Categories
community conservation biology design education

Loving life: Taking action

Tahu Mackenzie and Harvey Penfold won Audacious this year for their development of PekaPeka – a movable, predator-proof bird-feeding platform designed to feed a range of native birds anywhere.   Tahu is the lead educator for Orokonui Ecosantuary, while Harvey is completing a Bachelor of Product Design at Otago Polytechnic.

Talking points

Teaching people what we can do, what’s been lost and what we can come back to.

10 years into a 1000 year restoration plan

(we asked both Tahu and Harvey these questions – you can decide who said what).

Sustainable:   Closed loop production cycle.  Emotional connection with nature as priority.  Emotional well-being in environment.

Success: Audacious.  Meeting Jane Goodall.

Superpower: Love. Thinking.

Activist: Yes.  Yes.

Motivation: Make dreams come true, working for yourself and provide a great home life.   I feel the most inspired, loved and powerful in nature – I would like everyone to have the opportunity to experience that.

Challenges: Growing business.

Miracle.   Remove predators.

Advice:   You can make a difference in so many different ways – however you passionately connect with the world, I’d encourage people to take action and feel good about it.   Design has made such a difference to me, but I didn’t do it for so long.  So if you feel like you would enjoy something then you should look for ways to make that happen. .

 

 

Categories
computing

Loyalty to devices, not just brands

christianRemy-01

 

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 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.

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.

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
game design gaming

Exploring possible futures

Josh Tanenbaum

How to use narratives as a way of exploring possible futures – both desired futures and frightening futures.

Dr Josh Tanenbaum Assistant Professor at UC Irvine. He runs the transformative play lab, focussing on the experiences of traditionally marginalised. We also talk narrative games and ask what can we learn from steam punk?

Talking points

Designing for character transformation in games

How do you design a game that gives people an understanding of what the experience of being transgendered? Or the experience of living below the poverty line? Or the experience of being racially marginalised. Without stereotyping or appropriating. It combines participatory design, designing within these communities.

How to produce empathy?

Games that are successful in transformation are not that those tat providing with knowledge – what games do really well is provide experiences.

“Tomorrow as it used to be” provides a retrofuture lens, that has values for sustainability, it does a really good job of re-appropriating technology.

Steam Punk struggles a lot with the fact that the era that it draws its aesthetic inspiration from is really politically problematic -it was the colonialist time, women were treated terribly, ethic minorities were treated terribly – it was not an era of equality by any imagination. But the retrofuturistic lens provides a means to critique those aspects.

The closest analogue is the Arts and Crafts movement, and if you look at Ruskin you can see that it was a reaction against industrialisation, against mass production, against mass labour, it was a return to handicraft, a return to individual practice, the Arts and Crafts returned to the ornamentation of baroque and Gothic, and steam punk returns to the ornamentation of the Arts and crafts perion in a fantastic bit of historical cannibalism.

You see the same ethos in the Steam Punk making where you see people say I don’t want my mobile phone to look like everyone else’s I want it to reflect something about myself. People are rejecting at the cheap plastic things that result from industrialisation – these material outcomes of mass industrialisation are no longer satisfactory or acceptable.

Steam punk is characterised by a sense of optimism. This can be problematic if people whitewash and sugar-coat the past. There are post-colonial and indigenous steam punk researchers that doing very interesting work.

Unknowable what is the right thing to do.

Right now we are living with the consequences of choices just being made in the Victorian era, the outcome of 150 years of “isn’t this amazing we have all this power now!” but not realising the consequences of the power that industrialisation gave us. Its more nuanced than simply saying let’s learn from the mistakes of the past.

Every technological epoch is unable to look past its own assumptions.

Previously inconceivable resource consumption.

Modernism believed that there was a knowable truth in the universe that if you designed things according to the principles of modernism, that you would produce something that was empirically and objectively good, and good for all people. But in the process it spackled over and covered over a bunch of historical beauty – it tried to reshape into the vision that it had, of this attainable perfection. And then the post-modern realisation that we were only designing one vision of perfection, and that this vision didn’t serve the majority of humans in the world. We’re still grappling with that.

We have an infinite diversity on this planet with an infinite set of optimum needs, how do we reconcile that with a system that’s been designed to produce material goods and industry… in a way that tends to be very homogenising.

Games allow consequence free exploration of alternatives.

(How can games go beyond resource use?) What explores spatial impacts? Minecraft. Experiments where resource areas are limited, quickly result in decimation of the game landscape. But in games there’s very little promotion of living harmoniously, as soon as you take away the resource frontier, most game environments fail.

