Complexity-starved

I have criticised common conceptions and industry practices of ‘user-centered’ design on this blog in the past, for example here. However, having now worked alongside designers, project managers, business analysts and executives and having experienced the approaches and processes in the field of UX first hand, I have come to realise that there are things I'm particularly at odds with and I haven't yet been able to put my finger on them. As someone with a background in anthropology and trained in the practice of ethnographic research, I guess working in UX I have become painfully aware of some of the many pitfalls of an industry eager to illuminate and provide bright and clamant insights into the world of 'users'.

The enemy of such work, of course, are the many inconsistencies, contradictions and uncertainties that come with observing and talking to people. Let's take usability testing, for instance. Sitting in a lab next to the participant, the UX researcher is tasked with finding out just how good, or bad, a product performs against the needs and expectations of this user. The person sitting next to the researcher is of course not anyone, he or she has been identified as an ideal participant. Why? Because it's been decided that this person is likely to be using this product in a real life context, whether that is because they can afford it, because they are already users of similar products or simply because the product has been designed with their needs and expectations in mind. In that case, the testing session becomes about validating one's assumptions about who the user might be, to test one's image of the user against the 'real' user. I, for one, must admit that this circular logic has always escaped me. What's more, I've come to think of this practice as missing an incredible opportunity to make designs better.

Often what’s behind the narrow definition of who the participants should be is the urge to control who gets a say in testing. Even if it’s subconsciously, with our decisions on who we should hear and observe we are already limiting our possibilities to learn.

"The testing session becomes about validating one's assumptions about who the user might be, to test one's image of the user against the 'real' user. [...]  I've come to think of this practice as missing an incredible opportunity to make designs better."

I maintain that there's value in finding out just how "wrong" the "wrong" people use a piece of technology. Interacting with many different users in a range of contexts (doing online banking, shopping at a supermarket, buying insurance), I see how people do stuff their way all the time anyway. They hack the technologies they have at hand and in many, messy ways fight with, reject and (re)appropriate them. I have tried to highlight this before, and in a more recent blog post, two user researchers at Mozilla describe how they were tasked with research to improve and optimize users’ browser workflows but found that "participants’ workflows were not as straightforward, deterministic, and reducible as we anticipated", and thus hard to improve at all. Instead of using services that had been designed to help them save articles to read later, they observed that users were simply doing things like keeping tabs in their browsers open. At the end of their article, the two authors argue that their informants had found and designed their own solutions and thus already optimised the processes that the researches came in to improve. For users, they argue, it simply felt effective to use several browser tabs.

While this view mirrors many of my own observations and impressions from engaging with users, I would take a further step to argue that complex, multilayered and seemingly "ineffective" use of technology is not only unproblematic from a user perspective but the actual point. It is through this use that people can grasp, understand and make sense of things.

Dawn Nafus' ethnographic work on the Quantified Self movement (QS) provides an enlightening account of what it means to make sense of things through use. Her informants were using their phones, smartwatches and various other devices to self-track all aspects of their lives, such as the hours of sleep they got in a day. Importantly, for QSers this was not simply about looking at a bunch of abstract figures and assessing (or letting the technology assess) what they meant, nor were they ceding complete authority to the supposed objectivity of the data. Instead, they were using it as a technology of noticing and self-reflection. And in the quest for heightened self-awareness, seemingly effective use of technology, through shortcuts and automation, was not only undesired but often detrimental. As one informant explained: “This glucose monitor will automatically upload my glucose levels, but I had to go back to doing it manually. When it’s all automatic, you aren’t really aware of what it is saying.”

Here, entering the data manually, is an integral part of the process of understanding and making sense of the data. And this is not only the case for members of the Quantified Self movement. Often, people comparing and researching products online make decisions about what to buy by juggling different devices, opening various tabs and making lists on papers. When decision-making is contingent on looking in various places and engaging with many levels of details and devices, a machine spitting out an answer may not be helpful at all.

