Category Archives: Philosophy of Technology

Do we need to be a little bit more Luddite?

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Hi, I’m Aaron and I’m a technofetishist.   I love everything new and shiny that promises to make my life better and easier.  I sometimes love technology just for it’s own sake.  Yes I know it’s at least a little out of whack with what I stand for: thoughtfully designed technology that is sensitive to human needs, values, and ethics. What are we to do?
It seems to me that at least some of the many problems we have with technology is the rapid rate at which it changes, and is improved, and we replace it .  As soon as something starts to get really stable, well used, and developed, a new version comes out.  In the case of commercial products like windows or OS X, another version comes out and we are asked to pay for an upgrade.  With hardware we have no choice but to upgrade at least every 7 years or so or we will be left high and dry because the programs we would like to use are no longer supported by those that make them (or those companies have gone out of business or have been sold etc.)  Honestly though, most people upgrade their whole computer, if not major parts of it, every 3-4 years it seems.  This creates a massive amount of waste.Sites are upgraded so often that any kind of documentation to help those that use it is outdated almost as soon as it is written.

I honestly don’t know what to do, but  it is clear to me that the technology industry, from hardware to software and design, is totally reliant on this kind of constant upgrade to keep their current business models functioning.  While I am happy to see that initiatives are happening in the HCI community on sustainability (notably many of them right here at IU Bloomington), I don’t know if it’s enough.

What this comes down to for me is that I think:

  • We need to replace less often.
  • We need upgradability/modularity
  • We need things that actually work well and stand the test of time
  • Escape the current business models that are entrenched in the world today.

I am not optimistic on many of these points, but perhaps by starting a discussion and developing my thinking here we can find a starting point.

My 5 min Presentation on Serious Games

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Aaron’s Current Capstone Presentation – Google Doc or on SlideShare

So I had to finally present to my colleagues last night (as referenced by Dave RoedlRoyer’s post at the Interaction Culture Blog) and got some great feedback on several fronts. One interesting thing Sam Shoulders brought up was to compare educational TV to educational games. It may be interesting to take a look at the differences between production of let’s say any ol’ cartoon, like transformers, and say Dora the Explora (or are you supposed to spell explorere properly?). That may produce some interesting items.

Essentially what Dave was saying in his post is that all games are serious, and teach people something. The difference between a “serious game” and just a game is that it was designed with the intent to teach, and that was explicitly made part of the game. Keywords: intent, explicit. All games teach, although it may not be what people think.

Some people think violent video games teach people to be violent, making it into a causal relationship. Kid A plays GTA, GTA in turn causes that kid to be violent. Perhaps we can put it in terms of influence, or that it sends the message that certain things are OK. I don’t really know, but it’s pretty clear from the millions of people who have played very violent games like say Contra, Duke Nukem, or pretty much any of the early space games (space invaders, galaga et al) who haven’t become violent (yet?!) that there is more to this question.

What’s the take home message here? Everything we make as designers embed values, judgments, prejudice… in short we embed a piece of ourselves and our culture in everything we make.

What does this mean for us? My reaction to this is, Hey Aaron, be the best man you can be! So that when you make your next game that explicitly teaches, it will make the world a better place.

Technology=Innovation? A reaction to Ted Dziuba

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Ted's picture in Wired

“…there’s no real technology there. There’s no noteworthy computer-science problem being solved. The Ajax stuff is pre-written. You just have to go to the libraries and put it all together.
When Gmail came out — and Gmail is a pretty kick-ass product — it was like, “Ha! Ajax for dynamic web apps! We can use it for everything!” So now you have companies like Zoho, for example. Their sole goal is to take every desktop app that ever existed and reimplement it in Ajax with no added features or functionality. It irritates me as an engineer that companies with no engineering merit.” (Emphasis mine)

This quote is from Ted Dziuba, and came from Wired, and I read it first in Zoho Blog (via Scoble’s Tweetstream). Ted has BS in Computation Mathematics, and perhaps that is why I fundamentally disagree on this issue, here are the three issues I have with his analysis.

#1 By “No real technology” I think that Ted means that there is no innovation.–WRONG
#2 “There’s no noteworthy computer-science problem being solved”–RIGHT (maybe), but that’s not the point!
#3 Ted is an engineer, and he’s mad because “There’s no engineering Merit” in Zoho– RIGHT, but again not the point.

#1 One could take him to mean that liteally there is no technology there, but I sincerely doubt that is what he is saying, rather that there is nothing new, no innovation. The idea of a word processor or a spreadsheet has been around for at least as long as Ted has been alive, so it’s true that part of it isn’t new. Of course the idea of sending messages to someone, in the form of letters has been around for centuries, millenia in fact, but when we suddenly got to be able to do it online it was the killer app. IM then changed things again, but it was still essentially the same concept. We applied computer science to it. We reduced something to s set of rules, modeled those rules in a computer language and, presto, our world is forever changed (Well I’m sure there is more than just computer science at work here,but for the sake of room and simplicity). Real, seamless online collaboration with word processing and other productivity applications is an innovation, one that is already starting to change the way people work. We are in the early stages, there is no doubt, but I feel comfortable saying that this kind of collaboration will change the way we do think about work.

