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since there's not been much action on the blog yet, and since i'm one of the leaders of today's dicussion i figured maybe i should throw some ideas out for consideration. i got into a long discussion with a colleague of mine about this book last week - she was taking a bit more of a critical view of what sterling sets out to do but i think her main point is a good one for discussion: can designers really "change the world" or is that just something we tell ourselves to feel good? my friend was pushing that a lot of the world altering decisions are in the hands of the big companies and governments. a bit of a pessimistic position, but i think it's useful to consider how exactly to go about the mission which sterling is advocating. what are the practical ways we can get together and make a change [this of course goes back a bit to the reflective design stuff we were getting at a while ago - how do we take theories into action?].

the other general topic for discussion i'd like to open up is one of information. this is something i've been keenly interested in lately and i take some issues with sterling's views. i think here the notion of information is clear one of data collection, though he proposes using mining and sort of communities of interest to do the filtering for us. i wonder though - 100 years ago a wine bottle could be read in a very different way, the color and the texture of the glass telling us something about the wines origins, something for which we have lost the skill to discern [and this is due in large part to a world of mass production and globalization, there are more choices for which we would have to be familiar with]. but still, i don't believe there is really any more information, just very new ways of uncovering, representing and examining it. however i think that sterling might be conflating at times "information" with "informative" and i think for the purposes of this book it is a dangerous mistake...

Posted by roxy at 12:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

"A new device merely opens a door: it does not compel one to enter."

It seems to me that we are often trying to specialize technology to the extent that we now design technologies, not only for their original purpose, but any other purpose we can possibly conceive. With this increased specialization, we are allowing technology telling us how to use it instead of us telling technology how we want to use it. In some instance these specializations are beneficial and even useful; in other cases it seems to be overkill. We can have hundreds of products that are esentially the same, but are different enough that they can be marketed as different products. For some products that we desire uniqueness (cars, houses, clothes, etc.) I see the specialization as an important factor, but for other products, the uniqueness seems somewhat excessive. In the Culturally Embedded Computing paper, the trigger spray example comes to mind as an example of an unimportant use. Although the spray bottle designs were meant to evoke thought instead of introduce actual products, I find just the idea of some of the spray bottles laughable. I would prefer to see people increasingly finding new uses for existing devices instead of creating or obtaining new devices to fulfill a use. That's just me, I guess.

Posted by Doug Kim at 01:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A spanish designer created a washing machine to even out the task of who does the
laundry.

Here is video of the washing macine and a news article about it

However, despite the fact that it does raise the issue of gender and house hold chores, does it really solve the problem. We will never escape the normalized gender relationships by having a given technology address them. Sure, it does address such problems, but sometimes, that is as far as it goes. Further changes don't seem to occur.

As with eating habits, instead of people changing their diet to prevent them from suffering from acid reflux, upset stomache, diarrhea (yes, the entire pepto bismol theme song) companies just create "technological" products to ease consumers' symptoms. So my question is, with the washing machine in mind, are we really solving problems when we approach them through the creation of technological products or are we just putting off the problem?

What's wrong with good old fashioned advertising(brainwashing)/social engineering to "change" social practices? (i'm bound to get criticized for saying this, but oh well)

Posted by ftsonis at 05:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Lillie notes that "the status quo is never challenged by the technologies presented" in narratives like Cooltown. "Rather, these technologies allow for social relations to seemingly flow as well, ensuring that social breakdowns do not threaten the efficiency of labor or the transmission of information." as a technologist/designer/builder, I'm left asking, how can we make technologies that challenge the status quo? could we make domestic products such as those for cooking and cleaning geared obviously toward a male demographic? could we make other products such as those for yard work or car repair geared obviously toward a female demographic? I suspect we could, but I'm not sure this would really get at the point. I think the point might be more to get users of these technologies to question, to challenge the status quo. so, how do we go about doing that? how do we grant efficacy to such challenges? moreover, how do we get people to use such "challenging" technologies in the first place?