More than often, we fall back into a reflex of ordering, streamlining and making neat. In the end, what we design for might not align at all with the reality of use. Providing automation and offering shortcuts when it's the journey, not arriving at the destination that counts, is an awkwardly misplaced attempt at adding value. Reducing complexity sometimes means destroying the very value a technology provides.

"When decision-making is contingent on looking in various places and engaging with many levels of details and devices, a machine spitting out an answer may not be helpful at all."

I have always found that the conception of ethnography that most resonated with me is one that sees field sites not as “an object to be explained, but a contingent window into complexity” (Candea 2007). Focusing on moments of controversies, tensions, sticking with uncertainty for a while before trying to resolve and untangle it from the lived realities, makes us engage with and discover the core qualities that make people creative.

When we look behind the flaws of people’s inefficient use we can uncover what is really at stake for people when they engage in meticulous calculations, research and tracking processes. In seeing how people use devices and solutions differently than envisioned, prescribed and intended we can recognise the actual value that these technologies have for people, and design to enhance this value. When we allow for overflow, we admit surprising results to inspire us in creating better design.

What do we really mean when we say 'user-centered' design?

While I was writing an essay on the question "How is the user as a person differently constituted within the fields of HCI and Anthropology" I realized that from an anthropological perspective the industry's view of 'user-centered' design is in many ways a pretty misleading idea. I stumbled upon a few interesting articles, some from STS scholars, but the most interesting ones by anthropologists working in the design industry analyzing their and their colleagues work with a sharp ethnographer's eye.

Typically, within a company setting the groups of actors involved in a design project are well defined and kept (mostly) separate. The work of developing, say, a technical product, then, always becomes one of mediating between technicians, designers, and possibly, ethnographers. In this mediation, the seemingly good- natured idea of ‘user-centered design’ works to conceal significant power relations between so-called ‘users’ and ‘producers’. In one HCI study I looked at, the designers used questionnaires as a way to explore what users wanted. But this alone did not seem to be enough to define system requirements, because later on, it was pedagogic experts who were consulted to speak on behalf of the ‘user’ and to further explore how future use could be envisioned and how the technology should look like. This is very similar to what STS scholars Grint and Woolgar describe in their ethnography of a company dedicated to the manufacturing of micro-computers for educational purposes. They observe ”an effective rationale for not placing too much emphasis on users’ views.”. And they note:

"According to this perspective, configuring the user involves the determination of likely future requirements and actions of users. Since the company tends to have better access to the future than users, it is the company’ s view which defines users’ future requirements." (Grint and Woolgar 1997:78).

The ‘user’ here is an outsider to the company that does not understand the technology. This position is reinforced in the stage of usability trials. Here, users are directly exposed to the project, but only when a prototype is ready for use. This is important to highlight, as usability trials confront the user with an already black-boxed technology, that he or she has to somehow try to relate to. In light of this, in this blog post Seavers goes even so far as to parallel the commercial idea of the ‘user’ to that of the ‘savage’, signaling that both terms designate “a class of people disempowered in relation to technology”. 

An anthropological understanding of the user, then, recognizes that a lot of technologies are “inflected by the sensibilities of technical elites” (Nafus 2014). It could be argued that designers, in their naivety of 'user-centeredness' are complicit in reproducing this power imbalance. As Nafus notes, users “who do not fit the mold must work even harder as they appropriate technologies for their own purposes”. The so-called ‘user-centred’ design process, then, produces ready-made products that set rules to the game and thus constrain users to play by their own rules. But this is no easy work, as users are not simply on the receiving end but actively interact with products and constantly negotiate and modify the rules that are inscribed in the technology and thus the developers’ idea about who they are and what they do. Anthropologically, the ‘user’, then, can be better grasped with the idea of a designer.

Nafus' article “Design for X: Prediction and the Embeddedness (or Not) of Research in Technology Production.” was published in: Subversion, Conversion, Development : Cross-Cultural Knowledge Exchange and the Politics of Design (2014), which I highly recommend.
And this is Grint and Woolgar's ethnography "The Machine at Work : Technology, Work, and Organization" from 1997.

