Barbara Kwasnik – offices: chaotic or organized?

We all organize, we all collect
Think about our own native ways to organize, esp for things that we really care abt
Jenna Hartell: Roronto. Information-seeking activities of hobbyist cooks

How do you conceptualize in terms of flows rather than physical movement
Rethinking information from the point of view of mobility

Error messages: trips up designers

Then Now
Task Conversation
Individuals Context/setting
Cognition/mind human-human interaction
Computer as brain brain as computer
[non-discretionary] [discretionary]

***Searle: attack on those abt information theoretic definition of consciousness; Leah will send the review

All the artciles challenge that cognitive psychological explanation
Philosophical diff between the cognitivists of last week and the phenomenologist of this week. Last week – early 80s earliest concweptions of people & devices what users are and what they do
Then we have a shift
Liam Bannon
In the late 80s the user turn
This week – winograd and flores was very different 1986
Suchman, too
First mac – 1984 big ad at the superbowl
The computer for the rest of us. Check out the symbolism
Moving from mainframe to personal devices
Now we’re moving back to mainframe with cloud computing

People’s desires to have this kind of tool pushes designers in that direction
MT: with moving back to mainframe/cloud, should we expect issues we had in the 80s?
Phenomenology—philosophy of how things appear in the world
Thrownness
How do things appear to you I that situation
Intentionality that drives the action rather than the
Action follows thought
Construction of meaning through the interaction/activity
The idea is the embeddedness – the sense of experience
We’re enmeshed in a whole set of experience conditions perceptions of the way things are
These designers are saying this is a better foundation
Wingrad one of the first o say cognitive foundation is not the right way to look at it
Suchman comes to it through perspective of ethnography
Situatedness
Context

Notion of thrownness: most of the time the condition we’re in is we’re just like fish swimming in the sea not nec consciously aware of what is going on
One of the principles here is the idea that you can take a lot of stuff for granted and be totally functional until things go wrong—breakdown
Embeddedness, experience, perception, participating/being in a moment

Anticipating the potential for breakdowns
Very important for designers

MT: designers have to create the spaces for alternatives—domains and the ontology of

John Austin – how to do things with words
Changing the conversation structure creates spaces for alternatives
Varella, Flores, someone else – Chilean systems theory

How these readings knock up against the viewpoints expressed last week:
Implication of these diff viewpoints for the different designs we get

Challenges to cog-psych perspective
• Concept of user/actor
o From human factors to human actors
• Types an nature of action (human, machine)
• Importance and nature of “context”
o The idea of context as a kind of container – phenomenologists are working on this all the time: you don’t get to split those. That’s where the dourish article comes in
• Nature of events (and tools) and designing for them
o phenomena themselves
•
last week:
notion of the ideal/universal model of the user, regardless of context
• about how humans do what they do
o
this week, highly situational

understanding human behavior, not linear, but cyclical? Breakdown at domain boundaries
brings process from being transparent to being aware of the
plasticity of the cognitive system
feedback

ontology: study of what is, the nature of things, the nature of existence
w&f say: “design is ontological”
term from philosophy of knowledge has been picked up and applied here
here ontology is language of classification? Not sure this is accurate
consider what designers do: the fact of designing when we’re creating our own system, it can be thought of as ontological
creating for ourselves what we believe to be the nature of how things are
trying to change the nature of our experience of the world
ISO standards for everything
ISO Becomes a great mediation device

You’re making worlds and creating deices that allow ppl to create their own worls in some ways

P. 167 the challenge is designing for action without clear problems to be solved. How do you design without the breakdown

Recap W&F: critique of AI because they say, wrong idea abt intelligence, based on a bad assumption (Suchman, also thinks this way)
Stepwise, cognitive, rational problem-solving models are not intelligence
All of that is easy to build
What’s hard from the design pov, is designing for uncertainty, variation
They propose, instead, phenomenology→hermeneutics (study of interpretation)
The kinds of tools for understanding (cog, positivist, etc.) you can analyze causes and effects if you talke it that way, but if you take reality to be experienctial, the way to get at that is to interpret it
Hermeneutics – study of the interpretation of ancient texts , esp philosophical and religious texts– this is the root
Now the term is picked up in phenomenology to describe how we interpret the world