Posted by Eric Baumer at 03:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In case anyone has trouble finding it, you can view the Cooltown video ad from the Lillie paper's source website:

http://www.ibiblio.org/jlillie/cooltown/lillie.htm

"Congratulations, Bob!" is my favorite part.

Posted by Sara at 11:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

well, if you guys need something to mull over, i guess i'll post something eric and i wanted to talk about:

if we take agre's work(s) as guidelines for thinking about, reflecting on, and pursuing 'critical technical practice,' how closely do the authors of the other three papers follow his guidlines? in what ways do they break from them, and why might they do so? in what ways do they adhere to them? do they fall into the same pitfalls agre mentions, or do they successfully avoid them?

hmm, that sounds like some sort of final exam question..

Posted by Teh Greg at 01:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

agre concludes his chapter saying that "A critical technical practice will, at least for the foreseeable future, require a split identity -- one foot planted in the craft work of design and the other foot planted in the reflexive work of critique." he focuses strongly on grounding such a practice in both the history of the discipline and in daily practice. however, in talking about AI he is describing a uniquely american grounding. of course it is not wholly unreasonable given the history of AI, but when considering in our case ubicomp i think such a narrow view is problematic. culture needs to be taken in to account, and not just the culture of the discipline itself. bell et al. solve this somewhat by attempting to "make strange" our everyday world and thus help us get a handle on how deeply ingrained our cultures are and sengers et al. take this further by helping us to use design to disrupt these notions. it seems though that these new "discoveries" occur on a "per-culture" basis - but how can we fold this back in to what agre was getting at? how can we begin to have a cross-cultural dialogue about these matters? what is the same enough to share and what is different enough to draw boundaries? can all ubicomp work be put under one umbrella or do we end up with "american ubicomp" "european ubicomp" not to mention asian, african, south american and so on... ?

Posted by roxy at 02:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In the paper "A Historical View of Context", Matthew Chalmers puts forward an interactional view of context and offers three system design principles. The second one being, "deep system structure should be revealed so as to support system inspection and adaptation" which I find to be going against the principles of what ubiquitous computing stands for. Should the user be bothered with the deep system structure in order to develop context. Isn't revealing the deep system structure making things more complex for the user. Instead of focusing more on the task at hand, the user is focussing more on the system at hand which infact what ubiquitous computing set out to change.

This is more about the positivist theories in social science. I find it hard to understand how a social phonemena could be reduced to simplified models and how they could be proved using mathematical equations. There are so many variables to be considered and so many unknowns making up the model which in turn could affect its accuracy. Doesn't social phonemena vary more and more with different individuals. Giving a generalized view may not be entirely representative of the social phonemena but in many cases can lead to a flawed theory especially so when it comes to predictions in areas such as social phonemena.

Posted by Yogesh Natarajan at 01:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I have some questions about the behaviour of the context aware systems.Are these systems a modification of the interactive systems which have some built in functions which define different behaviour in different physical situation or social situation depending on some assumptions? For example, a computerised travel guide which can sense the geographic position of the tourist and can accordingly suggest the local spots to view. Or it is more than that? If it is more than that, as I presume, how it could be possibly implemented?

Posted by Ishani Chakraborty at 02:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Some of the papers that we have been reading note a drive within people for sanctuary... the calm refuge with a gate in front of it. This came up in Infrastructures and Thier Discontents's explicit terminology of "sanctuary" as well as Living in the Global City's notion of "cocooning".

Coupled with Eric's alert observation that many systems of Ubiquitous Computing (as well as other systems not ubiquitous or computational) have effects upon those opting out as well as those opting in, it seems like there is this undercurrent of people desiring to be connected along social/physical/technological axes only if they have the ability to close the gates, as it were, and exist outside of the connected realm in some way, possibly by shifting which realm they are actively taking part in at any given time.

It's funny that calmness, appropriateness, and perceptual invisibility may not be enough to make a Ubicomp system successful. It's success may also depend on it's ability not to involve the user in its realm or it's ability to allow users to escape from other realms.