Some thoughts on sustainable design

“We are responsible for the world in which we live not because it is an arbitrary construction of our choosing, but because it is sedimented out of particular practices that we have a role in shaping” (Barad 2007:203)

In the last blog post I dealt with the question 'What is design and does it make a difference?'   Today I want to take those ideas to look at the design of sustainable products.

In no way should this be a comprehensive discussion on the state of sustainable design, but more of a first attempt to link the ideas on the agency of humans and non-humans with contemporary practices in that field. The ideas I put forth in the previous post suggest that design plays a fundamental role in shaping our actions. This is the first consequence for designers, for as Barad’s quote above makes clear, through their work, designers make themselves accountable for the products they design and the actions they enable. Designers have used this realization of the importance of their work to promote the development of sustainable products and thus make human lifestyles a little bit more sustainable. Design, as informed by the Actor-Network-Theory, has the capacity to promote sustainability precisely because configurations of humans and non-humans can be changed “in such a way that we can intra-act responsibly” (Suchman 2007).

Environmental questions have been linked to design since the 1970s. Since then, design theory and practice concerned with environmental issues has been reinterpreted and broadened, taking the field from “green” design, to “ecodesign”, to “sustainable” design. Behind this transition lies the realization that environmental issues touch on all aspects of our daily lives and that the “global model of development” is in itself structurally unsustainable (Manzini 2010). This is similar to what Fry (2011) suggests. For the field of sustainable design this transition means that when designers were concerned with “Green Design” in the 1980s, the aim was to design artifacts that were considered less harmful for the environment. This could mean making changes to clothing fabrics and garments by using low-chemical organic materials instead of synthetic ones that are more polluting.

With the advent of the term ‘ecodesign’ in the late 1980s, the focus shifts to a systems approach, concerned not only with the redesign of single products, but often entire systems of products or even entire industries. One approach developed within that phase is the Lifecycle Assessment or Lifecycle Analysis (LCA). The aim of a lifecycle assessment is to quantify and balance a product’s environmental impact. This is done for all stages of its lifecycle: production, use and disposal. Recently, there has been a wave of critique on this type of approach, suggesting not only that its methodology lacks transparency and that the way the impact data is acquired heavily varies from one model to another, but also that the design proposals resulting from lifecycle analysis are insufficient to solve environmental problems.

In their article “The things that matter”, Verbeek and Kockelkoren present the work of a group of Dutch industrial designers called “Eternally Yours” who propose ways of making sustainable products that go beyond the “technical” solutions that Lifecycle Assessments offer. “Eternally Yours” sees the fundamental problem of making sustainable products as lying in a culture that throws away products before they start being unusable. With this we move from a focus on ‘ecodesign’ to the present stage: ‘sustainable design’. For designers, this move implies a shift away from the design of artifacts or systems of artifacts, to the design of ‘culture’. For “Eternally Yours” this shift means that instead of focusing on technical improvements regarding materials or fabrication processes, the most important work of sustainable design is to make products that people will not want to discard and replace at a high speed. They seek to increase the psychological lifespan of products.

From an anthropological perspective that regards things as important actors in shaping our actions, the reconsideration of design from the unit of the single product, to compromising users, their bond with things and modes of usage, is without a doubt a productive improvement in the creation of sustainable design. However, this shift in vision has also brought with it a change in focus from the material to the symbolic. In their article, Verbeek and Kockelkoren examine the work of “Eternally Yours” critically, concluding that trying to extend the ‘psychological lifespan’ of a product does little to solve the problems of sustainability. “Eternally Yours” tries to create and maintain the bond between a user and a product by making them appreciate the object, for example through choosing materials that seem more attractive with age, strengthening the relationship to companies and their services, or creating stories that “give products more “character””.