#2 If you choose to define computer science at the logical positivist/reductionist activities of creating computer languages and modeling different rule sets to create things, then you are right. There is no big problem, they didn’t create Ajax. I’m no coder, so I don’t know, I’m guessing they may not even be pushing Ajax to it’s limits, maybe there is no new code at all, just rearranging things in novel ways to create new applications. So essentially it’s true, from a CS perpective online collaborative word processing and it’s sister apps are not a noteworthy computer science problem, and by that definition most computer applications aren’t either unless they are pushing the language into places it hasn’t been before, combining rule sets in significantly new ways, or something else like that. Again, I’m no coder, so I don’t really have any examples at hand, and if I’m wrong I’d like to hear about it. No the problem Zoho is solving is essentially a social one, a human problem, a problem tackled by interaction designers. I blogged about designing for sociality, and in fact I used productivity software as my example. Zoho is starting to solve a great HCI problem, and I applaud them for it. So yes, Ted, you’re right, but you’ve missed the point IMO.

#3 This is pretty much the same thing, but with engineering as it’s focus. I assume Ted means computer engineering, which is essentially the applied branch of CS. I was kind of sketchy between CS & CE in #2, I haven’t thought about that too much, and I frankly don’t plan to in the near future. Again Ted you’ve missed the point. There are companies that get money and success through engineering, or scientific merit. I would say originally, Google was one of these (no longer though, IMO, but they do have very good CS & CE). A good technology business, one that will be successful is a blend of several things: CS, CE, Entrepreneurship, HCI & UX Design, believing in your idea  in your idea to the point of being one or more of the following: arrogance, stupidity, chauvinism.   I’m sure I left out a bunch of other things too.

So go sneer to yourself and your minions, and realize that excellence and innovation and good technology in this world comes form cross-disciplinary teams working together.  HCI people need CS, CE people need CS ideas, and the list can go on forever.

Last of all, thank you Ted for making me think about this, you’ve clarified and crystallized some of my views, and I welcome any corrections and discussion.

Philosopy of Technology II, new name?

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Jeff pointed a few resources he quickly found on Amazon and scolded my hyperbole (of course there’s more than 7 people thinking about this).

I had a nice conversation with Heather (a PhD student in Social Informatics) about Philosophy and Technology. She commented how much she enjoyed Dourish‘s book “Where the Action Is.” If I didn’t already recommend it highly enough, let me say that anyone interested in this topic should read that book.

I am, as promised, composing a page on the blog that I will have links and reviews of resources on PhilTech, this is an open call for links and book recommendations, and book reviews.

Also I was thinking about getting a new domain name more descriptive of what I write about rather than my name.name. I’d love to hear what you think.

Hopefully commenting is working again!

I am one of 7 people thinking of the philosophy of technology?

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As many know I am completing a MS in Human-Computer Interaction Design (or HCI/D for short) in the department of Informatics in the School of Informatics at Indiana University. I am also applying for several PhD programs for next year. Even though I have my short list of places to apply to, I still dabble in my searches for other programs when I have a few extra minutes.

Kevin Makice has thoughtfully defined Informatics and I think I agree with him. In the Masters program we are immediately taught most of the standard methods in what most people call UX or IX design (User eXperience & Interaction), but it is sometimes called usability, user-centered design, or more properly as I learned yesterday, human-centered design. What brought me to IU was the unique nature of the program and that I have a passion for making technology better for everyone, and that it can make our society better if used properly.

That being said however, as early as November or December of last year (sometime after my midterm in 501) I started to consider the value of our program to be “critical thinking about technology”. I have started to really think about the philosophy of technology lately, not that I’ve had a choice with my selection of theoretically and philsophically dense readings (thank you Jeff Bardzell & Erik Stolterman).

Take all of that background and then mix in this argument: Technology in the developed world, and even to large extent in the developing world is almost everywhere and has a hand in almost every aspect of our lives. Each of us use technology to change the world around us, whether that be to make a phone call and save ourselves from walking over and talking to someone or making fun videos on YouTube, this is the case. Now here’s the premise that many of you may disagree with; When we design and use technology we are implicitly forwarding or promoting a philosophy about what the world should be like. If that is true then some scholars should be making that philosophy explicit, and this should be a consideration when designing new tools, platforms etc for use.

I take this argument to be true and therefore started looking at the philosophy of technology, and thought to myself “surely there is a PhD program somewhere that focuses on the philosophy of technology.” NOPE, not a one. There are several great books out there, and like I said it’s being talked about in some of my classes, usually obiliquely, but I just thought that maybe I would see some courses being taught on the grad level somewhere on this, or perhaps a minor, or track within a program on this. Very few. I managed to find a course that was taught last spring at UNT on the philosophy of technology.

There MUST be scholars out there thinking about these issues, if there is anyone who knows about them, please point them my way!

Coming soon a resource page of books, articles and people, please contribute to it by commenting or emailing me aaronh (at) gmail [dot] com.