Below are some excerpts I strongly resonated with (and which highlight an emerging need for interdisciplinarity and particularly ethnography within the design process) from a paper published by Microsoft Research Ltd. entitled Being Human: Human-Computer Interaction in the Year 2020 (2008, ed. R. Harper, et al):
Technological dependence interacts with other fundamental human values. For example, it is also the case that the more we depend on technologies to carry out or mediate our everyday activities the more we will need to trust them to do so. How does such blanket trust develop? Will people in the future be able to adapt to situations where access and use of technologies cannot be taken for granted? Is this increasing reliance on technology a healthy state of affairs for society? How does this weigh up with our natural curiosity to understand the facilities we use in order to trust them? One potential downside to all of this is a loss of independence and self-reliance, and a lack of depth and breadth of understanding about how the world works. If we are not careful, undermining these values may make the world of 2020 a much less rewarding world to live in. (41)
In a world where the design and development of new technologies become more decentralised, where new kinds of content and do-ityourself applications become widespread and accessible to all, where will the control and the accountability be? Who will be responsible for making sure there is good design, and that the resulting technologies empower rather than undermine people? (50)
Do we simply let technological advances dictate what it will mean to be human in the age of ubiquitous computing or can HCI as an interdisciplinary community of researchers, practitioners and designers become more proactive in helping to shape society’s new relationships with computer technologies? (54)
Central to the new agenda is recognising what it means to be human in a digital future. We suggest foremost that human values, in all their diversity, be better understood and charted in relation to how they are supported, augmented or constrained by technological developments. In many ways, we are arguing for a strengthening of what has always been important to HCI: a focus on human-centred design, keeping firmly in sight what users – people – need and want
from technology. But beyond this, HCI needs to extend its approach to encompass how human desires, interests and aspirations can be realised and supported through technology. These have to be defined not just at the level of the individual, but also at the social, cultural and ethical level. (55)
Taking into account the scope of human values, therefore, is quite a different undertaking than seeking to attain the design goals of efficiency, effectiveness and utility. Design trade-offs need to be considered not just in terms of time and errors, but in terms of the weighing up of the various moral, personal and social impacts on the various parties who will be affected by the proposed technology. (56)
The bottom line is that computer technologies are not neutral – they are laden with human, cultural and social values. These can be anticipated and designed for, or can emerge and evolve through use and abuse. In a multicultural world, too, we have to acknowledge that there will often be conflicting value systems, where design in one part of the world becomes something quite different in another, and where the meaning and value of a technology are manifest in diverse ways. Future research needs to address a broader, richer concept of what it means to be human in the flux of the transformations taking place. (57)
But just what benefits will these efforts bring us? Will these technologies really help us to know ourselves better, make our lives richer, strengthen our connections to those we care about and bring us closer to the world around us? And what are the appropriate research questions here? How do we design these potentially complex and far-reaching technological systems? As we embrace the emergence of digital footprints in the bigger sense we have described, where this footprint has all sorts of properties, content and possible uses, just what we mean by memory and, further, what aspect of memory we might be interested in designing for, need careful consideration by HCI researchers.... To tackle these new kinds of questions, Stage 1 begins by taking a step back from the initial assumptions which appear to be driving this class of technology and asks what we mean by human memory, and how this relates to fundamental human values. What aspects of memory will make our lives richer? In what situations might we want to remember and why? And even, is it sometimes better and more desirable to forget? (72) ..... There are many other human values that might also be looked at here, including the collection of personal data for the purpose of reflection on the patterns in one’s life; or it might be about honouring and connecting the family to a shared past; and many more besides. The point here is that ‘memory’ means many things when analysed as a multi-faceted concept. And the value of a class of technologies which supports memory is rich and diverse. An initial step is to disentangle what that set of values might be, and to choose which are of most interest. It is therefore at this point largely a conceptual analysis. (73)
It follows that the ‘I’ in HCI – interaction – will need to be understood at many different levels too. First, it will be necessary to think about different ‘sites of interaction’, for example interactions on and in the body; between bodies; between bodies and objects; and at the scale of kiosks, rooms, buildings, streets and public spaces. All of these different levels of interaction offer different physical and social parameters that technologies can potentially change. (76)
HCI needs to move forward from concerns about the production and processing of information toward the design and evaluation of systems that enable human values to be achieved. Doing so requires HCI to shift its epistemological constraints away from their psychological roots towards other approaches, such as the philosophical, where conceptual sensitivity to meaning, purpose, and desire is possible. This suggests adding a fifth stage to HCI’s conventional design/research model: a stage of conceptual analysis where we consider the human values we are trying to support or research. This affects the whole cycle of research and design, including how we understand the user, how we do studies in the field and the laboratory, how we reflect on the values sought in design, how we build prototypes and how we evaluate our designs. Finally, HCI researchers need a larger assembly of skills and know-how if they are to succeed, which has implications for the concepts, frameworks and theories of HCI. (77)
Good conversation
6 years ago
