Getting to Grips with Design Matters in HCI

Liam J. Bannon

University of Limerick, IrelandAarhus University, Denmark

© Liam J. Bannon

...design is not something that can be completed by the manufacturer of the machine. (Austin Henderson, 1991)

Seminar, Bari University, Italy, May 28th; 2018

Aim of Talk

• DIscuss the ways the term “Design” has been used in HCI-IxD- CSCW-EUD- PD arena …. also link to discussions on notion of ‘appropriation’

• attempt to make it a significant topic for study, not an “add-on”...

• position it with respect to a “human-centred” activity framework....

• human as actor, not passive “user”..... LB - human actors paper

Design

• noun (objects/products) & verb (activity) ?

• professional practice vs. everyday (“we are all designers”)

• Science of Design? (Simon)

• Design - as conversation with materials, reflective practice....(Schön)

• making things into objects?

• material aspect and meaning aspect

• Design as bounded vs. design as continuing-into-use.....

UL IDC approachFocus on USE activity - as an integral part of Design

Work with use scenarios - throughout development cycle

Attempt participative design strategies at all times

View computer as tool or medium, not autonomous agent

Do not model the user !!

Computer per se not the object of interest - support of human activity is the driving force in design of computational artifacts

(shifting frames -> access -> use -> activity support)

UL IDC Research ThemesMateriality of Objects – the central role of material artefacts Human Activity – a fundamental aspect of human being in the worldEngagement – the need to excite, motivate, enhance the user

experienceInteraction – human play with objects being seen as a narrative

activity, not simple action-reaction (mouse event – action) pairsLocation/Place - “death of distance” exaggerated..people still need

grounding in a place Multimodality – incorporating several sensory modalities – visual,

tactile, kinaesthetic, sonic, auditorySociality – creating artefacts or assemblies of artefacts that allow for or

encourage collaborative activityComputer as an augmentation tool/medium– not a substitute for

existing practicesAppropriation Practices - tinkering, tailoring, mashing, scratching,

“unintended use”

Some LB Papers.. Bannon, Liam J. & P. Ehn (2013) Design: design matters in participatory design. In J. Simonsen

& T. Robertson (Eds.) Routledge International Handbook of Participatory Design. New York: Routledge. pp. 37-63.

Victor Kaptelinin & Liam J. Bannon (2012): Interaction Design Beyond the Product: Creating Technology-Enhanced Activity Spaces, Human-Computer Interaction, 27:3, 277-309 . To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07370024.2011.646930 

Bannon, Liam (2011) Reimagining HCI: Toward a more human-centred perspective. ACM Interactions (cover story), July-August 2011, vol. 18, Issue 4 pp. 50-57Bannon, L. (1996) Use, Design, and Evaluation: Steps towards an Integration. In D. Shapiro, M.

Tauber & R. Traunmueller (eds.) The Design of Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Groupware Systems (series 'Human Factors in Information Systems' volume 12) Amsterdam, The Netherlands: North-Holland. ISBN: 0 444 81998 3.

Bannon, L. (1995) From Human Factors to Human Actors: The role of psychology and human-computer interaction studies in systems design. In R. Baecker, J. Grudin, W. Buxton & S. Greenberg, Readings in Human-Computer Interaction: Towards the Year 2000. Morgan Kaufmann, San Francisco: California.

Robinson, M & Bannon , L. (1991) Questioning Representations. In Bannon, L., Robinson, M. & Schmidt, K. (Eds.) Proceedings of ECSCW'91, Amsterdam, Sept. 1991, 219-233.

Bannon, L. & Bødker, S. (1991) Beyond the Interface: Encountering Artifacts in Use. Book Chapter in J.M. Carroll (Ed.) (1991) Designing Interaction: Psychology at the Human-Computer Interface, pp.227-253. (New York: Cambridge University Press)

my background…

“When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world.”

― John Muir, naturalist, founder of Sierra Club

early 80’s: in UCSD with Don Norman’s group on HCI - Human Computer Interaction …. problems with the way HCI was being formulated

narrow focus - Human-Machine Dyad Machine as conversation partner, not a tool or medium dismissive attitude to “naive” users Ignored Users practices, community

My UCSD TR (1985) Extending the Design Boundaries of HCI

1987 - Talk at Apple Computer, Cupertino …trying to articulate what the problem was!

1978-1979: Human Factors Pre-Doctoral Fellowship Honeywell Systems Research Centre, Minneapolis

:

In the Beginning…personal odyssey..

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Human Augmentation, not Substitution e.g. Doug Engelbart’s mission…

Report: Augmenting Human Intellect (1962 )

First Mouse…But many other firsts as well….