Ethnography: technique developed over at least a century starting with cultural anthropologists
Try to observe, be there, try and learn about it
Go live with the ppl you’re studying
Soul of a New Machine—Tracy Kidder – about the creation of the computing system, lived with the engineers for a year
Immersion experience is the ideal for ethnography
Sketching really important for them
Field notes, constant;y notating because it’s fleeting and want o be able to go back later
All details – you need that saturated, difficult, embedded, messy stuff to get even close to what the xperience was like
If we think about phenomenology, we have to become ethnographers

W&F: Speech Act Theory
• When we talk, we’re not just signifying, talk is action
• How To Do Things with Words
• Categories of speech that constitute action
o Promises, vows,
o Licensed person pronounces ppl married – that’s an action
o Speech act is doing sthg different
• they’re talking abt language because language performs—our utterances have force
o different kinds of forces (look at Wikipedia page on Speech Act Theory)
• locutionary act (actual utterance)
• illocutionary act (intended significance of the utterance)
• perlocutionary act (actual effect the utterance has)
o unless you understand these building blocks, you’ll never have interaction
o speech act theory → warrants
• interpersonal comm
• rhetoric
• warrant calling – not interactive interface until there is a way for us to call a warrant on a message
 make it more like the human experience
 cultural rules and they can change from place to place
 different kinds of warrants, claims, forces
we enact reality with our talk, and here’s how we do it: speech act theory
w&f saw in this a possibly computable set of rules
they built an experiemental system (didn’t go far) they were just interested in the proof of concept

Lucy Suchman
Linguistic machines
Copier machines study
Looked at the interaction and the microdetail of what was going on when two people because they can speak to each other
Looking at what the agents know and don’t know
MT: Two people gives the opportunity to contribute unique experience and tacit knowledge
Certain information available to the machine, as well as to the user
Can characterize either one by what information is available to them
This study completely changed the approach at Xerox for how to get users to make more effective use of their machines
You are an actor ina condition
Your action is always going to be in the moment
It’s not plans on both sides
Designing for plans, but can’t anticipate complete anticipated domains

Orlikowski

Lotus Notes
Groupware
Interested in the managerial effects of this software – ways to use computers collaboratively
What difference does this make for collaboration?

Push and pull collaborative systems
Sometimes imposed, other times demanded on part of users

Orlikowski says to managers: this is a cautionary tale to mgrs.. you can’t just plug it in
This goes back to the whole notion of how computers are used: 1 person at a time
Email was relatively new at this point
The experience ppl had of computers was tool/program/individualized ideas about the nature of the user
Groupware, but the first thing that will happen is that ppl will approach this individualistically

NEED TO READ SOCIAL LIFE OF INFORMATION

We have a better mental model now of what shared docs are like online
But then, people were oriented twoward individual experience

She said you have to pay attn. to your organizational culture and climate – won’t succeed if you don’t
Example – dictation of medical records
Communities of practice: Lave & Wenger
• When you think abt how ppl organize and work together, ppl engage together in certain kinds of practices. You can analyze their membership by their practices
• Have to know how ppl do what they do