There has been a successful pacifist WoW player – but he was so unusual he made the news.

Journey is based on helpful interactions, cooperation and a sense of connectedness to other people and the world around you.

We have sunk ourselves into spatially biased communication. And sustainability asks us to move more to the temproal bias (see Harold Innes – bias of communication).

Games to experience loss of agency – it’s easy to judge someone of not properly exercising agency when you have lots of it.

Situations where you are given only bad choices

(Success in last couple of years?) Captain Chronomek

(Activist?) More and more so. Activist is a title like “artist” in that you are one if you say so. Meaningfully express changes I want to see in the world.

(Motivation?) Doing more things I love. For a long time that was enough, but now we’ve got a kid on the way, that’s changed a lot of my motivation, it’s changed a lot of how I think about the future. Its very easy when presented with the realities of our current situation, our environment, to give in to despair, but the current situation is the result of people giving into the easy choice. So giving in to despair as the easy choice is not the right choice. If I can do work that in some way participates in the conversation that leaves a little bit more of the world for my daughter, then I guess its worth it.

(Challenges?) Articulate work in a way that attracts funding.

(Miracle? or smallest thing that would make the biggest impact?) Tell a story that could actually stir people to reexamine deeply held partisan biases, tell a story that would really stop and question.

(Advice for listeners?) Take ownership of what you what want to do in the world – its not enough to wait for other people to do it for you. You have to determine what your goals and values are, and work your ass off to acheive them. If enough of us do that, we’ll find the world that we want.

This Sustainable Lens is from a series of conversations at University California Irvine. Sam’s visit was supported by the Newkirk Center for Science and Society, and coincided with Limits 2015.

Categories
computing design

Usability:Sustainability

Don Norman

To respect the others’ point of view and try to understand it. This applies whether it’s warring nations, difficult negotiations in business or designing something for other people to use.

You know when a door has a label that says push (or pull) when it should just be obvious? That bad design is referred to as a “Norman door”. Don Norman is usabilty. And it turns out he is sustainability too.

Dr Donald Norman has for many years advocated user centred design. His 1988 book The Design of Everyday Things has been top of the reading list for both design and computing students for nearly three decades. Several other books include Living with Complexity, Emotional Design and The Invisible Computer. The question for this conversation, is how can we apply the learnings from Norman’s work to the design of systems for sustainability?

Talking points

A physical affordance is not what matters, what matters what it says to who is looking at it.

Great design is communication, which has its own form and its own function

Because its invisible we don’t have to think about it

How could we make people more aware of the source of their electricity? It’s not an easy problem, but its one we should be much more concerned about.
And how do we do that without getting in the way? It would be good to get a little bit in the way because we would like people to use these things less, some habits need changing.

It’s hard, really hard to change behaviour.

We are wasting most of the stuff, wasting things that is not doing nobody any good.

One thing that bothers me about the sustainability movement is that people look for easy answers. In the design world, its a standard thing that people ask your design class to come up with things that will save energy, so they come up with simple answers – we’ll use wood instead of some manufactured stuff, and we’ll have a meter that shows you how much hot water you’re using when you take a shower – and it’s all rather silly in my opinion. I want to work where I have the biggest impact, but the amount of water we waste in the household is trivial…in the US most of the water is used in industry and agriculture and evaporates before it reaches its target.

I want to do things that have the maximum impact, it makes people feel good to make sure you turn the lights off when you leave the room – and that’s good and I don’t want to say we shouldn’t – but when you look at the total amount of energy in the country, that’s just a small percentage.

Wicked problems, by definition – they’re wicked. Its often hard to define the problem, it’s hard to know when you’re getting an answer. But most of these (sustainability) problems are like that.

You’re not going to find a single thing to solve a wicked problem – it has to be a concerted effort.

We have to change the whole nature of business so they realise that they have an obligation. Business has an obligation to society, to where it lives. We once chose to believe that, but modern business schools have taught the importance of profit, and quarterly profit and benefit to the stockholders – but I’m more concerned about benefit to the world, to humanity. We have to figure out how they can do that in a responsible way.

(on systems and complex problems) We have to start thinking big. Question, step back and ask the biggest problem.

The scale has meant technology has had implications we couldn’t predict.

I decided I didn’t want the military money, and I stopped taking it. So yes, there are many things I would not do. I will not worth with cigarettes, I will not work with weapons.

