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computing design

Saving the world through computing(?)

Samuel Mann with Vanessa Thomas [ 53:05 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Vanessa Thomas hails from Alberta, Canada via Lancaster, England.  She’s a PhD candidate in the High Wire Centre and has worked in a lot of different areas, continually exploring the relationship between computing and sustainability.

 

Sam: Welcome to Sustainable Lens: Resilience on Radio, a weekly show on sustainability topics brought to you by Otago Polytechnic. The show is co-hosted by Shane Gallagher and me, Samuel Mann. Shane’s not here tonight because I’m in San Jose, California at a conference.

 
Each week we talk with someone making a positive difference and we try to find out what motivates them and what it means to see the world through a sustainable perspective, through their sustainable lens. Tonight’s sustainable lens is that of Vanessa Thomas, who is a PhD candidate at the University of Lancaster and is a research associate in the Institute of Social Futures, also at Lancaster but she’s not Lancastrian. Where’d you grow up?

 
Vanessa: I’m from Edmonton Alberta, Canada, which will probably give you a lot of context for why I do what I do if you know anything about the environment and oil sands and natural resource extraction.

 
Sam: What did you want to be when you grow up?

 
Vanessa: A fire truck but I’m not allowed to say that am I? Initially, in high school, I thought I wanted to be an accountant.

 
Sam: You saw the light?

 
Vanessa: I entered university and I took some entry-level classes, then I saw the light. I also took entry-level classes in computer science and learned that all of my skills in mathematics, which was what I always excelled at, could be applied to computing is well.

 
Sam: You shifted into computing?

 
Vanessa: Yes. During the first year I shifted away from accounting towards computing because I had thought that it was a more exciting and creative field for me to be in than just plain old numbers and maths and accounting.

 
Sam: What did you think you were going to do with computing at that stage?

 
Vanessa: I think I bought into a lot of the rhetoric around computing about saving the world through digital technologies, so I thought that I would get a job with Google. Google was just starting up at the time and it was really, really cool. Alternatively, I thought I would use my programming skills to make cool tools that would help people with their problems.

 
Sam: Interesting that you described that as the rhetoric. I would say that the “cool tools” rhetoric is a lot stronger than any “saving the world” rhetoric, doing something innovative perhaps with digital technology, but I don’t know if there’s a common “saving the world” vibe.

 
Vanessa: You’re right. I think retroactively I’m applying the saving the world rhetoric just because of the communities that I got involved with. Probably building the cool tools rhetoric was what I saw at first but that’s quite a long time ago. It’s over a decade ago that I started doing this, so it’s hard for me to remember exactly, back then.

 
Sam: You said that Edmonton in Alberta, if I know anything about that, I’ll know everything about you. Okay. Pretend I don’t know anything about it.

 
Vanessa: A lot of people won’t know very much about it, so that’s fair. Edmonton Alberta is a city of about a million people at this point. It was around 800,000 when I was growing up. It is heavily attached to the natural resource extraction industry in Canada and in Alberta specifically.

 
Obviously, Edmonton is the capital city, so a lot of companies are based there, our government is based there, so policies around natural resource extraction are developed there, which means that groups that want to lobby for and against that are also based there and are also quite active there.

 
Many people from Edmonton go and work in the natural resource extraction industries and those industries include forestry, they include oil. They also include fishing. There’s a large farming community as well, which you can argue is or is not a culture that sometimes gets looped in with natural resource extraction, if you consider crops, extraction, but some people don’t. In which case, it’s kept separate.

 
Sam: What I want to know is, were the tensions that are implicit in that, apparent when you were at school?

 
Vanessa: I would say it wasn’t clear to me when I was a teenager. I’m sure for some teenagers who were far more aware of those issues, it was obvious for them. For me, it didn’t really make sense. These issues came clear to me probably at about the time that I turned 20 or 21, certainly not when I was younger.

 
Sam: What happened?

 
Vanessa: I started getting involved with student groups on campus. Just through convenience and interest, I became involved with the Student’s Union at the University. They were a very open and welcoming group who shared a lot of nerdy interests with me and I didn’t know very much about how Alberta’s industries were tied to Canada in global economic issues at the time.

 
They introduced me to a lot of those issues and retrospectively, I could see how that was linked to my upbringing and a lot of the issues in the area of the city that I’m from, which is quite a low income area, the city. A lot of people that I went to high school with graduated and chose to take jobs in the oil sands, or in forestry, or in the natural resource extraction area industries.

 
I was one of the few people from my graduating class that went to university. There may be a cohort of like 20 of us from a graduating class of 700, who went to university. The rest all went off to low income housing and/or natural resource extraction industry jobs, things that didn’t require anything else after high school.

 
Sam: Were you living at home or on campus?

 
Vanessa: I was living at home. Yeah, with my parents. I couldn’t afford to go anywhere else.

 
Sam: Did the neighbourhood think you were going off to a day job as a hippie?

 
Vanessa: I didn’t look like a hippie at the time. I didn’t have dreadlocks at the time. My immediate neighbours, one was an old couple and they were just happy to see us go off and do anything and the other house had quite a transient population, so we didn’t really get to know them very well at all. It changed over a year or two, so I have no idea what they thought of me. They often didn’t talk with us.

 
Sam: Around the family dinner table, were you bringing in new ideas or was it carrying on ideas, developing ideas that were already there?

 
Vanessa: No. There was quite a lot of friction, especially when I became vegetarian and then eventually vegan. That caused a lot of friction. My family has a conservative bend to it, I would say. That’s the polite way of phrasing it, because Alberta, for a very long time, for 44 years had a conservative government in power. Everybody was just assumed to be conservative.

 
You obviously supported the natural resource extraction industries. We had a large active beef farming community, so you obviously ate a lot of beef to support that. Yeah. Very conservative. The idea of having a vegetarian in the family was very off-putting. I remember vividly, a conversation with my dad where he asked if I would still eat my vegan burgers if it was cooked on the same grill as a beef burger, now that I had become vegan.

 
Sam: Similar conversations in your computer science classes?

 
Vanessa: No. No. Not at all. No. I had very few friends in my computer science classes. First and foremost, I was one of the few women. In one of the first classes that I took actually, one of my peers said that I never had to do any programming because I was female and I could get away with just letting the boys do the work for me.

 
I didn’t actually make many friends in my computer science classes. I think that’s part of why I turned to the Student’s Union, because they were an open welcoming group who had similar ideas to me. They didn’t care that I was programming. They didn’t really care what I did for school, we just had these shared values.

 
Sam: Within the academic frame, where there opportunities to explore the social side of computing?

 
Vanessa: During my undergraduate, no. No. Not at all. Actually, I dropped out/got kicked out and took an internship, an international development internship, after three years in Ecuador doing something called ICT4D, Information and Communication Technologies for Development.

 
I worked in a human rights nonprofit called Defensa De Los Niños, Defence of the Children. They helped support street children in Ecuador to do with all of the very many issues that they faced. I helped them set up their database and website, which in 2006 was very new for them. I helped them get email in their workplace. I trained them in how to maintain their website and maintain some of the computers that were also in the workplace. That opened me up to questioning the values of computing.

 
Sam: You went back and finished your degree?

 
Vanessa: I did. It was a very slow process. It took me until 2011 to get my degree. I started in 2003 and it took me until 2011 to get my undergraduate degree. I ended up taking courses in feminism along the way. I also took courses in management studies, communication studies, Earth and atmospheric sciences.

 
I went looking for answers that computer science wasn’t giving me and that meant that it extended the length of the time I spent in my undergraduate but I also had a much more well-rounded and eclectic education as a result.

 
Sam: Can you see a way of structuring a computer science degree that you wouldn’t need to go searching for those things?

 
Vanessa: Absolutely. Yeah. If you included more flexibility in the course offerings. If you allowed people to take classes from the … Every University will obviously have a different departmental structure but if you we’re allowed to take courses in the environmental sciences and have that count towards your degree. If you we’re allowed to take courses from women’s studies or indigenous studies and have that count toward your degree, I think that would help.

 
Sam: Having gone through the left-field way of eventually finishing a computer science degree. Then, you turned your back on all that and went to work in a bank. Is that right?

 
Vanessa: Well, no. I was also working throughout that entire process because I needed to be able to pay for my education. I had been working for utility company for a bit, so they provided the power and water services in my city. I also worked for the government in my province, both for the energy ministry and the environment ministry.

 
I eventually also tacked on a Master’s degree at the same time, to all of that. By 2013, I had earned a Master’s degree in interdisciplinary studies while working quite extensively in government and nonprofits and briefly, for-profits. Then, I quit all of that and went and worked in the Inter-American Development Bank for a few months before starting my PhD, so yeah I did get to the bank.

 
Sam: What were you doing in the environment ministry?

 
Vanessa: I was doing the same thing in the environment ministry and the energy ministry. I was the internal communications technology specialist. I helped set up and run their websites internally. I also was a member of a lot of projects helping employees feel more engaged within those ministries and to share their work because there was very low engagement.

 
People were very angry and upset about what they were doing in those two ministries specifically. They had the lowest engagement scores of any of the ministries that the government delivered us, so I was trying to help that.

 
Sam: What’s the structure of the government? Is the environment ministry to protect the environment or is it to provide a vehicle for extraction to go on? How does that tension sit?

 
Vanessa: Yeah. There’s no real clear answer there. You can take the slogans that the government offers at face value if you’d like. I believe that, at that time, the slogan for the environment ministry … The full name for the environment ministry was Alberta Environment and Sustainable Resource Development and they were stewards of Alberta’s environment. However you wanted to take stewardship, you could.

 
Sam: They’ve got all of the options stuck in that title.

 
Vanessa: Yes they do. Yes they do. That is a very carefully worded title, I think for a reason. I think also, what they pursued policy wise was very different than what many of the employees had in mind with that ministry.

 
Some of them were really keen on protecting the environment and making sure that Alberta had a long sustainable ecosystem with crop rotations and carefully planned forests that handle different animals as well as bugs and just had a proper forest ecosystem in place.

 
Then, there were others who were more keen on making sure that we could just move those issues aside to make oil development a more easy process. It was a highly conflicting environment at Environment and Sustainable Resource Development.

 
Sam: Were you based in the IT department?

 
Vanessa: No. I was strategically based in the communications department so that we had more flexibility to do what we wanted to do. The IT department was very structured and had a very slow approval process for everything.

 
When you want to help employees with engagement, you want to have quite a lot of quick movement at your fingers, I would say. You don’t want to be bogged down in bureaucratic structures that take a year just to get a website approved.

 
Sam: Interesting that you’re a person who’s clearly driven by social justice and the environment. Having coming out with a computer science degree, in which you’ve got none of that, except which you’ve managed to shoehorn in. Did you then manage to find a job that enabled you to do both or was it still more computing?

 
Vanessa: I wasn’t able to find a job that allowed me to do both, which is why I ended up pursuing that PhD that I’m pursuing. I’m still desperately seeking a way to reconcile the real social and environmental justice activism I used to be involved with and my computing career because they’re not two things that are easily reconcilable, as I’m sure you’re aware.

 
Sam: Okay. You said you were working for some non-profits as well or at the same time. What was that about?

 
Vanessa: Yeah. I also worked for another non-profit in Bolivia, which was called INFOCAL. It teaches people from low income areas, skills that they would need to be employed as a mechanic or doing food prep, just giving the skills that people from low income areas from Bolivia would need to find employment.

 
I was also involved with a bunch of groups that help immigrants when they moved to Edmonton, helped them get settled. I was involved with something called the Sierra Club and also briefly Greenpeace in Alberta. I was the provincial coordinator for the Canadian commission of UNESCO’s Alberta presence and they did work on biospheres and also education support in rural communities.

 
I was involved with just a peace organisation, the John Humphrey Centre for Human Rights. I was involved with a lot of different things. I didn’t sleep very much because in all of my spare time I went seeking the things that my job didn’t offer me.

 
Sam: What were you trying to achieve? I’m sure there’s a path to a theme in there, but I don’t know what it is.

 
Vanessa: Yeah. I think it put a lot of people off because I was doing a lot of things.   The pattern for me was trying to … I don’t know what the pattern is. I still don’t know what the pattern is. You can help me with that baby.

 
Sam: MSc in interdisciplinary studies, what was that about?

 
Vanessa: Yeah. It was actually an MA, a Master of Arts in Interdisciplinary Studies. It was focused on something called Human Security, which is a United Nations development programme paradigm for looking at any sort of issue that you may have, any sort of problem around the world.

 
There are seven pillars to this paradigm. We’ve got the economic security pillar, the food security pillar, to health security pillar, the environment security pillar, the personal security pillar, the community security pillar and the political security pillar. Those are the seven. You look in any sort of thing, you can even look at objects with those pillars and pick apart how they’re related to it.

 
How does this microphone affect somebody’s food security, their access to food? How does this microphone affect somebody’s environmental security, their access to safe tree spaces, green spaces as well as water? Water’s typically linked with environment. It could be also put under food. Political security is another one. How does this affect whether or not somebody is going to be arrested? How does this link to their community security, which relates to their friendships with people?

 
If I’m giving this interview now, now that this microphone is recording it, is this going to make somebody in my community hate me? Is it going to make them more accepting of me? All sorts of things. You pick apart anything with these seven pillars and that … As I was searching for, actually something quite like this paradigm, it came into my life through the Masters and it helped me see things differently. I think I was looking for something like it during my computer science undergraduate degree, which is why I went so broad with my extra classes and ended up taking a lot more than I needed.

 
Sam: In your Masters, did you relate that in any way back to computing?

 
Vanessa: I did in a couple of papers. I also related it to media systems because I feel like in a lot of … Media systems and computing are connected and have been for quite some time, so I linked them to both of those.

 
Sam: What did you find?

 
Vanessa: I found some not pretty stuff. That’s where I first started learning about eWaste – eWaste is electronics waste, so what happens to your electronic devices when you throw them away when you get rid of them. It’s a massive issue globally.

