Crossing HCI for Development in Asia PacificChaos, Culture, Conflict and Creativity: Toward a Maturity Model for HCI4D!April 19, 2015 John C. Thomas, !Problem Solving International

“IF THERE IS NOT ONE AMONG US WHO CONTAINS SUFFICIENT WISDOM, MANY PEOPLE TOGETHER MAY FIND A CLEAR PATH.” — Paula Underwood, The Walking People.

OUTLINE

Why HCI4D?

Provisional Maturity Model

Examples of Stage 8

Enhancing Creativity

Representations

The “singularity” & fluid representations

WHY HCI4D?

CHI ’89 plenary talk by astronaut

Cross-cultural HCI workshops at CHI ’92 and InterCHI ’93

Recommendations to SIGCHI EC to make SIGCHI and CHI more cross-cultural friendly

Information and deadlines

Sound friendly environments

Development consortium

Use “International English” in talks

“Million Person Interface”1999; IBM World Jam 2001

HCI4D workshops at CHI 2007,8,9,10

Multiple workshops in Asia, Africa, and S. America; 2010+

Interact 2007 Rio; DIS 2008 Capetown; CSCW 2010 Hangzhou; CHI 2015 Seoul

PROVISIONAL MATURITY MODEL

Isolation

Exploration

Exploitation

Exhortation

Exportation

Localization

Globalization

Transmutation

PROVISIONAL MATURITY MODEL

Isolation: One culture has no real knowledge or contact with another

Exploration: One culture begins to find out about another.

Exploitation: One culture attempts to exploit, subjugate, enslave another.

Exhortation: One culture tries to convince another to be more like the first.

Exportation: (At least) one culture sees the advantages of trading. As applied to HCI, this might encompass trying to export PC’s from the US to Africa.

Localization: An exporting culture realizes that unaltered goods and services are often not appropriate for another culture. E.g., different languages, icons, and, more deeply, service models are needed in different places.

PROVISIONAL MATURITY MODELGlobalization: In this stage, people from cultures work together, often as part of a larger organization (e.g., a religion, corporation, transnational government, or NGO) to jointly identify opportunities and solutions appropriate for multiple cultures. Often the people who work together are more similar to each other than they are to others in the original cultures.

PROVISIONAL MATURITY MODEL

Transmutation: In this stage, people from different cultures stay distinctly different. They draw on their unique talents, skills and backgrounds, to find and solve problems that would not be noticed or solved by people of any one culture.

“IF THERE IS NOT ONE AMONG US WHO CONTAINS SUFFICIENT WISDOM MANY PEOPLE TOGETHER MAY FIND A CLEAR PATH.” — Paula Underwood, The Walking People

ASSUMPTIONS/PREMISES

Different cultures and background provide different default assumptions and representational schemes.

These differences lead to different ideas when faced with a problem.

A greater number of ideas is, other things being equal, more likely to contain good ideas than a smaller number of ideas.

People can evaluate with more than chance probability good vs. bad ideas.

Additionally, the interplay of different ideas can result in the production of ideas that no single background or culture is likely to thus expanding the pool of possibly good ideas even further.

Understanding the range and diversity of languages, customs, and cultures allows the construction of a meta-cultural framework. This framework can then allow us to construct new ways of working, living and thinking that transcend those of any existing culture.

DIRECT EVIDENCE

• 26 to 42% more IT patents for mixed gender teams than similar teams of all men or all women teams (Ashcraft & Breitzman, 2007)

• Companies with reported highest levels of racial diversity had 15 times moresales revenues than those with lower diversity (Herring, 2009). .

• Companies with higher levels of gender diversity had more customers than those with lower levels (Thomas, 2004).

• Having multi-cultural experience enhances creativity (Leung, et. al., 2008). In short, there is significant evidence that shows a diverse group of contributors leads to better outcomes.

INDIRECT EVIDENCE

Binocular disparity (and motion parallax and binaural hearing) use multiple views to construct “reality” better than one view.

