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30 April 2011

pitching vs. thinking about what it is like to live with a system

One of the other things to come out in my visit to Malcolm’s class is an awareness of a certain difference in styles between School of Information, HCI/user-centered-design project presentations and architecture project presentations. Basically, teams of SI students or mostly-SI students presented projects as a bit of a “pitch” — this is why our idea is great and should be pursued — while teams with students from architecture tended to present projects ideas as a bit less positive, including at least one presentation of an idea as leading to a very dystopian world. One of the other visitors, an architect, reflected at the end on how strange it felt to have had three hours of mostly back-to-back pitches rather than discussions about what it would be like to “live with” a system.

This prompted some reactions from the SI folks, some of which got posted to Twitter, e.g., “shouldn’t a concept have a compelling use- or who would use it, and why?” and “there was an arch guy who was shocked by the idea of considering users.” I can understand these reactions, but as someone with less skin in the game (no project to pitch), I think I had a more moderated reaction. After reflecting a bit, I want to write down some thoughts about this difference and start a discussion.

The difference that I saw in the presentations was that the “pitches” showed use cases with no downsides, or only technical obstacles. The “live with” presentations showed a vision that was more rounded and showed pros as well as some very serious cons, particularly for people who would be affected by but may not choose to use the system. In comparison to the “live with” presentations, the pitches seemed a bit naïve or even dishonest, while the “live with” presentations felt incomplete: given such obvious problems, why not change the idea?

So, where does this difference come from? Of course architects consider the people who will be affected by their creations — and not just the “users” — so it’s not that. And of course things should have a compelling use. Something that has a compelling use for some people, though, may still create a less than pleasant experience for others who it affects. This is particularly true for architecture projects — everyone in a neighborhood has to live with a building, not just its occupants — so I can see how that would lead to a certain style of presentation or discussion of a proposal. This is not, however, unique to buildings; groupware and social software certainly affect people who may not opt in, and some persuasive technology is designed specifically to influence people who do not opt in, and so maybe it would be good for some HCI presentations to take a bit more of a humble tone that acknowledges potential downsides.

On the other hand, it’s also often fairly easy to prototype and even do large-scale test deployments of software (i.e., try living with) in a way that simply isn’t possible with large buildings or urban development projects. These prototypes and field tests often let designers learn many of the unintended consequences. (Of course, you only learn about the group you test the app with.)

This assuredness of early feedback on software products, as well as the ability to iterate rapidly after deployment to correct for problems or take advantage of newfound opportunities, makes many software presentations more about why something is worth starting this process of building, releasing, and refining, rather than a discussion about building and living with fairly immutable and durable creation, and I think that motivates a lot of the difference in styles. I’m not completely sure that software designers can continue with this attitude as software becomes more social and hooking up system A to system B can lead to information disclosures with long lasting effects.

Other thoughts?

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1 April 2011

@display

For those interested in the software that drives the SIDisplay, SI master’s student Morgan Keys has been working to make a generalized and improved version available. You can find it, under the name “@display” at this GitHub repository.

SIDisplay is a Twitter-based public display described in a CSCW paper with Paul Resnick and Emily Rosengren. We built it for the School of Information community, where it replaced a number of previous displays, including a Thank You Board (which we compare it to in the paper), a photo collage (based on the context, content & community collage), and a version of the plasma poster network. Unlike many other Twitter-based displays, SI Display and @display do not follow a hashtag, but instead follow @-replies to the display’s Twitter account. It also includes private tweets, so long as the Twitter user has given the display’s Twitter account permission to follow them.

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19 May 2009

SI182 Final Projects

A belated congrats to all of the EECS182/SI182 students on finishing the semester. For those not familiar with the course, SI182 is an intro to programming course in the informatics program at UM. Paul Resnick and I taught it this past semester, and arranged the course around pulling data from public feeds, processing this data, and presenting it again, online, in a way that adds value.

Here’s a sampling of the final projects:

Also, a huge thanks to Chuck Severance, who got this course started and gave us early chapters of his book Using Google App Engine, which gave us the confidence to use App Engine in the course and which we were able to rely on for class readings.

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12 January 2008

Training, Integration, and Identity: A Roundtable Discussion of Undergraduate and Professional Master’s Programs in iSchools

Libby Hemphill and I are hosting a roundtable discussion at the 2008 iConference, hosted by UCLA, at the end of February.

Professional students, whether undergraduates or masters’ students, represent a significant portion of the iSchool community. How do iSchools effectively educate those students while continuing to develop successful research programs? This roundtable discussion will focus on how iSchools educate their professional students and engage them in the research aspect of their programs. Innovative approaches to training and integration will be the central theme of this discussion. In an iSchool – where students training for professions including librarianship, information policy, human-centered computing, preservation and researchers exploring such topics as incentive-centered design, forensic informatics, computational linguistics, and digital libraries have both competing and complimentary goals – the potentials for collaboration, innovation, misunderstanding, and disharmony are all high.

The annual iConference provides a unique opportunity for us, as a community, to discuss the roles our professional students have in shaping our identity and our practices. The proposed roundtable will invite participants to discuss questions such as:

  • What should the role of research in training information professionals be?
  • How can we best engage professional students in our research?
  • How do iSchools address the unique curricular challenges we face in preparing students for a very wide variety of careers?
  • What do we want an Information degree to signal in the marketplace?
  • What are some successes in which research and professional training have benefited one another?