 
It’s also where I first learned about some of the rare earth minerals that are in computing devices and the flows of minerals and materials that make up our devices. I had somehow not managed to put these pieces together before I got to my Masters. In part because I’d been distracted by the more common things that people are interested in.

 
Environmental issues, I had been interested in, so at that time it was a lot about oil industry in Alberta and also plastics in the ocean. Food waste was a big thing that people talked about but I hadn’t thought to link all of that with computing.

 
Sam: Because we don’t go out of our way to connect those things?

 
Vanessa: I think so. I think we definitely don’t go out of our way to connect those things.

 
Sam: We’re happily seeing these things as information appliances with no consequences, they just exist.

 
Vanessa: Yeah. I think some of the rhetoric around those appliances aids that by saying that we’re putting our data in the cloud. I’ve actually had conversations with people where they think their data is up in some cloud. It’s got nothing to do with the ground and the planet. There’s no physical place.

 
Sam: There’s no such thing as the cloud. It’s somebody else’s computer. People just don’t get it, do they?

 
Vanessa: Yeah. I think some of the rhetoric supports that, that they don’t want you to think about it in a way. That sounds very, like a conspiracy theory because … Yeah. It does. That’s not how I meant for that to come out. I don’t mean it to sound like there’s a conspiracy but I think the wording around the cloud, I think we need to change it. I think we have to.

 
Sam: What do we need to change?

 
Vanessa: I think we need to have some pretty open and honest conversations about what happens with our digital devices after they’re used. I think we also need to have some pretty open and honest conversations about what happens with our digital devices while they’re being used.

 
What is the cost of a Tweet? Why don’t more people know that? What is in the background of all of those Facebook feeds? How often are those algorithms making calls to a database on the other side of the planet and what cost does that have?

 
Sam: You finished your MA, then what?

 
Vanessa: I thought I wanted to go work for the United Nations, to try to tackle some of the big global issues that I had problems with, so I got a job at the Inter-American Development Bank, which is a smaller international development organisation. That was not a pleasant experience, so … I had also applied for some PhD’s at the time, thinking that perhaps I could spend some time researching the issues that I was interested in.

 
Sam: I’d like you to take this positively but I can’t imagine you ever thinking that going to work for a bank was a good idea, even if it’s a development bank.

 
Vanessa: Yeah. I completely agree. It was not the smartest decision, I would say in retrospect. I really actually desperately wanted to get out of the Alberta government, so I started looking for options and that was one of the first ones that came up.

 
When I worked in Latin America, actually the Inter-American Development Bank had a very good reputation. It funds a lot of very successful and very helpful projects around sanitation, around urban development. They support a lot of good work, even if they are a bank and-

 
Sam: On a continuum of not-for-profit Sierra Club through to corporate bank, where does that sit on that continuum?

 
Vanessa: Obviously, at the corporate bank end of things but they were at least a corporate bank interested in social justice and they really do support a lot of amazing projects in Latin America that would otherwise not have happened. Most of the bank is staffed by people from Latin America.

 
A majority of the people working at the bank are from Latin America and they find projects that they care about because they affect the people that they care about. That’s certainly a gross simplification of it and there are bad projects funded and there is money wasted, of course, but I had also just witnessed the exact same thing at the government of Alberta, which was a non-corporate public sector organisation that I thought should have been doing a lot more good and at times it was.

 
I was perhaps a bit lost and looking for answers and I thought that this organisation that had supported a lot of great projects in Latin America might have had some of the answers and they didn’t, so I pursued my PhD instead.

 
Sam: Okay. You decided to pursue a PhD.

 
Vanessa: Yep.

 
Sam: Where did you look?

 
Vanessa: In England because I was getting old and I didn’t want to spend eight years in Canada doing a PhD. That’s probably too honest. Also, England has a lot of really unique programmes, a lot of really unique interdisciplinary programmes, which is what I was seeking.

 
I didn’t want to go back to feeling like I was stuck in one discipline and just needed to study one thing. I wanted to be able to draw on all of my very different knowledge bases and experiences and work that into the research that I was doing.

 
I applied to a couple of different schools in the UK. When I met the people at Lancaster University, I immediately got along with them incredibly well. Their programme was the most radical of all of the programmes that I had applied to as well and it seemed like the right fit for me, so I joined them.

 
Sam: Which programme is it or what-

 
Vanessa: It’s called the High Wire Centre for Doctoral Training. It is a post-disciplinary doctoral training centre, which means we’re supposed to be long beyond any sort of disciplinary confines. The people that it has attracted, I think, share a similar set of values to me.

 
Sam: You took yourself off to England?

 
Vanessa: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

 
Sam: Then what? Did you know what you wanted to do?

 
Vanessa: Initially I thought that I would look at how digital technologies were being used in rural communities because sorry, I also grew up splitting my time between Edmonton and a farming community where my grandparents are based, in a small town in Alberta called Killam. It’s a side story, it’s not important. Anyway, I was interested in rural development so I thought I would see how digital technologies in rural development would be used, or would be linked rather.

 
Sam: You said initially?

 
Vanessa: Yes.

 
Sam: That didn’t last long then?

 
Vanessa: No. Part of the fun of High Wire, is that they actually tell you to get rid of your initial idea when you enter. You go through this year-long process of basically being put in a blender with all of these other people from different backgrounds.

 
I worked with somebody who had studied philosophy. I worked with somebody who had run an arts organisation and was a poet. I worked with somebody from China who had become a service designer and an ethnographer. There’s a fellow from Mexico who does audio locative. It’s called Locative Audio Experiences.

 
I’ve worked with somebody who had done indigenous studies work with the Sami people in Scandinavia. I worked with a comic artist as well. We were all doing very different things and coming at our ideas with very different perspectives, so we were told to forget that initial idea that we had developed before we met all of these fabulous other people and to instead, come up with something new, with and amongst and even from them, so I did.

 
Sam: What else did you try in that process?

 
Vanessa: Throughout all of this, I was also involved with something called the Standby Task Force, which helps the United Nations during-

 
Sam: Of course you were!

 
Vanessa: Of course I was! I had briefly thought about studying crisis informatics, crisis response in digital technologies. I actually ended up co-authoring a book chapter about that and I am still involved with an EU project related to this.

 
I also dabbled in something called Smart Cities, which is a … Do you want to call it a paradigm? Can I call a paradigm? A current research and tech development industry paradigm trying to make cities smarter and by smarter they mean more full of technologies to help make people’s lives easier.

 
Sam: For someone that’s questioning the value of computing, pumping more of it into a city wouldn’t seem to be a sensible place to start.

 
Vanessa: Yeah. I think when I first looked at the marketing materials, I was interested in what they were trying to achieve by pumping more technologies into cities. I was very fortunate that right when I started to get interested in Smart Cities, a fellow by the name of Adam Greenfield published a book critiquing them. I read it and immediately connected with everything he said.

 
He’s a brilliant man and everybody should look into his pamphlet called ‘Against the Smart City.’ That started to help me unpick a lot of the marketing materials, which is mostly what I had been exposed to. There was quite a large body of research at the time, also about Smart cities, but it was mostly about specific digital technologies and how they would address a certain “problem” within a city. None of it seemed to make much sense to me. I was very sceptical and then Adam’s book crystallised a lot of that scepticism.

 
Sam: That’s what you’re not doing.

 
Vanessa: Yes.

 
Sam: What are you doing?

 
Vanessa: I’m now finally, very happily, looking at how natural resource scarcity will affect people who do HCI.

 
Sam: In which order is that? How natural resource scarcity-

 
Vanessa: I should say, might affect people.

 
Sam: Might affect.

 
Vanessa: Might affect people who are HCI researchers.

 
Sam: Why is that of interest?

 
Vanessa: Because I think that throughout this whole messy process I’ve realised that a lot of what I did in industry was HCI. I was working with people trying to design technologies to support them and help them, which is a lot of what HCI is supposed to be about. Also, I have always had this, not always, I’ve had for the past decade or so, this interest in environmental issues.

 
I crafted this research as an attempt to unify these seemingly disparate threads in my life and try to crystallise something for me. It’s a very selfish endeavour. I want to know what I can do in the face of natural resource scarcity, as somebody who does HCI.

 
Sam: What are you doing? Are you talking to people?

 
Vanessa: Yeah. I’ve done two phases of research. I’m in the middle of the second phase. The first phase I interviewed people who repair and maintain retro computing technologies, so Commodores, super Nintendo’s, Sega Genesis, BBC micros. I was trying to talk with anybody who still repaired those.

 
Then, now I’m talking with people who are currently active in HCI research and finding out what they do and how they do it, how they develop new things because I think the two groups are linked and that resource scarcity is one of the things that will link them.

 
Sam: Are you particularly looking for people who are thinking those two things, the HCI, the Human Computer Interaction Research or practise and environmental stuff, the natural resource scarcity?

 
Vanessa: Yes. Definitely. I work with people who are in sustainable HCI, which is, I think, the closest field dealing with these issues. I’ve also the Limits Community to be quite interesting because they are playing around with similar topics.

 
Sam: Because, while there’s a few people doing that, the vast majority aren’t.

 
Vanessa: Yeah.

 
Sam: What are you hoping to find?

 
Vanessa: This is not going to be a very satisfying answer but I want to find answers for myself. I want to have a good idea of how I will be affected. I think, because I’m learning that the HCI community is quite a small, close-knit community, I think I will start by sharing my research amongst people who do similar things.

 
Then, I will progressively get shoutier and try to integrate this into broader HCI discourses because I think that more people within HCI need to think about how what they’re doing relates to climate change and the environment.

 
Sam: You’ve done some of those interviews?

 
Vanessa: I have done some of those interviews, yes. I’ve got 17 done so far. I just started a couple of weeks ago. I intend to spend the next three months interviewing as many people as possible and having as many conversations around this is possible. Then, I will try to write it up.

 
Sam: Has anyone said anything surprising so far?

 
Vanessa: Yes and no. Most people aren’t thinking about, even if they’re going to maintain their data for the next 10 years because University requirements state that they have to, most people aren’t thinking about whether or not they should go back to that data and reuse it in an interesting way and how that relates to the environment or doesn’t, for some people.

 
The more interesting things for me selfishly, have just been the differences between countries and the pressures that they face to deal with these things and the pressures that they face to publish interesting new work every year. That’s not a thing that I was expecting. Perhaps that shows how young and naïve I am within the field. I was expecting it to be a little bit more homogenous than it has been.

 
Sam: The academic publishing cycle of identify a problem or define a problem, identify solution, do an intervention, measuring it and write it up real quick, doesn’t sit very nicely with-

 
Vanessa: No, it doesn’t.

 
Sam: -intergenerational equity with looking at changes on large scale over long time periods and messy wicked problems and so on.

 
Vanessa: Right.

 
Sam: Has anyone got a solution to that?

 
Vanessa: Not anybody that I’ve spoken with but I’m hoping that somebody might.

 
Sam: You’re hoping that there’s someone out there?

 
Vanessa: I’m hoping. Yeah.

 
Sam: When you do …

 
Vanessa: I think I have to hope that other people are thinking about this right now. I don’t have to hope that. I’ve had a lot of conversations with people who acknowledge that it’s a problem, they know that it’s a problem. They don’t like that there is this publishing cycle that they have to adhere to but they also would rather not be fired.

 
They would also rather not lose access to their immediate colleagues and peers if they don’t do this because you have to make a living as well. They feel almost a sense of discomfort and inability to do anything in the face of this particular challenge. The ones that are saying this to me mostly are ones who are not super senior academics. Most of the senior academics … That’s not true, I’m generalising. I want to take all of that back.

 
I had a conversation with a very senior academic from Cambridge. He’d given a presentation to a large group of people where he had been calling for more interdisciplinary researchers and he was saying that we need to rethink the publishing cycle and rethink how we value people within academia.

 
I went up to him after his presentation and I was like, “That was great. That really resonated with me. Thank you so much for saying that. I want to do an interdisciplinary generalist PhD. If I came to Cambridge, how would I do that without facing the pressures of this publishing cycle?”

 
He laughed in my face and said, “You’re too early. Come back in a decade. We might be able to accommodate something like that then but right now, no. Nobody’s going to allow you to do that.” To me, that interaction optimised the problem in academia. People want it, they will claim it to a large crowd of people. They will say, “This is the thing that we need to be doing,” but nobody’s making steps, they’re just deferring the problem to 10 years from now.

 
In many ways, that is the exact same issue we’re facing with environmental problems around the world, with climate change. “Oh, we won’t deal with that right now. Come back in 10 years and we’ll have a solution for that. In the next 10 years we’ll have figured it out but right now you’re too early to be trying to figure out the answers to these issues.”

 
Sam: You’ve been involved in a lot of different organisations.

 
Vanessa: Yes.

 
Sam: Probably more than anyone else on the planet and from a whole range of different areas mixing both environmental and social justice and culture and everything else. How come you came down to natural resource scarcity in your question?

 
Vanessa: Because you have to have a very narrow question to get your PhD done. It was a practical choice. If I could … The paper that I’m writing about the retro computing people, it’s actually far more broad.

 
It’s just resource scarcity that includes access to knowledge, that includes access to support, that includes access to the physical components that you need to replace broken things on your computer. For my thesis, I had to be quite narrowly focused so that I could finish it in the time and meet the requirements of this academic structure that is not ready for something more broad.

 
Sam: Do you have a go-to definition of sustainability?

 
Vanessa: I do not. I know that I probably should but I keep it quite flexible because of the broad variety of people that I speak with. Business sustainability is a very different thing than environmental sustainability, which is a very different thing than community sustainability, even though they’re all connected. If that makes sense. I wish that I had an easy to ramble off thing so that … I’m probably going to need to articulate one at some point in the near future and it’s going to be very difficult for me.

 
Sam: What do you say when somebody says, “We’re computer scientists, this is not our problem”? What’s your line into it?

 
Vanessa: I ask them typically, why they think it’s not our problem and then I ask more probing questions like, “Have you ever considered where we get the materials to build our computers? What happens to your data? Where are you storing it? What do you know about the broader context?”

