Recognising the Blind Spots in Technology Innovation

Seattle.
The final keynote at AoIR 2011 is by Richard Harper, who is the recipient of AoIR’s inaugural book award. He begins with a personal story: some twenty years ago, Richard was researching knowledge work across distances; the task was to engineer technologies which could connect dispersed workers in collaborative spaces. To trial this, individual offices within the same company were treated as distant places, connected through shared, collaborative editing technologies (along the lines of what we now know as PiratePad or Google Docs). At the time, simple conventions for coordinating activities were also necessary, in order to avoid edit conflicts.

Such technologies seemed incredibly boring at the time, though – as simple steps towards something more interesting. The shared whiteboards developed by the project were used, but for unintended purposes: for chitchat, even for romance – a kind of tribalism at work.

This developed into an interest in the media space – a being together over distance – constituted by shared communication technologies. Just writing text was a paltry beginning to working together; seeing one another seemed an important step forward. At the time, such media spaces were orchestrated through TV cameras and screens, while computer screens were in different locations – so one could look either at the computer screen, at the image of the other party, or at the camera, but not at all at the same time.

The need to combine screens and camera (as they now are in modern laptops) became evident. Such combinations (using complicated periscope contraptions) were trialled, but turned out to be difficult and disconcerting – the gaze into one another’s eyes seemed inappropriate for the workplace. Even in the current media space, such potential for gazing into one another’s eyes remains problematic.

But another problem may be more important – how do we share documents at a distance? This is not just about passing them along, but also about observing others working with them, and sharing the manipulations of the document which each party is making. The category of such research agenda is one of geographies of interaction: of touching, pointing, grasping documents and other objects. In this work, the knowledge aspects of knowledge work disappear, in fact; bodies become central (in a form of ‘bodyism’).

Such bodyistic approaches, then, naturally also lead to physiological models of issues like communication overload. What are sources and messages of such overload; what technologies can be devised to deal with it? This is not an issue simply about how communication takes place once it’s started, but how it begins: how openings for communication, indicating availability to participate, are identified. Such openings are communicated through glances; what technologies can build on this?

At the time, Richard’s team explored the use of videophones to check whether someone was busy, or available for communication – the glancephone, which included a front-facing camera. Placed on the desk, the glancephone could be used by other approved users to check quickly whether someone was currently busy (they would see a quick snapshot from the phone camera); it could also be closed in such a way that glancing functionality was unavailable.

But what emerged were unintended patterns: people glanced others in order to be glanced back at in return – the first glance became an invitation to others to check out what the user was currently doing: a kind of prompt to look what they were or weren’t doing, where they were or with whom. Overall, this intervention didn’t reduce the communication overload of knowledge workers, then, but simply provided them with another way of adding more content.

Another attempt to intervene in communication practices was centred around the move towards person-to-person messaging – what is lost as this happens; would it not also be useful to enable place-to-place messaging, or person-to-place messaging? The device prototype Richard’s team developed was Wayve, a kind of electronic noticeboard at home which could be used by the family; the device also included a camera.

Again, the device was used in unintended ways – people left graffiti-style messages, or took pictures which they scrawled over; few people were interested in leaving meaningful messages in the home, but instead played with the technology for fun. This was the case especially the closer people were to one another; the device was used as a way to be social and share a life together, rather than simply to keep in touch.

So much of the technology developed for remote knowledge work turned out to be used much more readily for communication in close family. What can be learnt, then, by examining communication practices in the family? Families are frequently engaged in monitoring through communication; to explore this, Richard’s team developed a ‘whereabouts clock’ which would scrape location information from family members’ mobile phones and would then place members in one of four spaces: work, school, home, or other – and families loved this, because it reassured them that the world seemed normal, and that they could work around for one another’s movements. The technology greased the wheels of family affection, and of family life – even though it told family members what they already knew.

Richard’s team has been exploring the development of a range of other, similar devices. All of this is about data, of course, and those data are further connected with other information, available somewhere in the cloud. The same is true for any piece of data – for example, for a photo, which already contains metadata about the circumstances of its creation; how could devices connect with these data and metadata, for example?

If a file is the ‘thing’, then, why can’t a file have the properties that a thing has? First of all, can it be completely deleted, eviscerated? Can it be owned, possessed, given, lost, stolen? How can we design file types which have such properties? How could such design afford files more sociality?

What draws people to design new solutions is in part that it seems technically difficult; that it hasn’t been done before; that it appears to afford something more. And most of all, designing something enables designers to more fully grasp the problem which they are attempting to address. At the same time, through the design process, certain other elements are taken for granted and thus ignored; they are simplified and treated as ‘normal’ – for a reason, but this must also be openly acknowledged and kept in mind. We see some things more clearly by pushing others into the background. Something must be assumed to let the research be focussed.

The designs Richard has pursued have ignored certain things, then, in order to highlight others; this has led to unexpected consequences. Knowledge work devices ignored the actual work; information overload management devices ignored the desire to communicate; new file types which could act like physical objects ignore the desire to share and multiply information. The best research limits itself relatively narrowly, in order to study the object of research more deeply.