Category Archives: Philosophy of Technology

Pieces of my digital life

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I’m not alone

I think almost anyone who has a multiple computer household experiences this problem to some extent: I have music, video, pictures, and audiobook files scattered everywhere.   Over the last 14 years or so I’ve been through so many moves from place to place, so many upgrades from different computers, and so many devices it’s all over.  I thought I had a pretty good handle on the whole thing when we finally bought a 1TB external drive along with our decently sized 320GB drive on our imac that stays at home, but the collection of media comes from so many places and in so many forms it’s spread out again.  You would think that with One iMac, one macbook, and my computer at work plus the external devices it wouldn’t be too bad, but yet it is.

I know the greatest part of it is located in those two big drives, but where exactly I don’t know.  I also know I have other media scattered on my laptop at least 2 USB drives and my work computer.  Admittedly my work computer has more work related media (TED talks and other conference video or audio related to my research or at least my interests), but there’s other stuff too.

I don’t organize, I search

I’ve long long since given up on trying to organize this stuff.  I let google desktop or spotlight find stuff for me, but I do want to be able to know what’s out there.  With the recent loss of my ipod music (had to restore it, soon to be restored AGAIN) I’ve been hoping to get some more musical variety on my ipod.  I also used to enjoy pandora for music listening and discovery, but since my move from the USA I can longer enjoy that service with using VPN or other means to circumvent ridiculous geographic restrictions.

I know I can go get it all onto the external drive, but then it’s not always readily accessible.  Network Attached Storage (NAS) is a nice idea, but I just don’t have the money to spend on it, and still that really won’t help unless I can get remote access from work to it as the majority of my computing time is at work and I don’t carry a laptop to work anymore.

Online solution?

Dropbox is great for keeping all the files I’m currently working with and my current account limit of 3.25 GB is adequate only for those things, not full-scale storage of my media life.  Not even close.  I don’t think we have that many pictures, but it has to be 4-5 GB of pictures alone.  Music is somewhere in the 70 GB range.  Video isn’t that extensive, perhaps 30 GB.  So let’s just round up to 150 GB.  Is it practical to have all that on the cloud?  It wouldn’t be very cheap, Amazon would want $22.50/month or $270/year, and that’s just for storage, request to use it would be more, though I doubt it would add significantly to the costs.

A Story

I just chatted with an old friend I haven’t seen or talked to in 15 years.  She was telling me about how she was trying to upload some photos to facebook and messed it up, deleted them and is now trying again.  She had to stop chatting with me so she could concentrate on the task.  Admittedly she is 20 years my senior, but things like this are even more important and probably more common in her age group.  I also don’t think that this is much less common for younger folks.  Sure if you have the uberconnected smart phone pictures from that are easily and instantly online where you want them, but what about those pics you take with your camera?  What about if you have multiple cameras?

So what?

This makes me think again of the complexity we deal with because of technology.  We’re all already cyborgs.  When I think of technology’s ability to shape our consciousness, I wonder how much responsibility one should have when designing such systems?  How well is the average user equipped to make good decisions on which products and services to use when you consider how much extra time it takes to maintain and do all these little things that eat up so much of our time?  Will this be the one of differentiators in the future for buying choices? I think so.

techno-feteshism & techno-utopianism

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I noticed again that I don’t know any person in the HCI community who doesn’t use one or more of the following email providers:

  1. University email
  2. gmail
  3. Their own domain email
  4. An organization email (like acm.org or other collective, it usually forwards to another account though)

It should be noted that some universities like IU are now turning to gmail or hotmail for student use at least.  Many people who have email at their own domain look to gmail/google apps to power their email.  I’m very hard pressed to name anyone that I’ve worked with closely that doesn’t use either university provided email and/or gmail.  Almost every person I’ve interacted with on twitter does the same.

Yet once you slip out of the technorati and the realm of students I hang with (though certainly not the student body at large) gmail is less common.  Strangely so many of the technorati are independents, or at least insist on using their own emails instead of a corporate account.  Whether this is because they’ve moved around enough that they know they don’t want to lose their email address when they change jobs, or they simply refuse to have corporate email systems foisted upon them I do not know.