 
They typically respond with more questions and then through that questioning process, I try to provide them what information I have on hand and that changes regularly as well because I think new research comes up quite regularly about the environmental impact of computing. Yeah. I try to fit that into the conversation as they’re responding to me.

 
Sam: On the scale I’ve just invented of one to 10, where one is optimist and 10 is pessimist?

 
Vanessa: Oh. Ah. Scales, again. I fluctuate between probably one and 10, quite regularly, even earlier today, depending on a lot of things. I have to be optimistic because I’m just in my 30s and I know I have a long, long trail ahead of me. I think if I was pessimistic all of the time I would not have the energy to get myself out of bed in the morning but I also see a lot of exciting things happening. I see cool projects like to Restart Project. I see cool projects like Fairphone.  Fairphone’s a great project.

 
Things like that give me hope and make me quite optimistic but then, talking with lots of researchers who don’t think about the environmental impact of their computing at all makes me quite pessimistic. Attending presentations by large search companies who talk about wanting to provide abundant access to the Internet for everybody and then not having them acknowledge that the environmental impact of that. That makes me quite pessimistic as well.

 
Sam: The whole paradigm, not just of computing but of technology and business itself really, is make new products and sell more stuff.

 
Vanessa: Yep.

 
Sam: Are we kidding ourselves?

 
Vanessa: By trying to think about environmental issues related to that?

 
Sam: No. About turning around that sight, that discipline, that science, that industry that’s behind it, the business.

 
Vanessa: I don’t really care if we’re kidding ourselves. I feel like somebody has to be saying it. Somebody has to be trying to raise these issues with big business or it will never change. I don’t know if in the long term this will matter, I don’t really care.

 
I just feel like I have to do it. It feels like the right thing to do and beyond that I don’t really care. I should care because I know that neoliberalism is the problem and that we should try to bring it down but I also know that I am one person.

 
Sam: Some questions to end with. What is your sustainable superpower?

 
Vanessa: Yeah. Laughter? Am I allowed to say that’s my superpower?

 
Sam: You just did.

 
Vanessa: Great.

 
Sam: I’ve written it down, so that’s what it is.

 
Vanessa: Perfect. I feel like I have to laugh in the face of some of the things that make me incredibly pessimistic. That’s probably what keeps me optimistic.

 
Sam: What’s the biggest success you’ve had in the last couple of years?

 
Vanessa: Oh, wow. Quitting my job at the government of Alberta and pursuing what I cared about.

 
Sam: Do you consider yourself an activist?

 
Vanessa: Yeah. That’s a question that I’ve always struggled with. I should, I should consider myself an activist and sometimes I do. Right now I don’t. I don’t feel like I’m doing enough. I’m just doing a PhD and some research. I don’t feel like I’m enough of an activist right now. I used to be.

 
Sam: Do you see a long-term future where you can be an activist?

 
Vanessa: I see a long-term future where I will be an activist. Yeah-

 
Sam: Do you think that you’ve cracked it? Through your myriad of things that you’ve done there’s been a separation between computing and your, let’s call that part that bit of the activism.

 
Vanessa: Right.

 
Sam: Do you see a long-term future where you’re going to be able to bring the two together?

 
Vanessa: Yes, and I’m trying to right now. I just submitted an environmental impact of computing … Yes. I just submitted a digital technologies and climate change proposal to the government of Canada, a competition about a month ago that closed.

 
I’ve made it to the top 10 for that particular competition, so there’s a very good chance that this submission I have is going to affect policy in Canada, getting the government to think about how their computing regime is linked to the environment. That’s my first step.

 
I intend to write a lot more for the public sector, more policy document submissions. I’m going to try to engage with some ministers. I intend to be more active about this specific subject, at least within Canada because we have recently had a government change there and I think that we now have the right people in place to think about these issues, so yeah-

 
Sam: How’s that going down in Edmonton?

 
Vanessa: I will find out when I’m home in about a week and I start chatting with some people.

 
Sam: What motivates you? What gets you out of bed in the morning?

 
Vanessa: Yeah. That’s a great question. What does motivate me and get me out of bed in the morning? There are the typical motivations that everybody has. I need to eat food and survive, those things. I need to have friends…like motivations, whatever.

 
I am motivated by … I hate this question. I’m so terrible at answering it. I should have an answer to this question and I don’t. I have an idea of what I want to see from the world and I’m motivated by pursuing that idea. It’s a broad, messy, complicated idea that draws in all of these different threads, so it’s not an easy thing for me to articulate. I do end up styling it a bit when I am talking with different people but that gets me up in the morning.  Pursuing that gets me up in the morning.

 
Sam: Maybe it’s always only ever going to be a broad, messy, complicated idea.

 
Vanessa: I think it’s going-

 
Sam: If there was a silver bullet, simple idea, we would have fixed it already.

 
Vanessa: I would agree. Yeah.

 
Sam: Good. You can stick with, “Oh, your answer was good there,” remember that one.

 
Vanessa: Thanks.

 
Sam: If you could wave a magic wand and have a miracle occur, what would it be?

 
Vanessa: I can give you a flippant answer or a very serious one.

 
Sam: Give me both.

 
Vanessa: Okay. I would wave a magic wand and we would all be transported to Jurassic Park and it would be a fabulous, exciting time with dinosaurs.

 
Sam: Except we would get eaten.

 
Vanessa: They need food too. Dinosaurs need food too. I’m not a species-ist, I’m not. Yeah. No, if I could wave a magic wand and make one thing happen it would be that the world would be a less unequal place for everyone and the environment.

 
Sam: Do you have any advice for our listeners?

 
Vanessa: The-

 
Sam: It’s this last question, it’s a free hit.

 
Vanessa: I know. I know. I’m sorry. The advice that I used to give when I was a mentor for young women entering computing was that you should feel and it’s such a piece of advice from a place of privilege, you should feel that you can pursue the things that you care about, even if they don’t fit into the nice, normal, clean, clear structures that are centred in front of you.

 
Even if you are an engineer, if you want to learn about knitting, go learn about knitting. If you are a nurse and you want to learn how to fix a car, go learn about fixing a car. That would be my advice. Pursue the things that you’re curious about and be curious. Be curious, please.

 
Sam: Thank you very much for joining me.

 
Vanessa: Yeah. Thank you. I’m sorry that was so rambled.

 
Sam: All of the best stories are a ramble.

 
Vanessa: Are they?

 
Sam: You’ve been listening to Sustainable Lens: Resilience on Radio, a weekly show on sustainability topics brought to you by Otago Polytechnic. The show is co-hosted by Shane Gallagher and me, Samuel Mann.

 
We broadcast on our title access radio, oar.org.nz and Podcast on SustainableLens.org. On SustainableLens.org, we’re building up searchable archive of conversations with people from many different fields who are applying their skills to a sustainable future. In our conversations we try to find out what motivates them and what it means to see the world through a sustainable perspective, through their sustainable lens.

 
Tonight’s sustainable lens was that of Vanessa Thomas, variously from Lancaster and Alberta, Canada. She’s a PhD candidate in the High Wire Centre and has worked in a lot of different areas, continually exploring the relationship between computing and, let’s just call it sustainability. Although, she didn’t.

 
You can follow the links on Sustainable Lens to find us on Facebook and you can listen to Sustainable Lens via iTunes for free and it goes out to lots of other party places. Please do like us on Facebook. It keeps the wolves from the door and it means we don’t have to go and get a job working in the oil sands.

 
That was Sustainable Lens. I’m Samuel Mann. I hope you enjoyed the show.

 
Categories
Africa computing India

HCI4Development: love for people

Nicki Dell & Neha Kumar

Samuel Mann with Nicki Dell and Neha Kumar [ 52:18 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

 

Working closely with people in a much more holistic approach to understanding this domain rather than thinking that technology is just going to be a silver bullet for a lot of these issues.

 

Dr Nicola Dell of Cornell Tech and Dr Neha Kumar of Georgia Tech join us to talk Human Computer Interaction for Development.

 

Sam: Welcome to Sustainable Lens – Resilience on Radio, a weekly show on sustainability topics brought to you by Otago Polytechnic. The show is co-hosted by Shane Gallagher who is not here tonight and me, Samuel Mann. Each week we talk with someone making a positive difference and we try to find out what motivates them and what it means to see the world through a sustainable perspective, through their sustainable lens.

Tonight we have two Sustainable Lenses, that of Nicki Dell from Cornell Tech and Neha Kumar from Georgia Tech. They both work in the area of Human-Computer Interaction for Development, both developing technologies for underserved populations, marginal populations and so on. Thank you for joining me.

Nicki: Thank you for having us.

Sam: We’ll start with Nicki then, shall we? Where did you grow up?

Nicki: I grew up in Zimbabwe actually, Harare, the capital city of Zimbabwe, that’s where I was born and that’s where I still call home.

Sam: What did you want to be when you grow up?

Nicki: That’s an interesting question. Most of my family is in the health area. My parents are pharmacists, my grandfather is a doctor and so I kind of defined my goals by not wanting to be in health and ended up choosing computer science because it was about as different from going into a medical profession as I could find at the time in Zimbabwe.

Sam: What did you think was going to happen if you did computer science?

Nicki: I wasn’t too sure. I think I didn’t really know what it was. It just sounded cool at the time. Once I started doing some programming courses, there weren’t very many at my school. It was kind of a small community. I decided that this was something that I liked a lot and I liked using code to build things that were useful to people, but I didn’t really have any idea that I would end up where I am today.

Sam: You did always think useful to people or is that something that you think you might be looking back on and thinking that’s what the goal was?

Nicki: Remember that the very first project that I ever worked on when I was fourteen working in a very old programming language called COBOL, that is from the ’70s, I was building a system for tracking pharmaceutical drugs to try and identify if people would take two drugs that had an interaction, whether or not they would end up combining. There was definitely from the beginning an interest in building systems that actually did something and that helped people.

Sam: That sounds suspiciously like a health front.

Nicki: I know. Well, I failed in my mission as you can probably tell almost immediately. That was the motivation was to not get a degree or to do anything academically related to health, but turns out that over the years I’ve progressed probably more and more towards doing projects that at least touch on the health domain in some way, so I guess I’m a failure.

Sam: And Neha?

Neha: Hi.

Sam: Where did you grow up?

Neha: I grew up in New Delhi. That’s where I was born and brought up. That is also where I still call home.

Sam: What did you want to be when you grow up?

Neha: I can’t really remember what I wanted to be. I think I just wanted to do math and that’s what I wanted to do in high school. When I went to college, it’s what I wanted to do. Of course my sister had done economics, and so I thought I could do math and economics and be exactly like her but then I ended up taking a different track.

My Mom was insistent that I take computer science or at least try it out. In my first semester as an undergrad I remember thinking that I’m just going to take this course so that I can finally just tell her that I don’t like it and that will be the end of it. Otherwise she’s always going to be telling me to take this course. Then I took it and I loved it, so that’s how I ended up doing computer science but I also did math.

Sam: Why did she want you to do that?

Neha: She thought it was really exciting. She thought, for whatever reason, that I would be good at it. I’m sure she thought that it was the thing to do because that’s what a lot of Indian parents think. She also felt like she would have loved to do it and she didn’t really have that chance, so she wanted me to try it out.

Sam: Where did you do your degree?

Neha: At Berkeley.

Sam: Straight on to?

Neha: I went on to do my master’s in computer science. That was at Stanford and then I went and worked at Microsoft for a couple of years. I was working on the PowerPoint team. At that point I was really excited because I was working on a product that I thought everyone knew and used and found useful, but it quickly got boring.

Very soon after, I was really kind of dying to get out. I thought I had my mid-life crisis. It was probably a quarter-life crisis but I just felt extremely unhappy, as I put it then, working on technology for technology’s sake.

The other thing was that I had always had an interest in education, so I had worked through my undergrad in an education nonprofit and working to support education projects in India. I didn’t know what else to do but thought I would try to use my computing skills somehow in the field of education, and that’s what made me go back to grad school.

Sam: What did you do then or where did you go?

Neha: I went back to Stanford to do my Master’s in Learning, Design and Technology and that was a programme in the School of Education. It was a fairly new programme at that point, but they had put it together to get people to think about how technologies could be useful in the education space. That was a one-year programme.

While I was doing that, I had the chance to do fieldwork for the very first time. I was in rural Karnataka in India helping another grad student in Berkeley with his PhD research. That experience is still my most favourite field experience, and will be I’m sure.

Sam: When you described it as Learning, Design and Technology, I was imagining it was going to be about designing, modelling things for use at places like U.S. institutions, but they had a much wider use in that?

Neha: No, they didn’t. Interestingly, I knew someone in that programme and she was developing a curriculum for teaching youth about HIV and how they could be more aware. I thought that that was incredible that there was a programme that would allow people to do that kind of work in their master’s research. I got involved with that project only because she needed someone who could speak with an Indian accent.

I was just doing voiceover, but when I found out more about her project I thought that was really cool and I need to apply to this programme and I need to do this thing. When I started the programme, I realized that I was the only one who had an interest in doing anything outside of the U.S. but I tried to do that anyway. That’s also when I applied to do my PhD to work with Tapan Parikh at the Berkeley School of Information. He had been doing work in this space for a long time.

Sam: What did you end up doing a PhD on?

Neha: My PhD was actually in ethnography. I was studying youth from marginalized communities in rural, semi-urban, and urban India and trying to understand what drives the adoption of technology in those contexts. My goal was to actually do a situated ethnography, understand how people were driven or why people were driven to using these technologies, and how technology could be designed in ways that actually resonated based on the uses of technology by these people. That’s how I ended up doing my PhD research and trying to understand how these youth were appropriating mobile technologies.

Sam: What’s the short version of the summary of the findings?

Neha: The findings, well what I found was that entertainment was of course the driving force. I studied how music was a motivator and how music and videos and soon the social networking were really driving adoption of these mobile technologies. What I studied and what I wrote about in my dissertation was really how these youth were a little driven by leisure and entertainment and ended up creating these informal learning environments for themselves and how these entertainment-driven uses were actually leading to development oriented outcomes.