Participants will share innovative approaches to professional education, best practices in engaging professional students in research programs, and remaining challenges. We intend roundtable participation to represent the diversity of iSchools’ current programs.

We’ve setup a wiki for pre-conference sharing of exemplary programs, questions, and thoughts. It’s pretty sparse right now, but we’ll be adding some of our thoughts before the conference, and we welcome your contributions!

This is a topic that I started giving more thought around the time of the 2006 iConference, and I am looking forward to the discussion in February.

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26 March 2007

just for fun: people markup

For one of our Networked Cities projects, we were asked to explore urban markup. While looking at existing projects, my teammate David Hutchful and I got the feeling that tagging spaces is a pretty crowded space. Tagging or otherwise marking people with the intent of learning more about them or feeling more connected to them appeared similarly crowded.

Inspired loosely by Steven Johnson’s work Everything Bad is Good for You, we began thinking about intermixing the ideas of place and people markup with play. This led to imagining a game in which you tag other people. If tag from two strangers match, aside from some stopwords, within a certain range of time and place, each player might get points.

The idea of being tagged by strangers ultimately feeds into peoples’ curiosity of what others think about them. This became our focus for the project, which we are calling Mirror. We built in anticipation (you can only check how you’ve been tagged once per day) and ambiguity (tags, for you, are only localized to the resolution of a cell tower). You can only be tagged by people who are not in your social network.

These tags also build identities for places. Imagine a space that displays the way people currently in it have been tagged — reflecting its current occupants. Browse a map that shows the way people have been tagged in a neighborhood. We also imagine games, such as scavenger hunts in which the goal is to go out and get tagged in certain ways.

Storyboard

We tell show some of the possibilities in the above storyboard. There is another write up on the project’s page, as well as (an admittedly hand-wavy) tech/design explanation (pdf).

We actually believe that such a product could be bad for both you and community in general, but that doesn’t stop it from being fun to think about.

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11 March 2007

news

I’ve had a busy couple of months. Among the highlights:

  • My team’s submission for the CHI student design competition was accepted. Like a lot of good news, this begets more work, but it’s fun and I’m really looking forward to the conference.
  • I’ve been accepted to the PhD program at SI. I’m pretty excited; among the programs at various schools, I haven’t seen a better fit for my interests. My interest are broad, and it is going to take some work and reaching beyond SI to make sure I get what I want out of the PhD. Talking that through may be a future post.
  • I went back to Boston for a short weekend to interview candidates for Olin. Going back was strange. I couldn’t help but feel like I should be picking classes and settling into a dorm. It was a good time, though, and great to see people.

Boeing work continues to be a good complement to my SI activities. I’m having a lot of fun with my current portfolio of projects. I’ll admit, though, that after two trips in the last month, I’m feeling a bit spread thin.

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29 October 2006

Research and professional track students

The i-Conference was two weeks ago (time seems to be going very quickly now). It was a really good experience, and I feel that I left with a much better understanding of the history of information schools and some of the challenges they (we?) face. Much of the conference was navel gazing through the lenses of other schools’ navels and in some ways this sort of brought me closer to some of the important reflection on education that I loved so much at Olin. There’s one thing, though, that’s bothering me a bit.

If you just happened to randomly walk into the conference and listen to a reasonable sampling of the discussion, you would have no idea that any of these schools have masters or undergraduate students apart from wonderful conference volunteers. One of the few times that these students were mentioned was as a way to accomplish more tedious or technical aspects of research (eg: hire students to program something) that are not of interest to PhD students or faculty. I made this remark in mixed company and got at least one “Amen,” so I’m emboldened to continue the conversation here for a bit.

Continue reading ›

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21 September 2006

oh calendar, where art though?

The School of Information is the first place I’ve been in a number of years that doesn’t have a community norm of using a calendaring system. From what I gather, the school’s administrators use MeetingMaker, faculty use nothing, and students use whatever they have with Google Calendar being the most common. Others in the University seem to use Meeting Maker or nothing, except for the lucky few on one of the Exchange servers.

I’m on three teams for courses, with three to five people on each. We’ve gotten pretty good about having regularly scheduled meetings and, when additional meetings are necessary, trying to schedule the next meeting at the end of the previous meeting. That process works okay, but still not as well as when facilitated by Exchange. This also leaves a number meetings which need to be scheduled outside of meetings, as the need arises. For those, we revert to seemingly endless chains of threads of messages.

On one team, we’ve started using a shared Google Calendar, but that’s really only good for keeping track of team meetings we have scheduled. When used as a scheduling tool in groups, the weaknesses — primarily having to seek out other users’ calendars and hoping for appropriate permissions, rather than having the free/busy information shown in context as you try to setup an appointment — quickly make it unmanageable.

I’m whining, I know, but I am going to have to figure something out. After years of taking Exchange’s services for granted, scheduling group meetings by emails back and forth won’t do.

Also: would it be going too far to say that a nontrivial amount of the success we had at Olin, both with involving students alongside staff and faculty in the administration of the school and with student teamwork, was faciliated by having Exchange in our suite of IT services?

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