Perspective > Human -Language, Artefacts, Methods,Training

lead to pioneering explorations of interaction, hypertext, shared screen systems, collaboration,etc..

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Views on the “human factor” in systems design

• Human as source of errors

• Unreliable, forgetful, liable to slips, mistakes

• Unpredictable

• When taking part in teams, groups - add to variability, complexity, lack of predictabilty

• Need for SoPs, supervision, automation, monitoring…

• Need for designing humans out of loop

• “Eliminating the human factor” - sub-title of recent EU project

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Alternative View: Human as a source of (requisite) variety

Human as adaptive, flexible

Able to respond to unpredictabilty Able to improvise Awareness of context - “situation awareness” “Mindfulness” “heedful interrelating” Social formations ensure collective overseeing and environmental

monitoring Smooth and skilful interventions - timely, and fitting to flow of

events…

Bainbridge’s Ironies of Automation (1982) “The more advanced a control system is, so the more crucial may be the contribution of the human operator.”

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Weaving a Story…• a personal search… HCI, PD, CSCW, IxD, (SSST)

towards a “Human-Centred” Design of Technology

• Conceptual Framing, Re-framing….

• Empirical accounts, - listening, experiencing, observing, engaging,

• Advances in Technology - Web, UbiComp, Internet of Things,

• Changing economic,socio-political landscape

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Evolving Research Field Lenses.....

Retrospective: Inter-weavings in Human-Machine story Early Human Factors/Ergonomics (1900s ->)Human-Computer Interaction (1980->)[Participatory Design ( 1970s-)]Computer Supported Cooperative Work ( mid 1980s->) Interaction Design (mid 1990s->)

[STS, ANT perspective in IS/HCI? - Star, Berg, Suchman,Hanseth, ...]Prospective: Forms of Technology Design

Ubiquitous Computing, Ambient Intelligence Moving from Use to Presence/ Experience New methods, ways of looking at technology

Social Innovation… Object Turn - material participation…?

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Outline - • Design - much (ab)used term …distinct, but partially

overlapping communities, with own languages, conferences etc. …

• Professional Design areas - Architectural , graphic arts, RCA, Ivrea Design etc..

• HCI - UCD/UCSD, later DISS Conf, emergence of IxD

• Engineering & Software Design ( methods)

• Informatics - “Design Research” ( Hevner etc.)

• Participative (Participatory) Design - in Architecture, IS…

• “Scandinavian” PD in CS, Informatics- Kristen Nygaard,

• Linking Design-Use - part of ongoing development Cycle …tailoring systems - appropriation

• End-User Design community (EUD) - programming by

Appropriation

• from Latin, appropriare, the act of making one’s one..

• in design contexts, wish to distinguish from user adaptation to technology...

• human improvisation....the norm, not exception...in workplace...

• User/Society is an active agent in transforming artefact...

• against technological determinist view ...

early days.. 1990’s Oksnøen Symposium, Norway 23-28 May, 1992

Customizing software systems: when, how, by whom, why not...

In computer systems development as well as in the use of computer-based systems we are using various kinds of means and tools such as methods, tools, descriptions, prescriptions, specifications etc. Generally, these means or artifacts are considered to be stable or invariant with respect to the actual work process to be performed. However, a closer look at everyday working practices almost always reveals, that most of these artifacts have been changed since they were first installed: they may have been personalized to meet individual needs, they may have been modified to meet the specific demands of the problems in hand, and they may have been reconstructed to meet changed demands to the situation.Terms such as tailoring, customization, adaptation, etc. are used to characterize such changes of installed software systems. However, we need to apply a broader view in order to fully understand to complexity of making people and software systems fit together. We have to take into account also

- ways in which a system is being used

- changes in the physical embodiment

- degrees to which a system provides means for adaptation

focus on human practices, not system processes

• Suchman - situated action... contingencies, human actions in context...

• practices - inherently social....

a view from HCI..Tinkering/Tailoring activity of users...

• more individual, mental process..

• often focus on more superficial changes...

• allow for local, situated, shaping...

• Tailoring as a social practice...

End-User Programming (EUP)

• ..more substantive changes

• scripting, etc.. never became mainstream research topic in HCI, IxD, CSCW,…Why? ...[need for further study]

Xerox Legacy..

• early 90’s - PARC Henderson, Moran, ..

• EuroPARC - + MacLean, Carter, Mackay....

• Tailoring, Buttons software, Adaptive Systems ideas..

• software design and use/practice issues...

• influence of Aarhus on Henderson etc

• communities focus also...