Sam: Back to Nicki. Where did you do your undergrad education?

Nicki: I did my undergrad degree in the UK at a university called the University of East Anglia which is in Norwich. I did a year of it abroad from there in Canada at the University of Victoria in Vancouver Island.

Sam: You did?

Nicki: My degree was in computer science and most of the work that I did as an undergrad actually focused on computer graphics, which at the time I was very taken with. When I graduated I actually moved from England back to Africa to South Africa and lived for two years in Cape Town, working in an animation studio there mostly designing and creating digital content for kids. The animation studio has since put out several feature-length films that I think are Africa’s first feature-length animation, CG animation films.

Sam: Cool. That sounds fun. Why did you leave that?

Nicki: The entertainment industry ended up being not all that I thought it was going to be. I found that very quickly I also got a little bit bored with the actual day to day of the work that I was doing. In addition, it seemed to be a little bit more focused on designing characters that would sell and franchises and those sorts of things rather on kind of learning content or fun content for kids. I think I lost a little bit of the … The stars in my eyes were put out a little bit by that.

Maybe as Neha said, it was more boredom and the desire to go and see the world a little bit more and do some travelling. I quit my job in Cape Town and then I moved actually to South Korea and worked as an elementary school teacher for two years in South Korea teaching math, science, and English to elementary school children in an English immersion program in South Korea.

Sam: I wouldn’t have predicted you were going to say you went from Cape Town to South Korea.

Neha: Yeah.

Nicki: That’s why this is an interesting story. I mean, it was an incredibly valuable experience. In a lot of ways, it allowed me to travel extensively around Asia and Southeast Asia and to experience a lot of contexts that were different to Africa in a lot of ways, but also similar in many ways.

I also discovered that I did like teaching. Now having ended up as a professor, I think that was key in learning that being in a classroom and having kids learn or having students learn is something that I really enjoy. It definitely influenced my future career trajectory.

Sam: After that?

Nicki: After that I decided to conform to the rest of my life and applied to do my PhD in America. Interestingly, I was mostly motivated by not having lived in the States yet, so applying for grad school in the States was partly an excuse to go and live there for a while. My top choice of places to do my PhD by far was the University of Washington. They have a fantastic Computer Science department and were really very supportive from the very first email that I ever sent the administrator there. When I was accepted there, it was kind of clearly my top choice of place to go.

Sam: Did you know what you wanted to do?

Nicki: I did not. I started out thinking that I wanted to do more image processing and computer vision, which is when computers are essentially being able to see and interpret things in the world as we do. Although in my first year of the PhD I met my advisor, Gaetano Borriello, and he was working in this space. Initially I was incredibly skeptical.

I went to some of his seminars and I sat through some of the talks and I kind of thought this stuff is never going to work. The challenges are too great. The people are not going to be interested in this. Everything is going to break. It’s dusty. It’s dirty. Why are we even trying? This is all a waste of time. Then perhaps like Neha, so Gaetano kept at me for a while and I eventually started to come around and then I went and did some fieldwork myself.

I think as with her experience being in the field and actually seeing people and talking to them and interacting with them fundamentally changed the way that I thought about this particular part of computer science. Seeing their eagerness to embrace new technologies and to do things that everyone else was already doing, but more than that to do it for their own purposes and have the same opportunities that are enabled by digital devices and information really motivated me to stick with this particular area and continue to do work.

My PhD work ended up focusing on trying to see what we could do with the camera that comes built in to commercially available smartphones. If we can take images and videos using the camera, process them on the device to solve problems in data collection. Collecting data from communities and in settings where most data collection is still done on paper forms and to improve disease diagnosis by analyzing diagnostic tests for diseases like HIV and malaria.

Sam: This was about enabling communities to digitize their land records or…?

Nicki: Yeah. I really worked on two systems. One was digitizing data from paper forms. The basic idea is that you take a picture of a piece of paper using the camera on the device and it will register that image and automatically extract the information from that picture and put it into a database that can be queried and searched and analyzed in ways that paper can’t be, but continue to let people at the field level to use paper because they’re familiar with it. It’s cheap.

There’s a variety of different reasons why people like paper even in U.S. contexts, so universities. It’s everywhere. We wanted to allow them to keep using paper but at the same time digitize the data so that it could be useful for more decision making and higher level analysis that it currently wasn’t being used for.

Sam: My experience of paper-based forms outside the western world is that they’re incredibly intricate and really complicated things.

Nicki: Yes, absolutely and we saw that a lot. A lot of the forms that we ended up looking at, so we specifically focused on nongovernmental organizations or ministry forms and overwhelmingly there’s a huge push to convert all of the data into structured data. Most of it was looking at, for example, filling bubbles or check boxes or numbers rather than having fieldworkers write long passages of text. Developing algorithms and machine learning systems to interpret that structured data was a much more tractable problem and something we could find solutions for, using the computation power available on a mobile device.

Sam: Your field site for this was in Africa?

Nicki: The work that I did for this was based primarily in Mozambique. I was there, I did two deployments in Mozambique and we actually have another deployment that’s still going on in Malawi.

Sam: You had the advantage of coming from Africa, but you still had that experience of going backwards and forwards from a lab writing code environment to a field environment.

Nicki: Yes.

Sam: I’m not sure if “were you prepared for that is?” the right question, but is it hard?

Nicki: Absolutely. It was definitely very challenging. I think the first thing you learn immediately as you take something, a new system or a new device out into the field is that every assumption that you made was probably wrong. There’s a lot of you go back to your hotel room in the evening and redo everything hurriedly and hopefully in time for the next morning and the next day’s fieldwork.

There’s a lot of things that go wrong. I think something that always strikes me though is people’s willingness to put up with imperfection. From my perspective, I wanted the system to be perfect. I wanted everybody to be able to use it and have it never fail, never have any data collection issues or server issues or never lose internet connectivity. In reality, these things happen very frequently and people’s patience and willingness to persevere even when those things happen or the imperfection of the system is making it difficult for them to do their job is something that always struck me.

Sam: The second project you did was on diagnosis?

Nicki: The second project I did was similar. The first project was taking pictures of paper forms and extracting data. The second one was taking pictures of diagnostic tests and automatically interpreting the result of those. You would have a little plastic cartridge and that would have a series of coloured lines that would tell you whether or not somebody, for example, had malaria or HIV or syphilis.

It turned out that a lot of the nurses in the settings where they use these tests make mistakes. They don’t see faint lines, faint positive results. They don’t have a lot of eye care, so a lot of the older nurses, for example, don’t wear glasses when they should and there was a lot of positive tests being missed.

The idea behind having a system take pictures of the tests was that there would be a record of that afterwards. The system could interpret the diagnosis to either confirm the same diagnosis as the nurse or provide an alternate one that would suggest maybe do another test and get another opinion. Taking that data and then transmitting it to a database that was accessible to the Ministry of Health for them to start doing some disease surveillance and outbreak detection and those sorts of higher level decision making.

Sam: Now, the paper that you have presented at this conference is a meta-analysis of a lot of work done in HCI for Development, HCI4D. Before we talk about that, I’m having such a good time listening about your actual projects both of you. Let’s carry on doing that for a bit and then we’ll talk about the work that you came here to talk about.

Nicki: Absolutely.

Sam: Neha, what sort of work have you done since you graduated?

Neha: Since I graduated, I had the chance to be at the University of Washington where I was a postdoc in the same group that Nicki was doing her PhD.  That’s how we first got to know each other and started to work together. The project that I was doing primarily during my postdoc was actually operationizing my dissertation findings, so trying to see how media practices that I had observed and written about in my dissertation, how those could be leveraged in maternal health contexts in rural India.

There’s a project called Projecting Health, which I’m still working on though remotely that was started at the University of Washington. The goal of that was to use videos that were created by the community for the community and of the community for training or teaching mothers, the new mothers, how to feed, how to take care of their newborn infants. That’s the project that’s been going on now for more than three and a half years in rural UP in India.

Sam: That involves teaching people how to make the videos to start with?

Neha: Yes. In the beginning there’s a workshop of one or two weeks. We’re going to do one again soon, but the project started with that. There were NGOs that we were partnering with in the field. The staff from the NGOs were shown how to create videos using these low-cost cameras and then how to edit these videos, and also the process of storyboarding, so how they could take a health message and turn that into a video that wasn’t purely instructional, but also had like a little bit of a story in it.

They appropriated that process to then create these ten minute, fifteen minute videos which were really kind of short Bollywood films, I would say, of people within the community and trying to get at how … I mean, there were certain topics such as exclusive breastfeeding or institution deliveries or family planning methods. These are films that are kind of revolving around those topics.

The health workers are the ones who are responsible for getting this information, these films out to the communities. The staff of the NGO is responsible for creating these videos and for auditioning people, so bringing them into the cast of these videos and such.

Sam: Has it worked?

Neha: Has it worked?

Sam: How do you tell?

Neha: Well yeah, how do you tell? That’s a great question. I think that’s a really important question to ask for any project in this field. I think that the key point here is that we’ve been partnering with PATH, which is a global health organization. They have been responsible for doing the baseline, the end-line surveys to kind of see how the project has been progressing, what are the issues from the health and behaviour change standpoint.

The folks at the University of Washington and me have been looking at the technology side of things, so how could we leverage existing technology practices. For instance, how people are using mobile phones to either create or watch these videos and how those practices could be brought into this system so that the community can then both consume and share this content with others.

Sam: For this conference, the first keynote Dayo Olopade talked about development in Africa. She talked a lot about the informality and so on of the work and those different things. The first question someone stood up and asked a question along the lines of, why should San Francisco care or how is this going to make money for San Francisco? It seemed to me that he’d not listened to the whole talk. Are people talking at totally cross-purposes?

Neha: Are people talking at …?

Sam: At cross-purposes, are people like not listening at all? How far away from San Francisco development is development for Africa and India and so on?

Nicki: Hopefully it’s something that is getting better particularly within this HCI community and at the conference that we’re at. We’re starting to see that by having keynote speakers like Dayo come and give the keynote, one of the great things about a talk like that is that it starts to sensitize more of the people that are focused primarily on results, which settings or the Silicon Valley setting and allows them to think more about the kinds of problems that happen in other parts of the world.

I think it’s starting to happen more and more and bridging those divides. Our paper, for example, is similarly trying to offer a perspective to the larger HCI community and say here are some of the findings. Here are some of the lessons that we’ve learned and that can inform the broader field so that we can start to have more cross-pollination of ideas.

Neha: One thing in particular that I would say that she talked about, which I think is really critical even for people in our community to kind of listen to and think about, is the agency of the people themselves. It’s not just that we are developing these technologies to help people. I think if we get into that job then there’s no getting out of it.

It’s not that we’re helping people, so to speak, because that kind of also carries with it a very paternalistic sense. I personally think that I’m doing this work for myself and not for anyone else that I’m trying to help, but also I think that that helps in seeing people for who they are and valuing things the way that they value them as opposed to imposing our own value systems and our own judgements on them.

I think that’s something that she talked about with this idea of Kanju, I’m not sure if I’m saying it right, but Kanju, which is similar to Jugaad in India. This idea that people figure out their way based on the limited resources that they have. Certainly we can develop technology-based solutions for them, but we have to be really careful that we’re not also imposing our own value systems on them as we do that.

Sam: You’re listening to Sustainable Lens – Resilience on Radio. I’m talking with Nicki Dell and Neha Kumar about HCI4D, Human-Computer Interaction for Development, of which you’ve just done a big study of hundreds of papers that have been written in this field. Tell me about that study.

Nicki: We wanted to have a moment in time in which we pull together the field and kind of take stock of the ground that we’ve covered so far as well as analyzing some of the challenges that lie ahead and how we can move forward as a community. I don’t think anyone has done a kind of synthesis like this for a number of years now, and so it kind of was a good time to do it. The theme of the CHI Conference this year being CHI For Good, it also felt like a good moment in time to do this particular work. I’ll let Neha talk about some of the details.

Neha: Well, I think that just the process of putting together repository of papers was really challenging. Initially it was just hard to figure out like where do we look to find these papers? We tried to do it in as a methodologically rigorous a way as possible to try to target a good number of scholars and asking them where to look for these papers, what work to look at.

Then we went through the process of actually looking through all of these hundreds of papers, brought the list down to two fifty-nine somehow. It would have been nice to have a round number but we settled on two fifty-nine and then did the work of actually going through all of those papers.

Both Nicki and I went through them separately then went through them together, try to come up with a table of which we’re hoping to then share with the community and we’re hoping also that it will be useful for them. This table basically captures what the paper is trying to achieve in terms of who it targets and where the work has been done, why or what purpose such as education or healthcare or internet access and such.

Sam: We don’t have the paper in front of us, but I’m sure you can remember the generalities. Where was most of the work? Where were people focusing?

Neha: Well, a lot of the work was done in India and I think one of the big reasons for that is that there’s a Microsoft Research Lab in India which has been turning out a bunch of papers ever since it was set up more than ten years ago. Also the fact that English is … You can pretty much get by with speaking in English. The government is friendly to folks doing this kind of work.

For a lot of those reasons, India turned out to be the most popular country. I think there were more than a hundred papers that were looking at work in India. Aside from that, what were the other countries would you say?

Nicki: I think the next two most popular countries were South Africa and Kenya. Perhaps for similar reasons, they’re a little bit more friendly to English-speaking research communities. One of the great challenges I think that were surfacing in some of the deeper analysis that we did was the issue surrounding language and this bias for countries where English is spoken.

For instance, there was a dramatic lack, I would say, of work that had taken place in Central and South America at these particular conferences. The question we got at the end about looking at more local venues if we have been doing an analysis of maybe the venues actually in South America where the content is in Spanish and people are reading it in Spanish, there would be more work there. The point I guess is that that work is being done but it’s not finding its way into our community and our conferences, probably at least in part because of the language barrier.

Sam: What focus areas are people working on?