Sexual reproduction (allows faster propagation of “new ideas” than asexual reproduction)

Unstructured aid for problem solving (looking at quasi-random word list helped people generate more ideas)

Heuristic evaluation study (evaluators asked to imagine they were different people found more issues)

Jeopardy ( Watson used a large number of separate methods and learned the types of questions each method did better on)

UNSTRUCTURED PROBLEM SOLVING AID

In a pilot study, college students were given a series of puzzle problems to solve. A “structured aid” required them to be explicit about goals, starting conditions and operations. An “unstructured aid” was a quasi-random list of unrelated words.

Structured Aid revealed issues to investigators but had no impact on solution probability.

Unstructured Aid improved chances of solving “insight” problems and judged creativity of a design problem (design a chair).

In a second study, 30 college students were given a design problem: Design a restaurant from an abandoned church.

Designs were rated on originality (based on feature distance from all designs) and practicality (based on number of features an expert said were required).

Half spent 1.5 hours designing. Half had time broken up with 15 minutes of looking at quasi-random word list. Latter group had significantly higher practicality scores.

PAVE (PROGRAMMED AMPLIFICATION OF VALUABLE EXPERTS)

Three in each of three groups: Human Factors Experts, Developers, and Non-Experts

Three conditions: Heuristic Evaluation, Cognitive Walkthrough, PAVE

Given flow chart of proposed voice service.

Asked to identify potential problems and suggest additional features.

PAVE perspectives: Self, Human Factors Expert, Cognitive Psychologist, Behaviorist, Social Psychologist, Anthropologists, Freudian Analyst, Health Advocate, Worried Mother, Spoiled Child.

Spent 2-3 hours on the problem.

HF Experts: Heuristic Evaluation>PAVE>>Cognitive Walkthrough.

Developers and non-experts: PAVE >> Heuristic Evaluation=Cognitive Walkthrough

PATTERN: WHO SPEAKS FOR WOLF?

• Abstract: • A lot of effort and thought goes into decision making and design.

Nonetheless, it is often the case that bad decisions are made and bad designs conceived and implemented primarily because some critical and relevant perspective has not been brought to bear. This is especially often true if the relevant perspective is that of a stakeholder in the outcome. Make sure that every relevant stakeholder’s perspective is brought to bear early. !

• The idea for this pattern comes from a Native American story transcribed by Paula Underwood. !

• Underwood, Paula. Who speaks for Wolf: A Native American Learning Story. Georgetown TX (now Bayfield, CO): A Tribe of Two Press, 1983.

REPRESENTATION & HUMAN LIMITATION

Here is a still from a video of a bulldog trying to get a bone through the doggie door.

Thesis: Our representations are much like the way the dog initially tries to get through the door. We operate out of habit.

Sometimes our way of using representations is not conducive to solving a problem.

EXAMPLE: THE BIRTHDAY SHARING

435 People in the US House of Representatives

What is the probability that at least two share a birthday?

PROBLEM: MAPPING TO “THE BIRTHDAY PROBLEM"

People educated in mathematics or statistics often run across “the birthday problem” which basically shows the counter-intuitive result that even with only 30 people in a room, there is about an even chance that two will share a birthday. People then conclude that with 435 people, the probability must be much higher; e.g., .99

A GENERAL PROBLEM

It takes human beings a long time to learn a complex system of representation; e.g., a natural language or a programming language or a mathematical symbol system.

Therefore, we use the same symbol system for many problems in a domain — even if the system is not ideal for some.

We use the same symbol system for multiple stages of the problem — even if the ideal symbol system would be different for every step of the problem.

VARIETIES OF HUMAN LEARNING

Classical Conditioning

Operant Conditioning

Symbol-mediated Learning

Socially Facilitated Learning

Learning from Internal Conflicting Views (“cross-cultural” in the head)

IMAGINE:

Another way to work that involved experts from different cultures using different representations for each stage of each problem.

A system might be devised to select a subset of people for each stage of a problem.

A system might be devised to translate among steps/perspectives.

Empathy and story can get us part-way there.