These things we consider evil and the things we consider non-evil, the problem is there’s very seldom a sharp line between the two…as the example of lethal weapons highlights…students ought to grapple with that and think about it.

We owe it to students to cause them to think these issues through. That doesn’t mean we should tell them what they should think. But we should teach them how to think, how to examine the different sides, and how to determine what their response is.

One thing that annoys me is what we call human error. 95% or so of accidents are blamed on human error, on people. Nonsense. If it were 5% I would believe it, but when it’s 95% it means you’re not designing things that are appropriate for people.

We need to think of accidents as a rope of many strands, it’s the last strand that breaks that gets the blame, and usually that’s the person with their hands on the rope.

(can we think about extinctions and climate change as human error) That’s why the systems approach is so necessary for accidents and especially for sustainability. We look at the last thread that breaks – and say ‘I can reduce the amount of water you take while taking a shower’, or wood instead of metal or whatever – and that’s the easy answer and it might not be at all relevant, you have to ask, what does the system look like?

The technologist’s solution is technology – we’ll make cars that can drive themselves. But is technology the solution to all our ailments? No, and sometimes technology is the cause of those ailments, so it will take a mix.

I’m an activist, just not a jumping up and down activist. I certainly believe in the principles of sustainability, and I’m trying slowly to cause these changes to come about.

Challenges. When I look around the world it’s frightening. Global warming – look at how difficult it has been to convince people that it’s a real phenomenon and maybe do something about it if we start now. Peace for that matter – look at all the warring factions in different parts of the world.

(what can we take from his writings, Design of Everyday Things and so on, to apply to these bigger sustainability problems?) Empathy, to understand the other point of view. You have to design for other people, the consideration of other people, and other people are not stupid. If you have two groups fighting and disagreeing, quite often each of them are correct, but it’s from their own narrow point of view. You can’t come to some sort of agreement unless you understand the other person’s point of view…doesn’t mean you have to agree with it, but it does mean you have to understand why they are so vehement. And that’s the only way to come to a resolution. To respect the others’ point of view and try to understand it. This applies whether its warring nations, difficult negotiations in business or designing something for other people to use.

Whenever we do things, we should try to understand the other people, take into account not how people ought to behave – it’s so simple to give a lecture ‘this is what you should do’ – no, go and observe them, talk with them and understand them.

Take a systems point of view, don’t look at one simple thing, but look at all the interacting parts, life is complex and that means our solutions will be complex ones.

Categories
architecture design

Architectural games: designing complex emergent systems

Ann Pendleton-Jullian

It is not about how you necessarily design a finished object, but how do you design the conditions for that object to emerge?

Ann Pendleton-Jullian is an architect, writer, and educator whose work explores the interchange between culture, environment, and technology. She brings to sustainability her experience in architecture – but it’s not all about buildings. She says it is “not about how you necessarily design a finished object, but how do you design the conditions for that object to emerge?”.  In her studio she goes “beyond a complex juggling act of all the conditions” to adopt a ludic design process.

games by nature…are the way by which we push boundaries of the conditions that reality gives us, and in pushing boundaries – identity boundaries, physical boundaries – we test out alternative possibilities and they are very constructive for moving society forward.

it’s trickery, they’re designing complex adaptive systems without knowing they’re doing it at first

The four themes she consistently publishes on are:

  • emergent forms of architecture and urbanism
  • game design as a way to tool the mind to work with and design complex emergent systems
  • design and education innovation
  • architectural analysis and theory about anything that has to do with the intersection of culture, technology and the natural and built environment within a global ecology.
  • Until we have shifted from a narrative of guilt and fear to a narrative of desire it’s going to be a real hard thing to win

Ann Pendleton-Jullian was in New Zealand to give a keynote speech at HERDSA13.  The title of her talk was Upside Down and Inside Out. The Future of the University as a Design Problem.

Some of the works referenced in our conversation:

 

Categories
design

Mark Miller

Mark Miller is the General Manager, Applied Design Research Centre.

Shane’s number of the week: 1972 – the year when we were warned that the reactors used in Fukushima were reported as having a dangerous design flaw… and the warning was promptly ignored.

Sam’s Joined-up-thinking: As ground based beings we are good at thinking in two dimensions: backwards and forwards, left and right. We can cope with 3D, up and down, but not as well as birds. We can stretch to think of space-time as constituting 4D. Like the beings in Abbot’s Flatland, we struggle with dimensions outside our normal realm. Perhaps Sustainability is another set of dimensions: scale; cumulative time; system connections; and humility.

 

Air date:  17th March 2011