Nicki: There were three that really stuck out as being the leaders. I think the first one was education which covered both formal education, so interventions or systems that were targeting schools and teachers in schools, as well as more informal education.

For example, by teaching people how to do house work so that they could get a job as a house keeper, teaching people about health practices and other information services. Education was first. I think second was access, which we defined broadly as systems that sought to give people access to computing, access to the internet, access to information through …

Neha: Also papers that were studying access, so how communities were accessing technologies and the internet.

Nicki: Social media platforms like Facebook.

Neha: Yeah.

Nicki: Then the third one was health. There was a lot of work that was looking at community health workers and maternal health and trying to use usually very basic phones to provide information to patients around good health practices. Reminding them to go and do clinic visits and those sorts of interventions.

Neha: I would say that some of these papers do actually fall in a couple of areas. It’s not just that they’re only education, they’re only health, they’re only access. They might span both health and education for instance.

Sam: How do people frame the problem? I don’t want to say that they need a problem for the paper, carefully avoiding saying that a city or town is a problem, but how are people seeing what they’re doing? What’s motivating them, I suppose?

Nicki: Yeah. I think there’s a couple of things. A lot of things have identified very concrete problems. Some of the higher level goals are, for example, set by the Millennium Development Goals or now they’re the Sustainability Development Goals.

Neha: Sustainable Development Goals, yeah.

Nicki: Sustainable Development Goals. One of those would be to reduce by half maternal mortality. You would then say in this particular country, the maternal mortality rate is whatever number and that’s high compared to the world average. We wanted to design something to see if we could reduce maternal mortality in some way.

Neha: It’s very much about identifying resources that you’re looking at that are limited in some way and then trying to make up for those limitations by using technology-based solutions. That’s the interventionist work, but there’s also quite a bit of qualitative, more interpretive work that looks at, in specific contexts, how are people engaging with technologies? How are they using them for education, for finding jobs, for accessing social media sites?

There are those sort of parallel tracks also because the people who are doing this work come from very different backgrounds. There are computer scientists. There are also social scientists. There are cultural anthropologists.

I think that one of the unique things about this community is that there are people from these different disciplines who are able to come together and work together and use different methods, which is not always something that you find in other areas. There’s been a fairly harmonious coexistence I would say.

Nicki: Just to add to that, something that I think our paper at the conference really surfaces quite nicely is that maybe a decade ago a lot of this work was much more technology-driven. It was how can we take technology and put it into these contexts and have it save them and help them?

I think certainly what our work has shown is that we’ve come a long way in recognizing that we need to actually contextualize it. We need to go there and speak to people and understand their realities. Working closely with people in a much more holistic approach to understanding this domain rather than thinking that technology is just going to be a silver bullet for a lot of these issues.

Sam: How do people claim success? Not how you’ve measured their success, but what are they claiming?

Neha: A lot of different ways I suppose, and that also goes back to the disciplines that people are coming from. If they’re in global health, for instance, or they work in education, for instance, then their metrics are a little bit different. Again, they might be looking very much at quantitative measures or they might be looking at more qualitative aspects.

Success is hard to measure over a short period of time. There are some projects that have tried to do that, but they are mostly the projects that have lasted for four or five years or more. There’s not that many of them still in our field and one of the things that we talk about in the paper also is this distinction between outcomes and outputs and what we’re trying to produce immediately with our research and what we’re aspiring to produce in the long-term.

There’s also the difference between just looking at engagement with technology as opposed to actual say learning outcomes in the field of education. There’s lots of different ways that people try to conceptualize these things, but success, there’s no single definition of it. It mostly comes from the disciplines, so HCI or education or health or development. I think it gets harder and harder in that, harder to measure success.

Sam: There’s always going to be a problem with doing academic research in a development type thing when we’re starting to talk about intergenerational equity and things taking tens of years if not longer, and the drive to get on the conference cycle, you’ve got to produce something in six months. The PhDs are lucky if they get to stay in the field for more than a few weeks.

Neha: Yeah.

Sam: Is that unsolvable or do you have any suggestions on how we could address that mismatch of timescales?

Nicki: There’s been a couple of different ways that people have started to do this. Certainly one thing that came up a lot and that Neha pointed out is this idea that we’re aspiring, for example, to reduce maternal mortality. What we can show in the short-term is that reminding people using SMS reminders, for example, will increase the number of times they go to the clinic.

You’re not necessarily showing them the whole outcome, but you’re showing some improvement in metrics that do actually matter. There has been a different way of doing this is that we know certainly of a few people who have then taken their PhD work and created companies or organizations around that so that they can do this in the longer term. I think there’s a large push towards trying to do things in a sustainable way, so having interventions or projects or systems that go on for multiple years.

Figuring out how to support that or how it can be self-sustaining is one of the big challenges that people are grappling with at the moment. Rather than just doing your three years of PhD work and then packing up and everything is over, how do you actually build capacity in these places and put systems in place that don’t require you to manage it and maintain it.

Neha: One of the things that I think has worked well with a couple of the scholars that I know the work of is that when they’ve been in the field, they’ve tried to recruit local students and tried to work with them. What happens then is that when they’re not in the field, the students can still continue working. Certainly having Skype has helped and being able to work remotely or conference remotely.

Those are also some of the things that people have tried. I would say that different programs also have different requirements. Being at the Information School, I was able to actually spend one and a half years, a total of one and a half years in the field before I graduated but that’s not something I think I could have done in several other programs.

Sam: Do you have a favourite study that you looked at, it doesn’t have to be one of yours, that you thought, “They nailed it”? Maybe it’s not an individual study. Maybe it’s a sort of approach or pattern or something.

Nicki: Yeah. We did actually ask about some of the work that the people we were talking to and the people whose opinions we really document in the paper. We asked about work that they considered to be exemplary research and there were a couple of things that really bubbled up to the surface.

One was a body of work that has been looking at how to create systems that enable low literate people or people who might be blind, for example, to engage over voice or through graphical text-free interfaces. I think a lot of the work that’s really focused on providing low literate or illiterate people with access to the same kinds of services and information that people have when they are literate was certainly one of the biggest things that came up when people were thinking about exemplary work in this area.

Neha: Yeah. I would say that in general the type of work that I find really inspiring is when people put in a lot of effort to understand a space using ethnographic methods. Looking at the entire context and not just technology for instance. Looking at the socio-technical contexts and then designing technology interventions that might address that particular population in their context, addressing their needs and so on.

There is some work that’s more recent that I think tries to do that coming from Cornell actually by Ishtiaque Ahmed who has been doing work in Bangladesh. I think that from a methodological standpoint that is really inspiring. There’s a few other programs again that we mentioned in the paper.

Like Digital Green, for instance, which started out as a research project at Microsoft Research back in 2006 maybe. Then they span off. They created a nonprofit. They are now expanding to something like sixteen countries. That’s definitely a success story. No longer a research project, but they have made quite an impact.

Sam: I have some questions to end with. I think we’ll do them, both questions for both of you. We just have to be quick. Do you have an idea of what your sustainable superpower is? I’ll give you the background.

We’re writing a book called Tomorrow’s Heroes. We’re trying to distil the work that people are doing. What is it that you’re bringing to this that we can say, “Yes, that’s a really useful thing. Let’s see if we can duplicate that.” It doesn’t have to be an actual superpower, obviously. Unless you’re going to animate yourself to get back to…

Neha: I’m going to say love.

Nicki: For her I would say diplomacy. She’s very, very good at fostering consensus among people with different opinions.

Neha: Loving, it’s not just about between people or diplomacy. It’s really just about bringing all of yourself to this work and really thinking about what you have to give, not just to the field but to students which is part of the job. It just has to come from that place of love.

It’s so easy to be discouraged by so many things in the field. People try to take advantage of you or people … I mean, all kinds of things can happen in the field. If you don’t go with that feeling by constantly sort of replenishing your love supply, I think it’s just very hard to do this work.

Nicki: She’s a hard act to follow. I mean, I think for me it’s interesting because the very first thing that sprang to mind was students. I think that particularly as an academic and as a professor, it’s really the students that you can work with and inspiring them to do the best work they can do and to be the best researchers they can be is really what I see as being my primary goal for the foreseeable future. I guess I would want my superpower to be helping other people figure out what their superpowers are. It’s very meta for a meta paper.

Sam: What is the biggest success you’ve had in the last couple of years?

Nicki: Getting a PhD. I think for me it’s been probably learning from people in this community who have been incredible mentors and incredible researchers. I feel incredibly privileged to know people like this and to know that they are there and that they’re also working in this space. As a community I think we can do interesting things together. It’s not really a success, but I think trying to get to know these people and network with these people. I don’t know, it’s not very well articulated.

Neha: For me it’s the students that I have. I feel extremely grateful to have them. There’s a good bunch of students that I have gotten to know over the past year and I’m just very, very grateful that they’re so motivated, so committed, so sincere in the work that they’re doing and that they’re willing to give me a chance as well, because they could be working with a lot of other people.

Sam: Do you consider yourself to be an activist?

Neha: Yes.

Sam: In what way?

Neha: In every way. I think this goes into even like my day to day job and everything, there’s a very strong sense of … I think this just comes from doing ICTD work that there’s just a very strong sense of this is the right thing. I’m sure that I’m not always the only one who is right.

I’m sure that various people are right in various different ways. If I do think that something is the right thing to do, then it’s very hard for me to deal with not being able to do that. Sometimes you do have to give up certain things, but that’s very hard for me to do.

Nicki: Yes absolutely. I think as Neha has said, most of the people working in this space are doing so often for personal reasons. I grew up in Africa, she grew up in India and this desire to try and make the world a more equal place is certainly something that we’re both very eager to work towards and encourage other people to work towards.

Sam: You’ve just answered my next question, but I’m going to ask it anyway because then you get a free hit. What motivates you?

Nicki: What motivates us?

Sam: What gets you out of bed in the morning?

Neha: Students.

Nicki: Yes students. Definitely I would say two things, one is the freedom to work on problems that you find interesting definitely is something that … One of the main reasons that I chose to go into academia was this freedom of choice. Fortunately for me, the kinds of students that also want to work on those problems are amazing students who want to change the world and who have deep dreams to do better things. Those two things together are really worth getting out of bed for.

Neha: Yeah, absolutely. Whenever I have a meeting, so Wednesdays are my days for meeting with students starting 9:00 and going until 5:00, and that’s just the best day I have. I can barely talk by the end of the day, but it’s just the best day of the week.

Sam: What challenges are you looking forward to in the next couple of years?

Nicki: Trying to figure out how to have more time I think.

Neha: Graduating my PhD students. I’m really terrified of that right now.

Nicki: Yes. Certainly taking on the responsibility for students’ careers and making them successful and trying to help them work on the things that they want to work on is probably the biggest challenge and the biggest responsibility that I feel at this point.

Neha: Having more people do this work and having the community grow and more and more people want to do this work and realize the importance of it. I think the other challenge that both Nicki and I are dealing with and will be dealing with is just having other people kind of see what we’re doing and think that it is relevant because certainly as activists we think it is relevant.

Sam: Hopefully as that community builds, those graduating students won’t find it necessary to do this as a hobby and find a “real” bit of computer science to do.

Neha: Absolutely, yes.

Nicki: Yes.

Sam: I think that’s going to be really important.

Neha: Yeah.

Nicki: Absolutely.

Sam: If you could wave a magic wand and have a miracle occur by tomorrow morning, what would it be?

Nicki: Wow, that’s a tough question.

Sam: If you don’t believe in miracles, I have a backup question which is, what is the smallest thing that you could do that would have the biggest impact?

Nicki: That’s an even harder question.

Sam: Okay, back to miracle.

Neha: No, miracle. You said miracle, right?

Sam: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

 

Neha: I would just make sure that there are like a billion jobs for ICT4D interested folks, so that they don’t have to think about what other things they should be doing or how they should be going and joining these tech companies to do other boring work.

Nicki: Yeah. I don’t know. I think for me the miracle is more centered on the work itself would be in education. I think in general education ultimately is the cure and the solution for all problems. Trying to have several generations of people instantly be educated and able to have the skills to solve their own problems would be my miracle.

Sam: Lastly, do you have any advice for our listeners?

Nicki: Be activists.

Neha: Be the change that you wish to see in the world.

Sam: Thank you very much for joining me. You’ve been listening to Sustainable Lens – Resilience on Radio, a weekly show on sustainability topics brought to you by Otago Polytechnic. The show is co-hosted by Shane Gallagher and me Samuel Mann. We broadcast on Otago Access Radio oar.org.nz and podcast on sustainablelens.org.

On Sustainablelens.org, we are building up a searchable archive of conversations with people from many different fields who are applying their skills to a sustainable future. In our conversations we try to find out what motivates them and what it means to see the world through a sustainable perspective, through their sustainable lens. Tonight’s sustainable lenses are that of Nicki Dell from Cornell Tech and Neha Kumar from Georgia Tech.

You can follow the links on Sustainable Lens to find us on Facebook and you can listen to Sustainable Lens via all the pod sorts of places including iTunes for free. That was Sustainable Lens. I’m Samuel Mann. I hope you enjoyed the show.

Categories
computing

Loyalty to devices, not just brands

christianRemy-01

 

Samuel Mann with Christian Remy [ 49:13 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Christian Remy is a researcher at the University of Zurich,   He researches attachment theory and considers how we can encourage loyalty to devices, not just brands.

 

Talking points
Christian: What kind of consumer electronics do people buy and how can we give them information on how to make better-informed purchasing decisions. We had some information back then, we thought we had some information on this later on, which turned out to be not the case, so that project changed, slightly changed gears in my PhD.

What I stuck with was studying people’s purchasing behavior, what kind of technology are they buying and why are they buying this? Then there was this entire research area around the replacement cycle; basically, so why do people buy a new mobile phone every year, when actually in theory there is no reason why it shouldn’t work for 5 years? If you look at it objectively, there’s lots of motivation to not buy a new phone, because you got accustomed to it, you have all of your data on it, it’s expensive, and all of this kind of stuff, but still people go on and buy a new iPhone every year, or a new AT&T phone, something, whatever, every year.