These ideas, Verbeek and Kockelkoren argue, “show a certain one-sidedness” as they do not work with material qualities of objects, but with nonmaterial signs. Even when looking at aged leather, “Eternally Yours” does not look at the material and what it does but at what it stands for: high attractiveness. In the end, a product like this could, and will probably be replaced with another one that has the same sign-value.

So?

From an anthropological perspective that recognizes things as what they are, sustainable design seems to benefit from its broadening of scope and from understanding sustainability in more integrated ways, an understanding that encompasses all aspects of culture. However, culture here must mean the relationship between people and material things, and not between people and signs.

The Actor-Network Theory helps understand the role of design in shaping our actions and thus brings forward a view in which design can (to a certain extent) change and improve environmental problems. As Manzini notes: “design can "give form" to a changing world, and "offer opportunities" for new types of behavior”. But since design is concerned with the intimate bond between people and things, the redesign of a world that is sustainable might be more complicated than contemporary design ‘solutions’ assume. After all, Fry’s quest for a redesign of design might be on the right track.

Here some recommended readings:
Design Anthropology (2013)
edited by Wendy Gunn, Ton Otto and Rachel Charlotte Smith

Sustainable Fashion and Textiles: Design Journeys (2008)
by Kate Fletcher

Design as Politics (2011)
by Tony Fry

The Designed World: Images, Objects, Environments (2010)
edited by Richard Buchanan, Dennis P. Doordan, and Victor Margolin.

What is design and does it make a difference?

The way one answers the question “Does design make a difference?” subsequently shapes one’s definition of what ‘design’ is. And how one answers this question depends on one’s understanding of the relation between humans and material objects. In this rather long blog post, I want to put forth an understanding of humans and objects informed by the Actor- Network-Theory. At its heart, the Actor-Network-Theory mobilizes the notion of ‘agency’ to explain human and non-human relations. I will argue that because agency is relational, design has the capacity to create and define human agency.

Meaning over matter?

Let us start this inquiry by challenging the assumption that design as the process of giving an object a specific material form, has any broader, sociocultural implications – let us argue that design makes absolutely no sociocultural difference. Csikszentmihalyi’s psychological study on the meanings of household object might help to prove this point.

Csikszentmihalyi conducted 82 interviews with different families in the Chicago area to find out how art affected the consciousness of the viewer. He quickly noticed that his informants had little to say about the ‘art’ objects that they owned, but they had a lot to say about other artifacts in their houses, which were charged with meanings and towards which they felt very strong attachments. Although there were quite a few (graphic) art objects among the mentioned artifacts, Csikszentmihalyi makes this interesting observation:

Of the 537 reasons given for cherishing the 136 graphic works, only sixteen percent had anything to do with how the picture looked. The objects were special because they: conveyed memories (sixteen percent), or referred to family members (seventeen percent), or to friends (thirteen percent). Formal qualities alone almost never made a picture valuable to its owner.

What this observation suggests is that the way an object looks, that its material and visual qualities, are not acknowledged by whoever uses or consumes the artifact. Rather it is the symbolic relationship between a person and his personal belongings that we have to look at. This observation poses a problem: How can we claim that design has any significant impact if people seem to see and choose ideas, signs and meanings over the actual object? Does the way things look not matter at all, then?

We do not need to be designers to sense that this claim is extremely reductionist. Csikszentmihalyi argues that visual qualities do indeed matter, but that it is not in a “natural” way that we respond to color and form. Instead, he suggests, these are “responses to meanings attached to configurations of color and form“. These responses result from a process in which visual qualities are linked to values. This is a highly cultural process, as these values develop within groups of people and can be “unanimous or contested, elite or popular, strong or vulnerable, depending on the integration of the culture.”. An interesting thing has happened here. In trying to prove wrong the link between the material qualities of objects and sociocultural aspects, we have instead unveiled its complex and deep entanglement. But Csikszentmihalyi view is not unproblematic, as we will see. It still leaves us in the world of signs.