Posted by Rubikzube* at 05:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

tolmie, et al's unremarkable computing brought out this interesting idea of respecting the background and foreground properties of routine actions. specifically:

"To take this further, it may well be
that systems which intend to support the doing of a routine will
be highly disruptive if in the course of the doing of the routine
they require the user to switch to description activities. To do so
would be to effectively pull the user away from doing their
routine and to call them to account for it, to remark upon its
elements and to thereby require an explanation of their
significance. "

i think this is a very interesting concept to explore, but (as usual) i have some problems with this idea: the binary distinction between doing and describing and the recommendation to adhere to the structure of a routine simply because it exists.

first, i feel there's a non-discrete gradient between focusing on the doing and focusing on the description. a user might be MORE inclined to think about the description of the routine than on doing it, but it's not like it's just one or the other. i mean, i don't start focusing on the routine that i'm doing and completely lose sight of the actions i'm performing. as a gut feeling, it seems more mushy, analog, and ill-defined.

second, what's wrong with requiring an explanation of significance? from a more computer science perspective (my home base) i can understand the desire to respect the user's tasks and routines and not disrupt them by artifically moving them between different perceptions of their actions. after all, HCI is often about respecting the user's expectations, desires, and needs while simultanesouly providing new functionality; however, it isn't difficult to imagine, from a more artistic standpoint, devices that would PURPOSEFULLY move the user to a state of reflection about their routine. it's important to understand that our "routines" aren't ideal, abstract, perfect routines that should be respected simply because they exist. these routines were developed under the context of our current notions of technology, and are defined not only by the tasks we seek to perform, but also by the technology that we appropriate to perform them.

designers should not ONLY seek to design to accomodate current routines, but also to make us aware of the inherent arbitrary nature of our routines and their reliance upon the context in which they were developed. for example, we have lots of experience focusing on the abstract, the mental state, and the brain while placing little priority on the body (symptom of modern computing); suppose a device were to specifically bring to the foreground the awareness of one's body - the idea that the mind does not exist in a vacuum, but that the body is as involved in the world as the mind is. foregrounding specific parts of routine may serve to aid in self-reflection and contemplation.

i agree that designers should make themselves aware of the structure of routines and actions, and use that information in their designs. it is the lack of this process that leads to so many hopelessly frustrating technlogies. on the other hand, i don't feel they should be restricted to designing for the current form of routine, afraid to break the state of the routine for fear the user might be 'distracted' by the significance of that routine.

going back to the cooking analogy, once one knows the rules of cooking, one can effectively break and manipulate these rules to produce novel recipes. once we know the structure and style of routine actions, we can break with this routine to produce beneficial effects.

i guess i'm getting at this uneasy tension between a traditional computer science approach to functionality and a more artistic approach to functionality.

Posted by Teh Greg at 01:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

After the last days lecture some thoughts on social meaning came to my mind.I felt that like any big technical revolution, computarization also has an impact on social behaviour and hence on language or other means of communication.For example, I got an instant message which said " the last evening was gr8". 'Great' has been replaced by 'gr8' under this impact.Not only in language , it has brought changes in our social protocol.Like, if we want to report against one of our office fellow, we write him/her an e-mail and give a cc to the boss.
It has also changed our way of telling lies. If we want to avoid some friends, we project ourselves as offline to those friends. And sometimes even they take offense understanding that we are avoiding them.
This is a great lot of change.

Posted by Ishani Chakraborty at 02:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Several thoughts went in my mind going through the interactions between designers and user through an interactive system. Emergence of Ethnography is one of them. The two examples of Air Traffic Control center and printing shop doesnot describe methodologies as laid in formal manuals rather how it unfolds in day to day every moment experiences by people. Many other places like pipelined automobile manufacturing unit also focuses how the work happened by people moving outside rules and guidelines.Even ethnomethodology rejects abstractness and theorizing but respects practical issues and methods. The examples show the use of sociology in interactive system design. It can be used to understand how work can be conducted in practical environments and how these systems can be designed to help it. The term technomthodology is describing this relationship.

Posted by Hironmay Basu at 04:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)