That got me into this obsolescence thing, obviously. You have this designed obsolescence discussion, which is the sort of paranoid, maybe true assumption that industry is building devices on purpose so that they break after 2 years. There’s this joke usually that a phone has a 2-year guarantee and exactly after 2 years and 1 day, the phone breaks.

Sam: The business model is entirely determined on selling more stuff.

Christian: Exactly.

Sam: They have to sell you that new phone?

Christian: Exactly.

Sam: Even if it doesn’t break, they heavily advertise the next one so you feel quite embarrassed that you’ve got an old one.

Christian: Yeah, and there is the social peer pressure, obviously, like, “Oh, my God, you still have the old phone like from last year. How dare you? That’s unacceptable, you need to have the new phone, 10SE, whatever.”

Sam: Now you have this sustainable viewpoint, is that the killer app? but is that the killer undoing of computing and sustainability that is so fundamental that we need to sell you a new computer, a new phone? Can we overcome that?

Christian: I would argue we can, because the industry itself actually, I see a silver lining within the industry itself, which is the move from selling devices, selling hardware, to selling services, which you see in all of this cloud computing that is coming up. Everything is moving into the cloud. You don’t buy a piece of software anymore, but you buy a subscription for a piece of software, and you have all of those different income strategies. Maybe those at some point can, for industry, make up for the effect of reduced revenue from selling new devices. I don’t know. Like I said, it’s a silver lining. It’s a little bit of wishful thinking, maybe, on my part, but maybe that’s the case.

I very recently, just before I came to this conference, read an article that actually there are signs for this rapid replacement cycle slowing down. I don’t remember the exact figures, but I think there were studies that in the U.S. people were replacing their phones every 14 months, on average, and I think that is slightly going down. It’s probably down to something like 17 months, and obviously at some point every market is saturated as well. I think in 2014 we were producing or selling 1 billion phones a year, and at some point everyone has a phone.

Sam: Have they perhaps reached a zenith of the stuff that they can pack into a phone that’s useful? There’s not many more things, perhaps, that they can put into it that’s going to make such a big difference to me?

Christian: You would think so. Obviously, every phone has a camera right now. Many phones have some kind of super-high precision detection thing, which can even do fingerprint detection and stuff like that. If the new phone doesn’t have any new features, besides just being 5% faster, then at some point people might also just be reluctant to buy a new phone, because they don’t really see the point. Yeah, that could be the case.

Obviously, as history has shown us, Moore’s Law and all those kinds of things that predict that technological advancement will always go on and go on, and go on, and there will always be new things, so maybe in 10 years from now there will be a new thing that needs to be in everyone’s phone, which proves us wrong.

Sam: Yeah, I’m just trying to think about what else are we carrying. You see those pictures of what the phone has replaced, the desk and the typewriter, and the camera, and everything else, but not carrying that much else. I bet there’ll be something else, won’t there?

Christian: If you told someone in the ’80s that every phone once would have a camera, they would be like, “Why? I don’t have a camera with me? I don’t think … ” I don’t know, ask 100 people in the ’80s on the streets if they have a camera with them. I don’t think there would be that many people, so the camera became an essential part of the phone now, even though it hasn’t really been something that everyone has been carrying with them. I think it would have to go beyond just what people have on them, but what artefacts of technology are you using in your everyday life?

It is an interesting discussion. It’s sort of dangerous, because we’re doing the job for industry to find the new thing to carry on obsolescence, almost.

Sam: Yes, but now we’re at the point where we can argue that it’s not going to carry on. Is it a problem that we can say actually that that problem is going to fade away? You’d have to be brave to say that, wouldn’t you?

Christian: Yeah, brave or maybe naïve. I don’t think just sitting back and waiting for the problem to disappear is a good strategy. I’d rather like to be proactive, obviously, and my research has been trying to do that. Yeah, rather than just sitting there and waiting for the problem to be…

Sam: That’s what you started with when you went to Zurich. Then where did you go?

Christian: Yeah, like I said, obsolescence was the kind of issue. Then one of the things that I found out, that there are so many motivators for people to buy new phones, but what are the motivators for people to actually keep their phones? Then I looked at research, and there is actually so much in the research domain that already tells us strategies on how to design devices in a way that people don’t throw them away as easily. There’s lots of stuff about augmentation, so, for example, how can you reuse technology later on?

We have met some people here at the conference, actually, who took their old tablet just as an e-book reader, even though it wasn’t 100% functional anymore. You can, obviously, resell devices like a second-hand market, and then my kind of direction of the research is rather something about ensoulment, or emotional design, as Don Norman called, or attachment framework, which is exactly what I’m focusing on. How can we design devices so that people really get so attached to the particular device that they don’t want to replace it? That’s what I was focusing on.

The thing is, like I said, the research has already been done. Those frameworks exist, but I saw it as my goal of my thesis to bring this to product designers, so that’s what I took. I took this framework, this knowledge about how to create attachment, how to foster attachment, and gave this to product designers and asked them to create a piece of consumer electronics, a tablet in particular …

Sam: Okay, so emotional design or attachment design 101, go.

Christian: 101, well, it has some criteria on how to achieve this, so one of those is, for example, engagement. If you have a device that, when you use it, it creates some sort of … You’re engaged in using it. The way how you interact with the device really is fun and enjoyable; that’s something. Memories is a strong facilitator for attachment. When you look at your device and you remember, “Oh, I’ve used that at this conference. I’ve used that on my vacation, and I really don’t want to get rid of that,” because those memories are connected to the device.

We usually don’t see this connected to devices, but actually to other physical objects, like there’s studies of people who keep old cups, for example, with some kind of labels or whatever on them for many decades, because they remember them or something. Those are the kind of criteria that …

Sam: Isn’t my attachment to the stuff that’s in the device, not the device? The photos that I’ve collected migrate quite happily around my progression of, my series of devices.

Christian: That is exactly the difference between the kind of attachment I’m talking about and the attachment that already exists, because marketing has done a great deal of this research, now to foster attachment, however, what they’re doing is brand attachment, or it’s called “brand loyalty,” in marketing speech. What I’m rather doing is, I sometimes call it “device loyalty,” because rather than just, “I really want this next Samsung phone, or Apple phone, or iPhone, obviously, I rather want to keep this particular device.”

For example, that’s an idea that came out very recently, that someone had just yesterday. What if a phone would have a casing made out of wood and then as you used the phone, obviously the wood gets a different patina, a different look and feel, and it feels very personalized? If you were to buy a new phone, yes, you could take the pictures with you and put on the new phone, but it would definitely look different, and it wouldn’t really feel like your phone. It’s kind of like an old wallet. You know, if you have an old wallet that’s …

Sam: I was about to say that what’s working for me is that my phone, I’m just holding it up in front of me here, looking at it, my phone is attached to my wallet and for me that’s the thing that’s made such a huge difference. I used to lose all the time, misplace all the time, both my wallet and my phone. Having the 2 things joined together means that it’s working for me, and I really, really like this solution. I’ve seen others, and there’s other things that work as well. For me, this 100% works.

Christian: What are you actually attached to? Are you attached to the wallet, or to the phone? It looks to me like you could easily just replace the phone and buy a new one, as long as it fits the form factor of this particular wallet.

Sam: I’m attached to this combo.

Christian: That’s interesting.

Sam: Just thinking about it, I said it’s perfect, but it’s not quite perfect. You see here … Sorry people on the radio, see here that I’ve drawn lines here, and those lines are to remind me, when I put my cards in, I have to put the strip in on that side, because I went through 2 or 3 cycles of breaking cards by putting them in on that side and having the magnets that hold it close, breaking the magnetic strip.

Christian: Oh, there’s a magnet in there?

Sam: Yeah, there’s a magnet that holds that closed like that …

Christian: Ooh.

Sam: … but, once I fixed that, and maybe that’s one of those things about the attachment is that I’m able to modify it to suit me.

Christian: That is a perfect example of attachment through customization, because you personalized this. This is not only like some kind of wallet you’ve found worked really well for you, but you actually modified this to suit your needs. You made some modifications to it and even if I had exactly the same one, it wouldn’t have those personalized marks there, or maybe if I make the discovery and I would put them on there. This is like not just finding this particular brand of wallet and that particular design, but actually just this one is very individual, like you wouldn’t find a second one.

Sam: Actually, annoying, as you said this particular brand. It’s not branded and that has meant that I can’t find a replacement.

Christian: Oh, my God.

Sam: I can’t go into a shop and say, “I want the something, something one,” because it doesn’t appear to exist. I can’t find it again.

Christian: Which is obviously very difficult for consumer electronics, because they’re very much on brand.

Sam: Yeah, and there’s 2 things. One of them, it’s changed my behaviour in 2 ways. One of them is that they little bit that goes around the corner here on the outside of it moves down. As it’s aged a bit it moves down and it covers the camera. Whenever I go to take a photo, I have to remember to do that, to move it out the way. It’s only a little thing, but whenever I get somebody else to take a picture with it I forget to tell them and the picture has got a big shadow across half of it, but I don’t mind, because I remember to do it. I rarely take a picture that I forget to do it, so it’s almost like it’s a personalised …

Christian: That reminds me of another criterion, which is learned functionality, which usually refers more to technological things, but that’s kind of like you learned the particular way on how to use the technology in accommodation with this wallet, which is something that you probably have a certain value assigned to this, like, “I know how to use this.” Like you said, it doesn’t really bother you, so it’s fine, but it you were to buy a new wallet or a new phone that would all of a sudden have a camera positioned slightly elsewhere, and then you have to learn a new behaviour, or learn a new functionality. That would be off-putting, and maybe it’s another reason to be already attached this particular wallet and this phone.

Sam: Another thing about it is that it didn’t actually suit me at the start, and I had to change my behavior in a significant way because of it, and that is because it doesn’t have a place for coins. It quickly prompted me to avoid coins like the plaque, because I’d end up putting them in other places, in pockets and things, and then I’d spend them to get rid of them, because I don’t want to carry coins. I like this. It works for me, except that I had to quite quickly wean myself off coins.

Christian: Well, maybe not too bad, as long as it works.

Sam: Maybe I’m talking myself out of this, but it bizarrely works for me. You mentioned the form factor before, so this is a form factor for an iPhone 5. Not that I’ve needed an iPhone 6, but if I get an iPhone 6, I also have to replace this.

Christian: Yep.

Sam: I imagine if somebody was to give me an iPhone 6, I might solve that problem, but I’m certainly not in a rush because of it.

Christian: Yeah, so that’s a good point. Actually, I don’t remember one of the designers that we did the study with, actually had an idea to that; maybe. Off the top of my head I don’t recall it, but it would certainly be something that we would go back to have … What am I looking for? The kind of peripherals that you have, like the casings, like in the ’90s we had casings for phones and stuff like that you could switch off the keyboards and stuff like that. Now every phone has a bumper, I think they call them bumpers for the iPhone, so maybe those kind of things can also be used in combination to create this kind of attachment. Yeah, could be. Could be potential.

Sam: The companies don’t help the situation by changing, primarily for technical reasons, but, for example, when they changed the big plug on the iPhone and the iPad to a little one, to the Lightning connector, the microphone that we’re currently talking through has got an adapter and for some reason they still haven’t provided a Lightning Adapter for that device. I have sellotaped to the output from the microphone the adapter to go into the Lightning, so I’m kind of like, “This microphone works for me. It’s much, much better than the microphone on the iPad itself.

Christian: Right.

Sam: Where did that lead you, that work?

Christian: Where did it lead me? Now, as I’m finishing my work, as in writing up, it’s kind of a double-edged sword. It’s very interesting because, obviously, it’s both very interesting and very well-received, like even at previous conferences I’ve met people from industry, who actually said this was very interesting, but at the same time it’s also very challenging. I always come across those arguments. It’s kind of like this dilemma that, yes, attachment is great and probably people want to be attached to their personal belongings, especially something as expensive as a phone, but also the industry and economy works against that.

That’s the dilemma I’m facing, but in my future work I would say, in my outlook, I’ve taken this prerogative stance that maybe this is all changing in the future, hopefully, I’d say, as I said before, with more and more upcoming services structure that we’re moving more into companies providing services rather than just hardware.

Sam: Those deals that you can get, certainly in New Zealand and I’ve seen them in the U.K., so presumably they’re wider, where instead of buying a phone you buy the phone service with the company, the advantage of doing that is that they promise continual upgrades. The other way that they have moved to that phone as a service is by doing what we would think is the wrong thing.

Christian: By giving you an entirely new phone every year, you say?

Sam: Yes.

Christian: Yeah, right, so obviously that’s not what I’m thinking of. What I’m thinking of is more like the entire area of modular phones, which has been proposed, I think, first time 10 years ago. More recently, we’ve seen them coming up more and more, and also being more successful. The Fairphone is just one of them, it’s like the very popular one, but there’s Phonebloks, there’s Project Ara, there’s a couple of phones that are coming out and offering those modular things.

I guess we were looking at this, and rather than just giving you an entirely new phone, they would give you the option to … “You have this subscription-based thing. If a new phone comes out, we promise you we’ll just give you the high-resolution screen and you can switch it.” Obviously, the best way would be if you could switch it yourself, because what else would give you more satisfaction than if you could replace something in your phone yourself, rather than just send it somewhere and you get a new phone back, or you get a new part of the phone back?

I think, again, that’s something where we don’t know what the future holds. I certainly hope that it goes into this direction, that’s it’s into the modular phones instead of just replacing entire devices.

Sam: Is this the work that you’re extracting these sorts of themes and calling them as patterns?

Christian: Yeah. I think there is a lot of patterns in there, because as you have said, moving entirely into services, have modular phones, have re-user phones, so you give it someone else after you personally are not using it anymore, for whatever reason, maybe augmenting a device by using it for something beyond its intended purpose. After some of the functionality breaks, maybe you can use the tablet as a picture frame on your cupboard. There are a variety of patterns in there that I see emerging, that could be potentially very useful for us in the future.

