Made out of people

The rush after a talk

I am at a workshop at CHI 2004 on the "Temporal Aspects of Work." We're discussing our notions of time: "social time" vs "calendar time"¹, "monochronic" vs "polychronic" time², and how tasks and work are structured. Some of the talks have been brilliant and thoughtful; others have been more than a little bit dull. I, personally, am not much of a theorist at heart; I find too much discussion of the concepts without a couple of good experiments and observation to be more than a little dull. I felt like a fish out of water: no one in this group could possibly be interested in my work!

Then again, everyone else was also seeming a little droopy. It was time to give a talk that would build some excitmenet.

I changed my presentation on the fly. I threw away almost all of my theory slides, and discarded all the social network diagrams. And I scrabbled around my hard drive, finding my archive of pictures. If my theory wasn't going to be up to the theory they wanted.

And then I told stories. Stories of collaborations on projects, and of travel. Stories of relationships changing, and of social groups shifting.

It went well. I got arguments, I got thoughtful questions, I got people who thought I was wrong. And, better yet, I got people who thought that the people who thought I was wrong, were wrong. Which led to a fight. Fights are important. This blew over fast, but kept spurring discussion. It worked very nicely, and I was suddenly a part of the workshop.

And now I'm sitting here bopping along post-talk. Yay!

¹ The distinction between "12:00" and "lunchtime", or between "Dec 7" and "Pearl Harbor Day." One is a calendar description, one is a social description. The workplace is an interesting overlap, where

fn 2. The difference between the concept of "writing from 1-3" and "someone dropping by at 1:30, a phone call from 2-2:15, and email at 2:12"