A system might be devised to synthesize incompatible results.

TOOL: BOARD OF DIRECTORS

Take a problem.

Now imagine what each of the following people would say/do/think:

Einstein, Gandhi, Shakespeare, Mozart, Dali, Darwin, Freud, B.F. Skinner, Asimov, Batman, Hermione….

The story of not eating sugar.

What do you think of western

civilization? “I think that would be a good idea.”

Be the change.

USING VARIETIES OF ACTUAL TO DEVELOP NOVEL REPRESENTATIONS

Date Notations:

April 19, 2015 (American)

19 April, 2015 (European)

2015, April, 19 (Chinese)

Change Order; Change Spatial Relations; Change specificity;

Adjectives and Nouns

“The red house.”

“La Maison rouge”

Simultaneous; put noun way before adjective; put noun way after adjective; “house”; kinetic typography

BASES FOR COUNTING

Number System A based on ten

Number System B based on sixty

!Allows us, not only to use one or the other, but also to invent system C based on two, system D based on 16 !Multiply by 25: In base ten, multiply by one hundred by shifting twice left In base two, divide twice by shifting twice right. Or, in base 25 shift once left … but this requires memorizing large table.

PEOPLE DIFFER IN ABILITY/INTEREST/KNOWLEDGE

ALIGNMENT: ALL MUST GO IN ONE DIRECTION

Fine for this person

OK for this person

Really a waste for these three

EMPOWERMENT: ALL AWARE OF DIRECTION & ENCOURAGED TO MAKE GREATEST CONTRIBUTION

Resultant in desired direction greater than if everyone

“must” go in exactly the same direction.

POSSIBLE CONSEQUENCES

Not just: More productive, effective, efficient problem solving

Also: Finding and Formulating problems we do not see

And solving the insoluble:

Global Climate Change

Unbridled Greed…

REFERENCES!Ashcraftand, C. & Breitzman, A. (2007) Who invents IT? An Analysis of Women’s Participation in Information Technology Patenting. Technical report, NCWIT, March 2007.

Best, M., Deardon, A., Dray, S., Light, A., Thomas, J.C., Buckhalter, C., Greenblatt, D., Krishnan, S., Sambasivan, N. (2007). Sharing perspectives on community centered design and international development. Human-Computer Interaction, INTERACT 2007. New York: Springer. Ceriejo-Roibas, A.,Dearden, A., Dray, S., Gray, P., Thomas, J.and Winters, N. (2009), Ethics, roles, and relationships in interaction design in developing regions, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Interact 2009. 5727, 963-964, Springer. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-03658-3_132. Dearden, A., Dray, S., Light, A., & Thomas, J.C. (2007). Participatory design for international development, Workshop for CHI 2007, San Jose, CA, May 2007. Desurvire, H. & Thomas, J.C. (1993). Enhancing performance of interface evaluators using non-empirical usability methods. In Proceedings of the Human Factors 37th Annual Meeting, 2, 1132-1136. Seattle, WA: October 11-15. Santa Monica, CA: Human Factors and Ergonomics Society. !Herring, C.. (2009) Does Diversity Pay? Race, Gender and the Business Case for Diversity. American Sociological Review, 74(2):208–224, 2009.

Kellogg, W. and Thomas, J. (1993) Cross-cultural perspectives on human-computer interaction: a report on the CHI'92 workshop, SIGCHI Bulletin, 25 (2), 40-45. Leung, A.K.,Maddux, Galinsky, A.D.& Chiu, C-Y. (2008) Multicultural Experience Enhances Creativity: The When and How. American Psychologist, 63(3):169–181, 2008.