Sam: You initially started out stumbling into computer programming by solving your math problems with computer programming. Are we going to be able to solve sustainability problems with computer programming?

Christian: Good question, difficult question. I don’t think that’s a yes or no answer here. I often like to say we are part of the problem, and that’s why I think we have an obligation to be part of the solution. If you look at this conference here, there are 3700 people, I think, around here, and they’re all striving for innovation. They are all, not all of them, but many of them are striving to find the new technological development that brings HCI, human-computer interaction, as a field forward, that brings computer science forward.

New technology is being developed and this obviously contributes to obsolescence, because, as we’ve talked about before, 20, 30 years ago no one would have thought of a camera being on a mobile phone. Maybe in 20 years from now we have something in our pockets that doesn’t look at all like the mobile phone, but it’s something that is super-obvious and we all need then. Maybe that’s something that is appearing here, now, in computing research.

That’s why I think we are part of the problem. This obsolescence is brought upon the society by our computing community, and that’s why I think we need to try to address this issue.

Sam: I’ve thought of an app that we don’t have yet, and that’s if we could take a pill and be filled up with some nanobots. It would be continually monitoring our health from the inside and our phone would be connected to medical specialists and it looked after us. That’s a compelling reason for buying a new phone. I’m sorry, even if I like the device, that would be a thing that would say, “Sorry, old device, you’re gone,” so, are we kidding ourselves?

Christian: Maybe we are, I don’t know. Maybe related to what you mentioned, there’s actually a piece of research that actually talks about, I think they’re called “insertables,” I don’t know, things you put under your skin. We’re almost turning ourselves into robots, as one of my undergrad instructors about HCI used to say, “There is no human 2.0. We can always change technology. We can’t change humans.” Maybe that’s not exactly true, because maybe the future will actually be …

Oh, my God, I don’t even want to think about that, but maybe it is something like that. I don’t know if I want to upgrade something that’s embedded in my skin every year, even if I have it.

Sam: It would hurt.

Christian: Yeah, exactly, so nope, I’d rather not.

Sam: As we get closer to that cyborg thing, we’re going to be more attached to it, because it’s me.

Christian: Yeah, it’s a part of us.

Sam: Maybe that’s where I’m going with my wallet. It feels like it’s mine, it’s part of my identity, hopefully, anyway. Other people might not recognize it.

Christian: It certainly does, yeah. I hope that we are going into a future where we don’t replace the synergy all the time, and maybe also it’s the same discussion we have about peak oil, that in 20 years from now we don’t have enough oil anymore for the entire world. The problem is we have been saying this for 50 years from now, so maybe the same thing happens at some point to some of the materials we are using in technology, that we will run out of them. It doesn’t really look like that, but maybe at some point we will be forced for reasons of availability of resources to change our entire production cycles of those things.

Sam: If you could either go back in time or change it for the people that are doing now, what would you change in your undergrad education? Would it have been beneficial and would it be beneficial for the wider crowd to have more sociological work, earth systems? Is it worth trying to get that into computer science?

Christian: I think so. I have to be honest, when I started my undergrad, I had to pick a minor. It was called “application subject,” or something like that, and one of them was psychology. I was like, “What? What’s the connection between computer science and psychology?” I totally didn’t see that, and obviously once I took HCI courses I was like, “Yes, I see the connection. I want to change,” and I couldn’t change anymore because the European system changed to Bologna and there was lots of political reasons involved, so I stuck with physics, which is obviously very different to psychology, but now I see this, I personally would have liked this.

I personally would say, yes, it would be great if we would give everyone at least the opportunity to more realize how much this all back-feeds into the society. What we do in terms of technological advancement, it also might change society for the better. I don’t know. The thing is that I don’t really know if many people see it that way, especially in undergrad when you start, like me, very naïve. You start and you want to program stuff. You study computer science for a reason. Not everybody is really interested in this. Not everyone really wants to do this. I think it would be great to have more sociology and those kind of things in the curriculum, but how, that’s a challenge, how to get people hooked on that.

Sam: Maybe we need to get better at selling those connections to psychology and whatever else to computer science, in this case, but then there’s the challenges you just raised, that the students want to be doing computer science. Like you, they’ll say, “What’s the relevance of this?”

Christian: Yeah.

Sam: Do you think there’s a killer app out there for sustainability?

Christian: Maybe, but if so I don’t see it. If I saw it, I would be developing it. I would go home and start developing it, but I don’t really see it, unfortunately.

Sam: We’re writing a book of these interviews. We’re calling it Tomorrow’s Heroes, as if we were looking back at people who are doing good, and let’s described those as heroes. Even if people don’t want to be described as heroes, we’re doing it anyway. How would you see your sustainable superpower? What’s the special thing that you’re bringing to us?

Christian: Ooh, wow, that’s a lot of responsibility put on one. Obviously, as I’m writing my PhD thesis, it all comes down to the question like summarize the thesis in one sentence. Like I said, I think the research is already there, but just trying to connect the research that’s out there to practitioners that then apply this in everyday life, and in product design, hopefully, at some point, that would probably be what I would say. Obviously, like you said, I wouldn’t like it to be called like heroes or a superpower.

Sam: What’s the biggest success you’ve had in the last couple of years? You’ve almost written your thesis. I think that is a success. I’m going to name it for you. I think getting to that point of saying, “Right, I’m writing this, it’s nearly done.”

Christian: Yeah, yeah, I guess. It took me quite a while to find a spot in research where I really feel like, “Okay, that’s kind of resonating with the community.” The problem is when you’re doing a PhD, you’re doing this work you’re looking at every day for years, and you’re kind of like, “Everything is so obvious. This is so obvious, what am I doing here? I’m just saying the obvious things.”

Then you talk to other people and at some point they’re like, “Oh, that’s really interesting,” and they show some sincere interest in this kind of work. I think identifying those kind of spots, and obviously that culminates in a PhD, so, yeah, I would agree.

Sam: Do you consider yourself to be an activist?

Christian: I would love to say yes, but I have to say no.

Sam: Okay, there’s 2 questions in there. Why would you love to say yes, and why do you have to say no?

Christian: Because I feel like we need more activists, we need more action. Like I said before, just sitting back and waiting for things to happen, to turn out to be better, isn’t really what we should do, but it’s just more convenient to do exactly that, so I could do so much more besides my research, obviously.

Sam: What motivates you? What gets you out of bed in the morning?

Christian: That depends if it’s a work day or a weekend. I think one of the great things about doing a PhD is that you’re doing work that you really enjoy. I think that that is always something that I’ll look forward to. Yeah, that’s actually one of the things that kept me from writing in the past few months. I have so many other things that are so much more interesting. Obviously, everything else is much more interesting than writing up this piece of research.

Sam: Including doing the dishes?

Christian: Yeah, yeah, everything, cleaning your house top to bottom.

Sam: What’s the biggest challenge you’re looking forward to in the next couple of years?

Christian: In my personal life or in general?

Sam: Whatever you like.

Christian: Figuring out what to do next, honestly, that’s kind of the thing, because I have no idea where it’s going to be in one year from now.

Sam: If you could wave a magic wand and have a miracle occur by the time we wake up tomorrow morning, on San Jose time, what would that be?

Christian: Just one? We talked about so many problems here and we had this great workshop over the past 2 days, where we had about 100 problems that we put on the wall. Solving some of them would be awesome. I’m not going to go for the very cliché like world peace, but something like … Obviously, I have a vested interest in my PhD research, so solving some of those issues with the magic wand would be amazing, yeah.

Sam: Lastly, do you have any advice for our listeners?

Christian: Act responsibility, think responsibility, yeah, maybe just be aware of what your actions are and what they imply. Like I said, activism is a big thing here, but that takes a lot of commitment.

 

This conversation was recorded at CHI2016.

Categories
computing energy

Footprints of digital infrastructure

danielSchien-01

Knowing the impact can be used to start a conversation, to reflect on choices.

Samuel Mann with Daniel Schien [ 55:34 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Dr Daniel Schien is an expert on the footprint of digital infrastructure. We talk about his background – Informatics in Berlin, developing software in Australia and teaching computing in Afghanistan. His research has involved the environmental impact of the transformation of the Guardian newspaper. He also teaches teaching environmental management and is involved in Green Hackathon.

Talking points

I was always interested of questions of ethical concern

Curriculum was technical content but it was informatics so questions of ethics and intersection of computers and society, not just the numbers.

Understanding of the consequence of future business

In making a comment on the environmental impact of a service we need to be clear that we are not making a comment on its value from another perspective. …that technology might be liberating…we are not claiming that environmental sustainability is the only criteria that should be applied.

Systems methods of dealing with the complexity of so-called wicked problems.

How can you deal with this wicked problem with no single optimisation criteria

The goal is to make sure that communities who are often marginalised in decision making…when other organisations are dominating the decision making, marginalising some actors. There is a potential here to make a change for good by teaching environmental managers -giving them the tools to involve everybody who is affected.

The Green Doors was a project to see how can we use ICT to make other practices more sustainable

(Superhero) Because I’m a computer scientist I’ve got an understanding of the anatomy of digital systems, but I bring into this a passion for sustainability, and an awareness of processes in the social domain. That’s a good starting point for doing this interdisciplinary work.

(Success) Daughter.

(Activist) No, my work takes place professionally. Activist compromises professional activities.

Guardian, making a difference…environmental footprint, I hope that other organisations follow

Chance here to create more awareness for consumers about the sustainability implications of consuming these services…a decision support tool. Knowing the impact can be used to start a conversation, to reflect on choices. The goal is not to blame people, to make people feel guilty, but to create more awareness and understanding.

By exposing themselves to criticism they should be applauded while other players are shying of that risk.

(Motivation) Chance to make a difference

(Challenges) having impact from academic position

Miracle: The biggest environmental concerns I have are around transportation, domestic heating and consumption.

Advice: trying to remain cool and aware, not too frantic about trying to play academic game

Categories
computing education

Searching for Sustainability

danRussell-01

Searching per se doesn’t have ethical force, however, it can help you to make a better choice, as a consumer, acting, behaving and voting.

Samuel Mann with Dan Russell [ 57:36 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Dr Daniel Russell is a research scientist at Google where has been working in the area of search quality, with a focus on understanding what makes Google users happy, skilled and competent in their use of web search. As a “search anthropologist” he works to understand how people use the tools of technology to amplify their intelligence. So, the big question for the expert in search, how can we better search for a sustainable future?

In searching for this positive future we first consider the role of questions in operational aspects (eg how we can better find information on positioning solar panels), and behaviour change (should I take the bike to work today?), then moving onto the harder questions of sustainability, values, wicked problems, contested concepts, answering ethical dilemmas expanded in space and time and so on.

This conversation was recorded at CHI2016, where Dan was co-chair the CHI4Good programme.

Talking points

Possibility in computing to build your own universe

The beautiful AI systems I was building didn’t work for people…I need to sort this out…so I switched to human computer interaction, the art and science of making things simple to use, so people understand them,

The paradox is that the simplest things are the hardest to design – the things that seem straight-forward and obvious are often not.

What is expert now? Looking up is not the same as knowing

Helping to teach the world to become better searchers.

Searching when it the question gets complicated…that’s the million dollar question

Should is always “with respect to…”. The big shift, as we get better at machine learning, we’ll get better at interpreting questions. But “should”, that’s a tough one.

(Google is us, changing our identity as it changes our relationship to knowledge) yes, but this has been going on forever, when we invented writing we changed our relationship with knowledge, an externalised relationship with information

(Contested concepts – will we see answers to climate change in the same way we currently see movie listings?) Even things like stream flow rates can suddenly become contested. The choice to put it on the homepage is only for pretty clear topics.

(Who is deciding that clarity? Machine or people?) Great question…machine.

(Does Google have expectations of journalistic integrity?) We do our best to have an objective ranking function…we do not consider political intent or perspective.

Searching per se doesn’t have ethical force, however, it can help you to make a better choice, as a consumer, acting, behaving and voting.

Rise of availability of information combined with ability to find it. You now have a chance of finding out.

(Restorative socio-ecological transformation, what will be search’s contribution?) Helping people find out what is going on, discovering underlying causes.

To discover that the aquifers are well managed is a straightforward search. To discover that they are not is a more complex search – not for the least because there are people that don’t want you to know that. But at least now you have half a chance. You can, through Google, access many more information sources than you possibly could before. This is transforming. For sustainability, for making responsible ecologically valid choices. Now you can find out.

Is the truth drowning in the swamp of information? It is incumbent on you as the information consumer to be able to distinguish between publishers.
That’s why I teach people how to search.

One of the fundamental skills is how to discriminate information.

Searching for a positive future. There’s nothing intuitive about this. My big message is it’s easy to search, but it’s easy to get it wrong as well. Let me show you some skills that will make you a better, more accurate, more powerful searcher.

(Superpower:) The ability to teach. What I mean is teaching – a grand a glorious profession, but as a superhero powerful teacher would be someone that can communicate complex ideas easily and efficiently and help you understand what that has to do with your life.

Its relatively straightforward to teach someone how to do, say, calculus. But how do you teach judgement, how do you teach that skill of assessment?

A hero teacher would be someone who could come in and say ‘the world is big and complicated, there’s all sorts of trade offs, there’s stuff going on…let me show you, let me work with you to help you understand how to be a reasonable interpreter of what you see going on in the world so that you can get at the bottom of it.

Judgement requires that you have a bit of self knowledge. You have to understand why am I making this choice in this particular way.

(Success) Mooc. I’ve had 2.8 million students taking my class – teaching people how to do this kind of search.

(Activist) I am active in local things – local politics, local sustainability, local Sierra Club. I’m not a trans-national activist. I think as I get older I might become that.

Multiple political perspectives are respected at work, and there are a lot of politically active people there – so it’s not a barrier. So yes you can, but there are also well understood boundaries around political speech, and activist speech and activist action,

There’s also an interesting distinction between what the corporation does and what individuals do. Google as an organisation is very environmentally conscious.