Paul Dourish
What we talk about when we talk about context
Received: 16 June 2003 / Accepted: 30 September 2003 / Published online: 5 December 2003
_ Springer-Verlag London Limited 2003
Abstract The emergence of ubiquitous computing as a
new design paradigm poses significant challenges for
human-computer interaction (HCI) and interaction
design. Traditionally, HCI has taken place within a
constrained and well-understood domain of experience—
single users sitting at desks and interacting with
conventionally-designed computers employing screens,
keyboards and mice for interaction. New opportunities
have engendered considerable interest in ‘‘context-aware
computing’’—computational systems that can sense and
respond to aspects of the settings in which they are used.
However, considerable confusion surrounds the notion
of ‘‘context’’—what it means, what it includes and what
role it plays in interactive systems. This paper suggests
that the representational stance implied by conventional
interpretations of ‘‘context’’ misinterprets the role of
context in everyday human activity, and proposes an
alternative model that suggests different directions for
design.
Keywords Context-aware computing Æ
Ethnomethodology
1 Introduction
contrasts the different viewpoints
two kinds of ways of thinking about context:
• representational (debunks)
o stable notion of context (the container model that phenomenologists don’t like);
• context is a form of information
• context s delineable
• context is stable
• context and activity are separable
o context is a kind of information
o actors, actions, the box in which they occur
• interactional (advocates)
o not stable
o we have this imaginary abt computing that will be everything pervasive ubiquitous computing
• he says we should interrogate that a little bit
• emphasizes the same idea about practice because has to do with material action
 not framing, meaning, linguists
 action as convention
• we all have practices and preferences—the things that make us comfortable
• we’re making the world as we’re dealing with it
and as we have actions and conditions of action, can’t separate

context is one of the most hotly debated words in the social sciences
MT: is there such a thing as flexible design that incorporates AI
Context is continually manifest, defined, TK, shared (p 26)

Affect: From Information to Interaction
Kirsten Boehner1, Rogério DePaula2, Paul Dourish2, and Phoebe Sengers1

While affective computing explicitly challenges the
primacy of rationality in cognitivist accounts of human
activity, at a deeper level it relies on and reproduces the
same information-processing model of cognition. In
affective computing, affect is often seen as another kind of
information - discrete units or states internal to an
individual that can be transmitted in a loss-free manner
from people to computational systems and back. Drawing
on cultural, social, and interactional critiques of cognition
which have arisen in HCI, we introduce and explore an
alternative model of emotion as interaction: dynamic,
culturally mediated, and socially constructed and
experienced. This model leads to new goals for the design
and evaluation of affective systems - instead of sensing and
transmitting emotion, systems should support human users
in understanding, interpreting, and experiencing emotion in
its full complexity and ambiguity.
Keywords
affective computing, situated action
•
affect = emotion, feelings, attitudes, the feeling domain of experience
“the world is littered with unsuccessful experiments”—Leah

considered a tough thing to deal with in computing
Calling FOR A GREATER ROLE, SAYING WE SHOULD BE DESIGNING FOR affect, as well

Miro painting: turns out that ppl were really talking abt feelings/emotions, but the painting was an excuse to talk abt emotions (MT: a projection?) tried to establish a 1:1 relationship between what the employee was feeling and the visualization on the Miro screen. Researchers assumed measure of happiness, versus the employee as stress

Computer as conduit
Conduit metaphor
The idea that information transfer channels are simply pipes that don’t being anything to it themselves

They say, we want to model affect somehow
Image as projective device. Immediately run into the issue of measurement
“poke and hope” kind of thing—Leah

affect is a much more high-value thing to know than, say, Nielsen data

Affector
2 cameras, two ppl, as they communicate, the Affector using diff algotrithms would read the state of the person and out a particular filter on this image of the person
in shared office space
to be able to signal their states to one anpther
trying to find rules that then can be represented out to people and then to see whether those images seem to reflect mood, or affect

the interesting thing going on here, if we buy into phenomenological viewpoint, can’t exclude affect just because it’s difficult.
But there may be lots of conditions when affect matters a lot (work, decision making, relationshiops)
If we’ve really going to have HCI, affect has to be part of it.
What could we build that ppl might be able to read from an interface pov that one can determine affective state

Leah’s takeaway:
1. how hard it is at basic imagery level
2. any competent person in a culture an walk up to someone and kind of get a sense by reading face and body language
autism – ppl can’t read affect
affect: persuasive, perlocutionary force, illocutionary force,
trying to come to terms with one of the parts of the experience that lets us know how embedded in a sitch we feel

humanistic viewpoints next week somewhat beyond soc sci perspective