Example: EuroPARC Buttons

from MacLean et al CHI 1990

HCI- extending CS/ IT perspective...

from Austin Henderson's (1991)  chapter (PARC)

a development perspective on ICT design: -

"from technology to technology being used by peopleftom technology being used by people to people using technologyfrom people using technology to people workingfrom generic people working to particular people working in particular situationsfrom a process done by a corporate design team to a process carried out by many people in many capacitiesfrom a process that happens once for a product to a process that continues happening over the lifetime of the product's usefrom a process that ends in use to a process that repeatedly moves from use through understanding to new designs and better usefrom a process pertaining to a single product to a process that addresses the applications and practices that will continue, appropriately adjusted to accomodate it, when a product is replaced with another one."

“Adaptive Systems” ideas...

• Tom Moran’s talk at ACM DIS 2002..

• “The User assumes the system is ready for a purpose, and merely puts that into action; hence the usability is the designer's problem.

• The Adapter makes the system suitable for a purpose, thus usefulness is the adapter's problem; they make the system their own."

• [LB - some problems with the terminology here - “adaptive system” - commonly refers to systems doing user modelling]

“Adaptive Systems” ideas...

Professional Design Adaptive Design

formal informalanticipated situatedill-defined concretereflect actspecify buildprogram arrangeadventurous conservativemake it right make do

(Tom Moran)

Tailoring as Social Practice

• Wenday Mackay PhD thesis - looks as adoption and modification of software by a group of users.....(also cf. Mackay, ACM CSCW 90 paper)

• Mackay notes:" Software does not remain static when it is introduced into an organisation. People in the organisation evolve their individual patterns of use, share them with each other, react to external changes, both technical and non-technical, and sometimes pro-actively modify the system to produce significant innovations."

• In the field study, Mackay shows the importance of the social environment in affecting the use and development of Lens, with a local expert exerting considerable influence, as well as information sharing going on among the participants - sharing of rules developed by one person and then picked up by others, even without any explicit support for such sharing in the system itself.

• Further work..e.g. on sharing... gardeners vs. gurus... (Gantt & Nardi (CHI, 1992) and others...)

Pliant Systems.... Henderson, Harris, ..

AustinHenderson(AH&JHinterviewtoappearinKlausKaasgaard(ed.)“genresofusability”bookms)

“one of the brilliant inventions of the paper bureaucracy was the idea of the margin. The margin is a place on a paper form, which is designed for writing things down that are outside, both physically and conceptually, the form that “the system” expects. The thing about the margin is that it is connected to the form in such a way that the form carries the stuff that goes beyond the form along with the form.”

[LB: I believe this links to double-level languages argument (Mike Robinson, CSCW)

Pliant Systems.... Henderson, Harris, ..

Jed Harris: ( also from interview book chapter...)

“ There is a whole other category of examples, which is derived from ecology. Instead of taking software as written and provided to the users, you give the users fragments of software that can be copied and co-aligned into different forms and you let the users essentially construct their own local software to do what they want. Then they pass pieces of software around and over time this population of fragments of software acts like an evolving ecology and adapts to demands of users.”

Pliant Systems - Harris (contd.)

“ The design is a substrate that new things can grow on.

...One is the buttons that were implemented at EuroPARC by Austin and others. Another one is the HyperCard product that Apple provided, which established a very flourishing ecology of little pieces of code and buttons and forms that people passed around, copied and made new applications out of. A third one... World Wide Web, where you can always go look at the source of a Web page and in fact innovations propagate through the Web very quickly. ..

We could come up with much richer ecological software processes.......what we are saying here is that the computer is not participating in the social discourse. It’s not an actor. But it’s enabling or supporting the discourse just the way that pen and paper does, except just in a more rich and diverse way.”

Dix (2007) Guidelines for Appropriation (for software designers)

• allow interpretation

• provide visibility

• expose intentions

• (emphasize) support not control

• allow for plugability and configuration

• encourage sharing of modifications, ...

• learn from appropriation (by users)

Changing Frame - PD - Continuing Design in Use

• breakdown of Designer-User divide

• Participative Design tradition...

• Users as Expert craftsmen using tools

• continual re-design in use...

• e.g. Henderson & Kyng (1991) There's no place like home: Continuing design in use.

• mixing of PD& HCI themes, issues...

other frames - Rabardel et al.

• Francophone cognitive ergonomics tradition

• Instrument concept - artefact +utilization schemes developed by human actors

• rich conceptual vocabulary...design-for-use / design-in-use

• Rabardel, Folcher, etc...detailed field studies...actual practices...

• not taken up by Anglo-American HCI/CSCW tradition ( yet!) ....

