regard for the intentions or goals of their creators, however I could see how they might be interpreted in multiple ways, including from a hermeneutic approach.

Rather than ask “What would be an example of structuralist design methodology?” the real question is “Why would you want a structuralist design methodology?” One of the most compelling reasons I’ve seen so far, is that structuralist analysis can be applied to any artifact, even in the absence of the person who created it or the people who are interpreting it. This type of analysis also seems to lend itself more to generalization since a language is shared by a community and seems to exist in some objective sense (at least, more so than the subjective intentions of individuals).

WWJD (What Would Jeff Do) ?

Worst case scenario:

Ethnomethodology fails because you can’t dive into the users’ culture for a year and even if you could, first you’d have to acquire all of their special training, education, experience, etc.

Ethnomethodological phenomenology fails because you might ask the user the wrong kinds of “why” questions, or ask them the wrong way, or be misheard or misinterpreted, or create a Heissenberg Effect or a Hawthorne Effect in the process of asking.

Structuralism fails because, you probably won’t share all of the codes necessary to understand the user, let alone do a proper analysis of their needs.

What then?

Prewriting Process-Phenomenology & Reactable

I started out just writing out keywords and major ideas we’ve had about phenomenology so far-things like intersubjectivity, ethnomethodology, and authors like Dourish and Metz. At the same time I had a couple of “concrete examples” that I find interesting. When I looked at the two parts together(theory & example), one of my concrete examples seemed to dominate so I went with that one. I can’t say that I’m at a stage where I have a very specific concrete direction for the paper we’re never going to write, but the process did help me organize and narrow focus.

I wanted to find a way to combine the reactable with phenomenology. A couple ways I did this was to look at intersubjectivity, ethnomethodology and the concept of “common sense”, and the implication of media’s influence on message(s) in Metz’s concept of the Impression of Reality, specifically “tangible computing” (Dourish) and “tangible user interfaces” (taken from Roedl’s Realism in HCI post). Initially, the paper would be devoted to playing with these topics, and their definitions, then would look at the reactable and its intentions (taken from its creators) with respect to these concepts.

Then I thought it would be pretty cool to take the original Moog modular synthesizer and apply the same phenomenological concepts to it and compare the two results. Identify an evolution of sorts, if there is one, especially with regard to user-, technology-, and human- centered designs. Also perhaps identify any pattern(s) and generalize it/them to technological developments-one example that comes to mind is the first computer(no GUI) vs. today’s models.

Game play experience today

Nine friends played Wii games today at my home including sport games and Mario party games. We have four handlers which means that we could have four people play at the same time. When we played those minigames, eight of us were really enjoy. Another one was very busy and working by using her laptop.

Clearly, everyone has a clear goal, win the game. In order to win, people use strategies, and share their win strategies with others. When we played 2 vs. 2 games, people shout their strategies to their partner about how to divide their labor, and how to aim their targets. Through the practice sessions, we were trying to find some tips by doing consciously. We were trying to stand out of others by predicting the others’ behaviors and actions.  Sometimes we wanted to win, and also want others to be happy. Activities were mediated in the game experience.

However, it seems that nobody really think about the final goals of the party during the gaming process. Maybe they were thinking about it, but who knows!?

Based on this game experience, I got some questions about Activity Theory. In AT, we mentioned in our class that all the activities involved in conscious mini goals. How about when activities happen in a social contexts, and everybody has different mini goals and maybe has similar activity? Or maybe we all have same mini goals but express it in different ways? When these happen, we have no way to connect a specific goal and a specific activity due to the dependency on people and context. The mini-goal direct activities are always changing. How can we connect activities and operations with planed and un-planed?

In one game, suddenly one friend found a new way to shake the handler and he won the game. He was very happy to tell others that we could shake the handler faster by using his strategy. And every other three players stared at their own handlers and began to shake in that way. This is really a wonderful breakdown!

I also think that the mind/body theory was challenged in this game.  It is impossible to think and plan our activities first before actions. The situation in every moment decided by the past activities and mediated by both the game environment and other people’s reaction. A lot of operations were  conditional response. and happened unconsciously. However, if some players are very familiar with the game, and they got the ability to predict the possible situation in the future moments, and they kind of got “more time” to react to the situations they were facing. This  matches the embodiment theory and this kind of familiar shapes the sensibility in HCI design.

Embodiment always exist in reality.

Patoke Lake and Playing with Sticks

So for those of you who don’t know, a large group of us went to southern Indiana’s Patoka Lake this weekend for a break from school and work. I thought that some of you would be interested in seeing how the weekend turned out. Here are my favorite photos that I took:

Ethnography in Industry: Notes from EPIC2007

EPIC (Ethnographic Praxis in Industry) is, as its name suggests, a conference about the implications and uses of ethnography in industry. I was a little surprised (and pleased) that about 80% of the presenters and participants were from industry, and only about 20% were academics. Intel, Microsoft, and IBM are very well represented here, as are less-than-household names, such as consultants, who are nonetheless doing some fascinating work.

The upshot of this is that the problems were quite grounded in contemporary business practices and problems. A sampling of some of the issues around which ethnography was used to improve understanding include the following:

• Sales pipeline management (IBM)
• Mailing out 38,000 individual retirement packages in 7 days (XEROX)
• Researching and modeling medical care ecosystems (Intel)
• Implementing computer automation in wastewater plant management (University of Southern Denmark)
• Teaching ethnographic practices to system engineers to improve their understandings of user needs (Fujitsu, PARC)
• Improving a real estate firm’s direct marketing strategy (Ricoh)

There was an interesting tension that many of the researchers seemed to be facing. On the one hand, their work was being used to help develop models for complex business practices. On the other hand, as ethnographers, they wanted to focus on concrete situations and contexts and the real, flesh-and-blood people within them. From my perspective, one way that this tension got addressed was to work proactively to improve communication between managers (who want the models) and employees, on whom the models are ideally grounded and in any case who will have to live with them once they are developed. Stated more abstractly, the ethnographers seemed to want to make a distinction between managing complex processes (which is seen as good) and implementing rationalist control schemes (which are seen as inhuman and bad).

Another major issue is one of legitimation. How can ethnographers convince managers and marketing leaders to take them seriously? How do they justify their work both intellectually (methods, data, etc.) and also from a business perspective (actually leads to better business processes or products)? Complicating this argument is the perceived conflict between the reductionist, abstract models that managers and marketing professionals want and the rich, individual "thick" and nuanced descriptions that ethnographers value and provide. Another way of saying this is that there is a lot of thinking about how ethnographic research can, should, does, or fails to connect to business cycles, that is, there is a lot of thinking about ways that ethnography can have real business impact.

It may appear from this post that there is an ethnographer versus managers and marketing professionals, good guys versus bad guys rhetoric at the conference; that is not the mood here and is instead a misleading artifact of the way I have tried to boil down the complex dynamics that I am seeing. The managers and marketing professionals are hiring and/or collaborating with the ethnographers, whether they are in-house researchers or consultants. So the managers and marketers, too, seem to want to distinguish between (a) managing complex processes and (b) implementing inhuman rationalist control schemes. In that regard, they and the ethnographers share a common value: the two groups just engage with it at different levels.