Am I delusional and detecting patterns here that simply do not exist?  Perhaps they are not as widespread as I think, but there is a pattern there.

What does it mean? Well I think it may be an indication of those who care about technology and they care about how they look to others in terms of what technologies they use.  I think that often those who think that they are “in the know” as far as technology is concerned may also judge those who are not.  I know that I do sometimes.

Here’s an example: If I see a business that posts and @aol.com email addess I assume they have no idea what it means to work with technology and what they try and do with technology will be second rate.  I will try avoid that person and business if I can.

I, and I assume at least some others, are at least to some extent technofetishists and/or techno-utopians.  We love our technology, we think it will solve our problems and that one day things will be like Star Trek (the latest movie of which is coming out tomorrow, can’t wait).  So why does this matter at all?

For those who are working on design, and espeically designs that are supposed to innovate and/or create social change, this can be a dangerous thing.  We tend towards technical solutions, or emphasizing the technical in the design of systems.  “Technology will save us, it must, because what else will?” seems to be the thought there.  I must admit that this kind of thinking is part of the problem in my opinion.  This kind of thinking has the tendency to marginalize the human.  So if we are trying to practice human-centered design, should we always be looking for technology to solve a problem?  Perhaps it is the driving need to be able to scale something, make it duplicable, and homogenous/systematized that we so often look for in business and science.  If we are truly to practice something that is human-centered, something that is more than just reductionistic do we need to leave our technofetishism and utopianism at the door? Maybe, or at least we need to box it up and set it aside from time to time, or at least a lot more often.

Is this a dichotomy? No I don’t think so, but it is something to be aware of.

Design and values

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I got an email (and he blogged it too) from Erik Stolteman, the director of the HCI/Design Program here at IU,

I want to recommend you to look at this video from the TED conference by Pattie Maes, maybe some of you have seen this before, it is quite fun and interesting.
http://www.ted.com/talks/pattie_maes_demos_the_sixth_sense.html

When you have looked at it, you can read this highly critical review of the demonstration
http://www.andyrutledge.com/blind-leading-the-blind.php#fragment-4

The demonstration and the review together presents what in many ways can be seen as core issues of interaction design, for instance, what designs are good, what designs are needed, are there designs we should not strive for.

Look, read, and think…

My reaction is:

I find it interesting (actually I’d like to just say I wish that he would open it, but perhaps he doesn’t feel like he has the time to devote to such an endeavor) that Andy Rutledge doesn’t open his blog to comments, thereby giving him a place to critique others and not for others to be able to engage with him on that critique.

The critique that he makes seems to be rooted in the fact that he beleives that augmented reality is distracting from our own human senses and will lull us into relying on things outside of our control instead of our own senses and instincts.
This is a fairly sound argument as this is certainly how most users will end up using it.  The implicit assumption and judgement is that this is a bad thing.  While I absolutely agree that “no person is their word cloud” If one is used to interacting with people largely online, some people may actually feel more comfortable having some of those same affordances with them during face to face interaction.  I make no judgement on whether this is a good or a bad thing.

Where I do have an issue with this though is for the non-social uses of the technology.  It seems that the mantra of “bringing the answers to where the questions are” makes a fair amount of sense.  I absolutely agree with Andy when he says that you probably have already done your research on what brands to buy and if you haven’t then you probably don’t really care that much, but there are other issues to be considered.  So often our choices are based on old information, or simply habit.  What if new values have come into our lives?  Sustainability was already mentioned and it’s a good topic.  10 years ago as a working professional I had a very different set of priorities in terms of affordability as well as awareness of what goes into many of our products today.  I had only the vaguest sense of buying natural cleaning products  or environmentally friendly products, for example I avoided things that contained CFCs.  Today the constraints are different as are my sensibilities, and I may not have thought about those choices as I approach the mega aisle in my local giant-mart.  If it strikes me that perhaps I may want to rethink my choice there, then I have a hard time saying that would be a bad thing should I want to do so.