Sambasivan, N., Ho, M., Kam, M., Kodagoda, N., Dray, S., Thomas, J. C., Light, A., and Toyama, K. 2009. Human-centered computing in international development. In Proceedings of the 27th international Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Boston, MA, USA, April 04 - 09, 2009). CHI '09. ACM, New York, NY, 4745-4750. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1520340.1520731 Schuler, D. (2008). Liberating Voices: A Pattern Language for Social Change. Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Thomas, J. C. (2012). Patterns for emergent global intelligence. In Creativity and Rationale: Enhancing Human Experience By Design J. Carroll (Ed.), New York: Springer. Thomas, J. (2012) Understanding and Harnessing Conflict. CHI Workshop Position Paper for HCI for Peace: Preventing, De-escalating and Recovering from Conflict. CHI 2012, Austin, Texas. Thomas, J. (2012), Enhancing Collective Intelligence by Enhancing Social Roles and Diversity. CSCW Workshop Position Paper for Collective Intelligence and Community Discourse and Action. CSCW 2012, Bellvue, WA. Thomas, J. (2011). Toward a Socio-Technical Pattern Language for Social Systems in China and the World. Workshop position paper accepted for CSCW 2011 workshop: Designing social and collaborative systems for China. Hangzhou, China, March 19-23. Thomas, J. (2011). Toward a Socio-Technical Pattern Language for Social Media and International Development. Workshop position paper accepted for CSCW 2011 workshop: Social media for development, Hangzhou, China, March 19-23. Thomas, J.C. (2008). Using Story Templates as a Method to Cumulate Knowledge in HCI and International Development. Workshop paper for CSCW 2008. Thomas, J.C. (2007). Panelist, Meta-design and social creativity: Making all voices heard. INTERACT 2007, Rio de Janeiro, BZ, Nov., 2007. Thomas, J. C. (2007). The Walking People construed as a persistent conversation. IBM Research Report, RC 24187. Thomas, J.C., Lyon, D. & Miller, L. (1977). Aids for problem solving. IBM Research Report. RC-6468. Yorktown Heights, NY: IBM Corporation. Thomas, J.C. and Carroll, J. (1978). The psychological study of design. Design Studies, 1 (1), pp. 5-11. !

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!Thomas, J.C. (2007). Search and sense-making strategies of the walking people. Presented at the Human Computer Interaction Consortium, Winter Park, CO, February 3, 2007.

Thomas, J.C. (2006). Calculating Culture. Invited discussant, Human Computer Interaction Consortium. Winter Park, CO, February, 2006. D. A. Thomas. (2004) Diversity as strategy. Harvard Business Review, September 2004. reprint R0409G.

Thomas, J. C. (2003). Toward a socio-technical pattern language. Invited keynote presentation at the 10th ISPE international conference on concurrent engineering: Research and practice. Madeira Island, Portugal, July 29, 2003.

Thomas, J. C., Lee, A., and Danis, C. (2002), “Who Speaks for Wolf?” IBM Research Report, RC-22644, Yorktown Heights, NY: IBM Corporation.

Thomas, J. C. (2001) Collaborative innovation tools. In T. Terano (Eds.) New Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence, JSAI 2001 Workshop, LNAI 2253, 27-34. Presented at Matsue City, May 25, 2001.

Thomas, J.C. (2001). Perspective modulation through interactive fiction. Workshop paper presented at CHI workshop: Interactive narrative and knowledge stewardship 2001; Seattle WA

Thomas, J.C. (1999). Facilitating global intelligence. Presented at Human-Centered Computing, Online Communities and Virtual Environments Report on the First Joint European Commission/National Science Foundation Advanced Research Workshop, June 1-4, 1999, Chateau de Bonas, France"Human-Centered Computing, Online Communities and Virtual Environments", IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, Vol 19,No 6, pp 70-74, 1999.

Thomas, J.C. (1999). An HCI agenda for the next millennium: global intelligence. Presented at Human Computer Interaction Consortium, Winter Park, CO, February 1999.

Thomas, J.C. (1995). Biological metaphors for organizational learning. Presented at joint University of Colorado, University of Michigan, IRL, NYNEX symposium on organizational learning, White Plains, NY.

Underwood, P. (1994). Three Native American Learning Stories. Georgetown, TX: A Tribe of Two Press.

Underwood, P. (1993). The Walking People. San Anselmo, CA: A Tribe of Two Press.