(Motivation) It sounds trite, but teaching people to do this stuff really does. Communicate ideas…what we’ve been talking about, this is my passion, this is what motivates me. And music, and running, and being out in the world, diving. If I was to be a transnational activist, it would be about coral reefs, ocean acidification and so on. That motivates me in a negative way – it makes me sad and I want to fix it.

(Challenges) Packaging up a lot of these experiences and skills…a book.

(Miracle) Fix the oceans.

(Advice) be a discriminating consumer of knowledge that you find.

Categories
computing design values

Values: Working on problems that really matter

Batya Friedman

Multi-lifespan information systems, starts with premise that there are certain categories of problems that we’re unlikely to solve in a single human lifespan.

Samuel Mann with Batya Friedman [ 1:06:28 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Dr Batya Friedman is a Professor in the Information School at the University of Washington. She tells us how her early interests in science, arts, education and politics all came together in value sensitive design. Batya’s recent work in multi-lifespan information systems has lessons for sustainability – in particular, the implications for intergenerational equity.

Talking points

Interested in how people organise society, and the choices they make, what sort of society we want to build and what tools we want to build – those themes have stuck with me.

Science museum…exploring residues that we create when we do any kind of work. What is the work we are doing, and when does that justify the kinds of waste we are producing?

I was teaching in a situation where we had 8 computers for 15 kids, traditionally the teacher would allocate them, but I turned it around to the students a and said how are we going to share these? And they came up with policies, and we would vote on those, and them implement them, and then reflect… the policies started to change as the kids saw what the implications and consequences where for this small community, and so they took those things into account as they allocated the resources they were using. It put in their hands this issue of resource allocation., and they were able to have their own conversations about what’s fair, what’s just, how do we create a caring society in our classroom around these kinds of resources. There wasn’t any whining about access to technology, there was mature conversation. The students learned to express what their needs were, what their desires were, and to listen to what other kids’ needs and desires were
graduate

(Thesis) Kids understand canonical things – stealing a bike, a car – the nature of the harm is clear, but when you move to the digital realm, it isn’t so clear to them what are the natures of the harm.

When we have new technologies and the conventions around them are not well understood, the adolescents I worked with fell back on moral reasoning – trying to identify harms, and then trying to identify the harms, and then coming up with a way of acting in the world that was respectful of the harms that they understood.

Human beings are tool users, and our tools become a part of what we do and how we go about being in the world. So there’s no strong delineation between a tool-use act, and a non-tool use act

We act in the world and we act with our tools

And as we act in the world, we ask ourselves these questions…am I hurting somebody by engaging in this action, is this fair…what’s the nature of justice, am I building community, am I being a good friend to somebody, am I being generous? These questions these qualities are part of how we want to be in the world, and technologies are an integral part of that.

The issue isn’t whether there is technology of a tool there, the interesting moment is when we introduce a new technology that gives us a very different way of acting or being in the world and we are unfamiliar with the ways in which it will intersect with all the other things we are doing.

By being conscious and intentional about some of the value implications that we are more likely to have effects that are positive or at least to avoid some of the more egregious negative impacts.

Designers of technology don’t control all the aspects of how these technologies will be appropriated and used by society, but they do control some of the important pieces. And if we don’t attend to those then I think there may be inadvertent consequences where had we been attentive, we could have been proactive on something positive.

Does the technology embody values? – yes, the architecture of the technology makes somethings easier and other things harder if not impossible.

Historically the greatest protection on privacy was just the amount of effort it would take. Rules and practices evolved from a time when you had to physically go down to the courthouse and look at records if you thought something was amiss, but it was accessible to you, you could examine them if you thought there was good need. Now you can do that search from your house, with very little effort. That balance between privacy and transparency, that delicate balance in place for a certain kind of technology, that has been changed. So the question for society is what balance do we want between privacy and transparency, then to put in place the technical infrastructure so we can experience that balance that we think is beneficial for society.

We hold a multiplicity of values, and they all sit in delicate balance with each other, just like the strands of a spider-web. If you pick up one value, put pressure on one part of the web, all the other values move with it. Two things can be in tension and together that tension holds them up. These tensions and how they sit in relation to one another is the nature of human life. So the question is how do we hold onto them. Take something like calmness, or the desire to be left alone, and also the desire to be part of community, also to be able to be responsive if someone has a need or emergency. We value all of those things simultaneously – holding onto that is the design challenge.

We can question the presumption about building more and more widgets. How many microprocessors do people have? We can ask is that sustainable? In therms of the resources, power? We’re building things now with the presumption of 24/7 access to power and network, and people are increasingly putting data and activities that are critical to their lives into infrastructure that needs to be on and functioning 24/7. We created this idea of 24/7 ubiquity, we can question that.

Multi-lifespan work, starts with premise that there are certain categories of problems that we’re unlikely to solve in a single human lifespan.

Multi-lifespan because of the nature of the problem: 1. limitations of the human pscyhe…lasting peace…first generation agree to keeping children alive, second generation grow up in environment where they don’t feel threatened, maybe third generation can really build a peace. 2. tears in social fabric (Rwanda) 3. Environmental timescales

We need to recognise that these problems and solutions are going to unfold over longer periods of time.

How do we engage in this longer term design thinking? We can help people understand where their lifespan fits, how that relates in to environmental time-frames, so you can begin to see how decisions in your lifespan can begin to affect and mesh with what might be going on on an environmental timeline. We can think about doing supporting people doing co-design 20-40 years in the future. What might be the systemic conditions in 40 years? then we can bring people back to “well what if we made some different design choices now?”

We’re at the start of the development of systems of international justice – just like where democracy was 200 years ago.

While can be discouraged about how our societies are evolving, we can point to areas of real progress, and that’s really important to hold onto

Take skeptism seriously, then go build something

Starting to do the work, slowly doing the work as best one can, trying to having eyes open to complexity, then over time one has a proof of concept about how you could make progress.

Working on problems that really matter is important

You could spend your life working on things that you know you can solve, but if you and others don’t really care about those problems, then maybe there’s a better way to spend your time.

If you work on something you care about, even if it is really hard, and you fail, or you don’t make progress, at least you know you are working on something that really matters.

For me if failure isn’t a actual possibility, then it doesn’t meet the criteria of a problem for me to work on.

There are things that really matter to us where we know we can do better.

(Learning from stone carving) Continually working the whole, without ever being able to see the whole. I’m comfortable going into a project not knowing where it is going to end or what it will look like at the end. You can use principles and be adaptive in the goals, and as you move into the project you can understand better what the next move will be. If I try and prescribe things, the solution ends up being brittle.

(Superpower) Systemic thinking and approach, it is organic and in some ways spatial or visual, and listening..to context, situation, to technically what is there, and then wait until I know how to act. Time is crucial. The same with research, we can be designing a system, and we don’t know yet what the next right thing to do is.

(Success) 25 years ago even saying you were working in values and technology was considered out there, now there are many people doing this.

(Activist) Not in a traditional way, but I am beginning to think of myself as a public intellectual, playing that role.

I would like to participate more in a public conversation about what kind of science and technology we should be engaging in. I would like us to be more thoughtful about which technology we should build out – that is a choice. What sort of society do we want to live in, what technologies do we want to support that?

Yes, I do work on margins, and those margins are always moving. What are the hard questions, but also what are the socially ethically important questions with respect to our tool use and infrastructure building?

(Motivation) Curiosity about each day

(Challenge) Crossroads…art, some big ideas, but also pushing at those margins, multi-lifespan work. And contributing to public discussion… different forms of expression…theatre, animation, artefacts…stories.

(Miracle) Peace

(Smallest thing biggest impact) Sleep: I mean that, seriously, a lot of aggressions and micro-aggressions…when people are exhausted they get cranky, if everyone on the planet could get a really good night sleep on the same night and reset

Advice: Slow down. Get a good nights sleep and wake up in the morning without an agenda, just opening your eyes and looking at the world and what it is offering and take that opportunity. Our society is so goal directed, we don’t see what is in front of us.

This conversation was recorded at CHI2016.

Categories
children computing design

Children as design partners in technology and sustainability

Allison Druin

We’ve got to start with the large to be able to connect the dots of excellence.

Samuel Mann with Allison Druin [ 37:59 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Professor Allison Druin is a Professor in the iSchool and Chief Futurist for the Division of Research at University of Maryland. She has been a leader in the the use of children as design partners, which has been widely applied, including to digital libraries for children (eg ICDL). She is currently seconded to the National Park Service, where she is Special Advisor for National Digital Strategy.

Talking points

With an inventor scientist father and an artist mother I’m a mix between the two of them

My undergraduate degree is in graphic design…A wonderful thing, I always say to people, if you want a real degree: problem solving, creativity, exploration – go get yourself a degree in design, it’s incredible.

I realised that I think like a designer -sometimes visually, sometimes problem solving – but really it’s about what are the parameters in front of me, how can I think out of the box to make something better than it is today.

Then at MIT, in my head I was translating from design-speak to technology-speak.

Not just how technology affects children but how children affect the design of technology

I was a big proponent – back when this was a bit of the lunatic fringe – of really hearing the voices of users as designers, as participants, full participants in the design process.

Rarely do you get a chance to ask kids who don’t have a lot of experience with technology, how do you tell stories? Why do you tell stories? What matters to you with stories? and then to work with them to figure out what that means in terms of new technologies.

It’s a people-led process – its understanding the needs of people, the desires of people, it’s also understanding how processes work, and how they are broken. And where you can bring solutions in that make change

We’re an information-centric world – the scale and speed that information moves, and we need better solutions, we can’t just keep doing the same things faster.

When we do amazing research for a particular population, it spreads like wildfire to what the rest of the world needs

The sooner you can get kids into the design process, the better the outcome will be, and the shorter the process will be in terms of back-end testing.

The notion of cultural tolerance was always underneath the surface of everything we do.

It was never about how do we make kids better readers, it was always how do we help people think about each other, oh and by the way, make them a better reader at the same time.

National Parks Service…a long time partner…maybe it is time for me to come in and think about a national strategy

How do we make it so that kids have a lifelong experience with parks? The pre- and post- experiences can be enhanced with new technologies

Today’s kids will look harder at the mountains if they’ve got a cellphone in their hands.

They’re thinking deeply about what is it that I am doing so that then I can report back to my friends.

Kids have a hard time not being able to be reporters themselves, not being able to share that experience.

If we do let our technology separate us from our physical world too much, that is a bad thing, but with embedded, mobile, ubiquitous technologies we can have physical/digital switching seriously, without a context collapse.

So what sort of language do we use with the Park Service about digital?

What does it mean to have 24/7 to the front door of the parks? Traditionally we built larger and larger visitor centres with beautiful exhibits, but what happens if the mobile app is the front door?

What would it mean if kids could digitally tag a landscape – to tell other kids this is a really cool place to go?

The messages, themes, are really important – the parks are about stewardship, about learning. The parks are not necessarily glorified vacation spots.

The parks are our best idea in education – they’re about teaching the American public that we need to be stewards of our own environment, or else there’s not going to be an environment.

Traditionally we’ve not been able to implicitly share these themes – some administrations haven’t wanted us to focus on climate change or the science behind things. Thankfully in more recent times we have been able to say the science matters, climate change matters, how do we look to ensure we are preserving

This goes for digital too – how do we look to digital to preserve what we know and what we care about?

The first innovation of the Park Service was the campfire (talks), before that they were really just to protect the land from poachers. In the campfire discussions we started talking about the stories behind the wilderness, the culture and the heritage that we have.

(Success) People taking up the methods: children in the design process.

People don’t question why we need to have children at the design table anymore, they just question why we haven’t done it sooner.

(Activist) I think all good academics, researchers, thinkers, are activists. Because we have to share ideas, we have to share what we are thinking. And we have to convince people that what we are doing matters, is unique and truly is a contribution.

(Motivation) Being able to help make change in this world.

CHI Conference (of which Allison is 2016 co-chair) theme is CHI for Good.

Making a little bit of change is going to make the world a little bit better in the long run. It’s not about making money, it’s not about better law, it’s about making people’s lives better.

We’re in a field HCI Human Computer Interaction, that starts with humans,

I’ve never seen such a uniformly positive response to a conference theme in 30 years of coming to this conference.

(how will it stick, not just be the year CHI was good) People really care deeply about change, and keeping that activist-change idea in the CHI community.

We’ve found that the impactful research is where you create innovative technologies that have broad impact.

(Challenges) HCI at scale.

It’s not about one type of user, one type of interaction. How do we work for multitudes of users, in multitudes of contexts, with multitudes of data.

(Miracle) I use this question. My most favourite answer was from a kid who I asked if you could wave a magic wand in your library, what would it be? And he didn’t know what a magic wand was – he had learnt to read reading his Mom’s magazines in the beauty shop. Once I had explained – if you could just change something, what would it be? He said, “I’d put grass on the floor of the library”. I said “what?” and he said “I’ve always been afraid to sit in the grass and read a book where I live, and that’s what I’ve always wanted to do”. So if I could wave a magic wand, I’d give grass everywhere so kids could feel safe, to learn, to be quiet, to explore, to do whatever they wanted, to sit and read a book.

That’s the challenge – HCI, technology at scale. When I got to the Park Service one of my colleagues said maybe you should start with one small thing and grow it. But I said that’s the problem, we’ve been doing that for too many years, we’ve got to see the larger picture. We’ve got to start with the large to be able to connect the dots of excellence.

We do so many wonderful things in this world, but they don’t seem to be connected to the next wonderful thing. In those connections, that glue, that’s where change can happen.

Working with children as design partners – it’s the surprises that make it worth doing everyday.
Could I have imagined that a kid would ask for grass on the floor the public library?
What does that mean? Can technology help? I made a digital library that makes it as fun to do the reading as the searching.

(Advice) Be a futurist. If all of us collectively could not just try and predict the future, but really try and prepare for it. And in preparing for the future we do what matters today – and the rest is commentary.

My children insist I put up this one too:

Allison Druin 2

 

This conversation was recorded at CHI2016.