The bottom line is always the same though.  When a designer makes a choice they embed values.  So often these values are hidden, and not obvious.  On the other hand our designs, as soon as we let them out of our hands, are no longer ours and will be changed and co-opted by others, and in doing so they will tend to align with the values and interests of those who are doing so.  What I encourage all of us to do is to be thoughtful and intentional with our choices.

As for this particular case, I agree with Routledge for the most part, we need not get so wrapped up in techno-fetishism that we neglect the human and trust the five senses and incredible power of our own minds.

Designing for experience vs experience design

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I recently got a nice little email from someone who said they liked the title of the blog.  I want to make sure and blog a few times a week, if not more, so I’m using that as my blogging fodder.

The title of the blog is designing for experience, and I often used to talk about being an experience designer, naively thinking that I could, in fact, design an experience and then a person would in fact have the experience I designed. Then the cognitive dissonance started to come… what about when you have an excellently crafted experience, like say Disney World, and people fail to have the experience that was designed.  I know my wife didn’t exactly love it.  What about the person who’s brother is in the hospital thousands of miles away, but yet they aren’t going home until tomorrow, will they have the same experience as the person without such worries?  What about the person who has never seen a disney movie and then arrives to the wonderful world of Disney?

The last example is unlikely in today’s world admittedly, but still the fundamental issue stands: as designers we cannot control someone’s felt experience.  The notion of experience involves both a person’s external surroundings as well as internal states of all kinds.  McCarthy & Wright talk about the “Threads of Experience” they are the aesthetic, the emotional, the spatio-temporal, and the compositional, and these are but the threads they chose to pick out and explain.  Felt, or lived experience is something that is ultimately constructed by the self.  I freely acknowledge that we socially construct many different aspects of our lives and even our self concepts, but in the end our experience is uniquely our own and dependent on our previous experiences.

All these thoughts ultimately gelled and came together while at CHI this year and was at the SIG on towards a shared definition of user experience.  Throughout the discussion this idea had been developing in my mind.  Yes it’s rather elementary after you lay it out, but before then I hadn’t known it. I finally understood why  Ian McClelland of Phillips Design calls himself an experience architect, not an experience designer.  I was speaking with him after the session and asked him exactly that question, and he looked at me as if I was a little daft. :) Of course that’s why his title is what it is, because he recognizes that the locus of control is not with him, but rather the person who has the experience.  We construct something that is then to be experienced by someone else (or by ourselves in a different role).

So as a designer I am here to say that while I strive to design for experiences that will inform, transform, delight, and even amuse people, I recognize that each individual will have their own experience with what is designed, and that experience is.  It is reminiscent of Kant’s categorical imperative, not treating other as merely a means to an end, but rather being a member of a kingdom of ends (to paraphrase it as I remember it).

In conclusion I design for experience, a holistic, iterative, people-centered approach where I recognize that ultimately each what people do with what is designed is up to them.  Different uses will emerge, and ultimately what I help co-create in this world is not mine, and never will be.

Can all these things be design?

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I am part-way through Bill Buxton’s Sketching User Experience, and I’ve read part of the Experience Economy, and of course my course last year on Experience Design.  Add to that the UK’s Design Council finding that businesses that use design thinking and methods are more successful than their counterparts.  Of course I am totally fascinated by what is happening with NextD, and using design to inquire and innovate.

Certainly F@astCompany and BusinessWeek have both picked up on the idea of design, but I’m surprised that this isn’t more widely talked about.

Now add to the mix some of the papers that have come out of the HCI community of practice about research through design and I start wonder. It seems like design is being used in all kinds of disparate contexts, so disparate I wonder if there is any unifying thread to what is being called design?

I of course turn to Nelson & Stolterman‘s The Design Way for answers.  They want the book to explain what design is, to instill design culture and design thinking, and I hope to find at least a preliminary answer to my question in this rereading of the question.

If I can answer more simply what design is in all these contexts, I would like to answer the question that has been riddling me for months now: what is the philosophical basis of design (if indeed it has one)? What can research by design rightly say?

All this come back to my original start point, how does design methodology and thinking really impact business? What is it that moves forward like so many think it does?  I think it has something to do with what design is, and where it comes from theoretically.