• [e.g our ECSCW2011 paper]

CSCW insights• Emphasizing Support, not Prescription…..

• Paying attention to actual work practices

• highlighting articulation work & “the work to make things work”

• highlighting problematic issues of fit of technologies into settings and practices - appropriation, domestication,

• .exploring alternative computational models…

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TheNeedforArticulationWork

“ Every real world system is an open system: It is impossible, both in practice and in theory, to anticipate and provide for every contingency which might arise in carrying out a series of tasks.

No formal description of a system (or plan for its work) can thus be complete. Moreover, there is no way of guaranteeing that some contingency arising in the world will not be inconsistent with a formal description or plan for the system. […]

Every real world system thus requires articulation to deal with the unanticipated contingencies that arise. Articulation resolves these inconsistencies by packaging a compromise that ‘gets the job done’, that is closes the system locally and temporarily so that work can go on. “

Gerson, Elihu M. and Susan Leigh Star (1986): Analyzing due process in the workplace. ACM Transactions on Office Information Systems, vol. 4, no. 3, July 1986, pp. 257-270.

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CSCW• concern with local practices..

• articulation, adjustments, fitting-in, shaping....

• inevitable need to mould technology into shape in particular settings...

• how to support design-in-use?

• notion of “design for unintended use”!

• modularity, open source, extended observation of uses(s), etc...

• modularity, openness, visibility....

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Potential Dangers...

• Early HF example - forbid customization, as need for operators to share “common view” of problem, situation in safety-critical contexts

• so, personal “tailoring” of interfaces - can be dangerous!

• in larger CSCW contexts - need to ensure operating protocol not “violated” - limited space for local adjustments....

A view from Information Systems

• meld of technical and social science

• Design Science Research - the inverse!

• Jennie Carroll - simple appropriation model...

• Claudio Ciborra - a new vocabulary

Slow realization of importance of human practices...

Claudio Ciborra (1998) in his book Teamwork & Groupware( See also his later Labyrinths of Information book ( 2002)

Phenomenological account of implementation processes - new language to descibe use of systems in organizations

Drifting & Learning“What “groupware “is” can only be determined in situ, where the matching between the plasticity of the artefact and the multiform practices of the actors involved takes place”

Appropriation & CareAppropriation can be looked at as a form of taking care of the innovation “fallen” in its context of

use.

Hospitality & Ambiguityusers are open to exploring possibilities with a new technology, allow it into their midst...

The strange case of Design Science Research in IS !

Hevner et al. (2004) DSR article ..:“we do not include people or elements of organizations in our definition nor do we explicitly include the process by which such artifacts evolve” (p 82).

a riposte...ˇ Hovorka & Germonprez in Pekkola (2010)...“Current structural specifications and guidelines for design theory fall short of creating theories that account for the end-users’ reflections, tinkering, and subsequent tailoring of information systems

The focus in literature on the structure of design theory and what guidelines must be followed has obscured and undervalued an important phenomenon we should include in design and in design theory: human activity. DSR is becoming dominated by a functionalist perspective which privileges method (design science) and structural form (anatomy of design theory) over understanding and support for the behaviours of the actors who will use the artifacts. ”

Innovation/Diffusion Studies

• Macro-level of analyses of technical change

• Diffusion - Adoption framework (Rogers,)

• “early adopters”... mass acceptance..

• determinist frame...

• emerging critique

• little scope for human actors..

STS approaches

• change from diffusion to “domestication”

• human / social actors shape technology

• users appropriate technology and “fit” it to purpose....

• field studies of domestication practices...

“The main difficulty of integrating technology into social theory is the lack of a narrative resource. We know how to describe human relations, we know how to describe mechanisms, we often try to alternate between context and content to talk about the influence of technology on society or vice-versa, but we are not yet expert at weaving together the two resources into an integrated whole. (pg.111)

..the most productive way to create new narratives has been to follow the development of an innovation.

Translations, trajectories…network analysis.. A process of translation – not one of reception, rejection, resistance, or acceptance.

e.g. “The new amateurs and Eastman’s camera co-produced each other….all the actors co-evolve.

Society and technology are not two ontologically distinct entities but more like phases of the same essential action “(pg. 129) Bruno Latour

Latour on translations....

From things to Objects - back to things?

• Things as Assemblies - “topics of concern”

• things - open, formless..not shaped..

• Latour’s thoughts on design...

• object - result of design shaping..

• internet of things? - perhaps the term is appropriate!

so, the Appropriation debate is of importance to the extent it re-focuses attention to issues such as the human & social use, re-design, critique, reflection, improvisation of tools and media...

...........the role of human actors..

Thank You!