iPhone or Droid?

“What if I want something more than the pale facsimile of fulfillment brought by a parade of ever-fancier toys? To spend my life restlessly producing instead of sedately consuming? Is there an app for that?”

Better start producing…

Filed under: study , thesis

Master’s thesis proposal

How can we assist the developer to become self-visible in the interactive process of creating a user script?

Introduction

Eight years ago, I graduated with a social science degree only to end up working as a web designer. As a social scientist slash web designer, I speculated about the quirks of my profession. Why were some practices followed while others avoided? Why were some users won over while others lost? Why did some projects succeed while others failed? As web technologies (and by that I mean computers and internet connections) stabilized I found myself questioning less. After all, such speculations were discussed and apparently resolved in countless online articles and blog posts. Web designers and developers appeared to have a pretty good handle on how computers, websites and users worked (together). It seems to me now that web design and development has been effectively “black boxed”. Technologies are black boxed when they have stabilized, when users have been successfully enlisted and when innovators are no longer present (Akrich, 1992). It seems to me that these questions still exist. They are just harder to answer when they are locked inside a black box.

A shift has recently occurred in web to open these black boxes. A new, ubiquitous, web technology is entering people’s everyday lives in the shape of internet-connected mobile phones. This new, seemingly unstable, technology offers the opportunity to study, rephrasing Bruno Latour (1987), web applications in the making. As a social scientist slash web designer, I want to grasp this opportunity. I am interested in developers and I am interested in users (projected and real).

My research question is: How can we assist the developer to become self-visible in the interactive process of creating a user script? In order to fully explore this question, I will be doing some “deep hanging out” with developers through participant-observation. I intend to build a DigitalNZ iPhone application and take part in the DigitalNZ development community. I will analyze my own experiences throughout this process and I will interview other developers engaged in the production of mobile applications. Finally, I hope to develop guidelines for creating mobile applications that developers can use.

DigitalNZ iPhone application

DigitalNZ (www.digitalnz.org) is a government initiative led by the National Library of New Zealand/ Te Puna Mātauranga o Aotearoa in response to the New Zealand Digital Content Strategy. DigitalNZ aims to uncover New Zealand content such as images, audio, video and documents that are buried in the deep web (i.e. not indexed by standard search engines) and make them easy to find, share and use.

Digital content comes from a range of sources including New Zealand cultural and heritage, broadcasting, education, and government sectors; as well as local community sources and individuals. These contributors give the National Library permission to harvest, copy, host and store all or part of their metadata.

DigitalNZ has released an Application Programming Interface (API) that allows developers to create tools to search and return to users the various New Zealand content that DigitalNZ is aggregating. To date eleven applications have been built with the API. The majority of the applications combine (or “mashup”) with other applications such as Flickr (www.flickr.com), Google maps (http://maps.google.co.nz), SIMILE Timeline (www.simile-widgets.org/timeline) and Yahoo! pipes (http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes). All eleven applications are desktop applications that allow users to search and view, but not contribute or upload, content.

My idea is to create a DigitalNZ iPhone application that allows users to download DigitalNZ content based on their geolocation i.e. the real world geographic location of their internet-connected iPhone. Users would also be able to interact with content, and potentially other DigitalNZ users, by uploading their own content and attaching it to that geolocation. The application I intend to build is therefore unlike existing DigitalNZ applications because it is mobile and it is social: Two aspects of computing that I believe users have come to expect from so-called “web 2.0” applications (O’Reilly, 2005).

Why DigitalNZ? While I intend to build a real product that will be publicly available, this is not the end-goal of my thesis. The end-goal is to study the development process itself. DigitalNZ is therefore appealing in a number of ways. Firstly, the DigitalNZ API provides easy access to a large dataset. Secondly, DigitalNZ already has a small community of developers and users supported by a Community Manager. Thirdly, as an employee of the National Library, I am familiar with the DigitalNZ project and I know DigitalNZ staff.

The social shaping of mobile phone applications

In 1991, Mark Weiser from the Palo Alto Research Centre (PARC) published a seminal paper describing an embedded computing world that “takes into account the natural human environment and allows computers themselves to vanish into the background” (Weiser, 1991, p.1). Weiser called this “ubiquitous computing” or “ubicomp”. Weiser believed that ubicomp would liberate people from the desktops and jargon of personal computing so that they may focus on living rather than computing.

Almost twenty years later ubicomp is fast becoming reality. Computer processing is increasingly moving from desktops and servers into our streets, homes and clothing (Greenfield, 2006). Designers and developers cannot assume that ubiquitous technologies are neutral in and of themselves. Moreover, the streets and homes in which we deploy these technologies are not empty or neutral. People, other technologies, and practices already populate them. Mobile phones are a good example of a non-neutral, ubiquitous, technology that is widely used today: People, hardware, software, social practices, and legal contracts connect and produce mobile phones.

The idea that technologies are socially shaped has been explored in great detail in the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS) (Pinch & Bijker, 1987; Akrich, 1992; Latour, 1992; Klein & Kleinman, 2002). Wanda Orlikowski and Stephen Barley (2001) argue that there are numerous design solutions for technical problems. Technologies therefore are the outcome of particular choices made by specific designers. Influencing these choices are a number of factors that may include designers’ assumptions about users, design traditions, and taken-for-granted understandings about the world.

STS scholars also explore how things in the material world shape technologies. In STS, Actor-network theory insists on the importance of both non-humans and humans. The interactions in an airport for example involve technologies as well as people and their ideas. Together these form a single material-semiotic network. In this network things define actors and the relationships between actors. In an airport things may include software, technical artifacts and contracts etc (Callon, 1991). Bruno Latour (1987) insists that when researching science and technology one has to look at these relationships between non-humans and humans.

We are never confronted with science, technology and society, but with a gamut of weaker and stronger associations; thus understanding what facts and machines are is the same task as understanding who the people are (Latour, 1987, p.259).

I would like to use actor-network theory as the theoretical framework for researching the production of internet-connected mobile phone applications.

One criticism of STS is that it focuses on technologists and artifacts at the expense of users (Cowan cited in Oudshorn & Pinch, 2003). Nelly Oudshorn and Trevor Pinch (2003) argue that the field of Information Technology is particularly sensitive to users. In web development for example “usability”, “user interface design” and “user experience” are common terms and a search on these keywords in the industry-standard journal A List Apart ( www.alistapart.com) returns numerous user-focused articles. The question “Who is the user” is the founding block upon which applications are built in best-practice web development. This question, as Oudshorn & Pinch suggest, is extremely consequential.

“Who is the user?” is a far from trivial question…Different groups involved in the design of technologies may have different views of who the user might or should be, and these different groups may mobilize different resources to inscribe their views in the design of technical object (Oudshorn & Pinch., 2003, p.6).

Oudshorn & Pinch remind us that there is no universal user and that designers and developers may well have different ideas about who the user is. Designers and developers therefore anticipate who future users may be and then write this idea into their software. Madeleine Akrich (1992) calls this process “inscribing” and the end product a “script”. Akrich suggests that much like a movie script, technical objects supply actors with a role to enact: “technical objects define a framework of action together with the actors and the space in which they are supposed to act” (Akrich, 1992, p.208).

Of course, people are not mere puppets in this process. Akrich describes the confrontation between projected users and real users in her study of a photoelectric lighting kit. The lighting kit was carefully produced against a set design criteria. While it made sense in factory conditions, it proved to be extremely difficult for users to install and to maintain “in the wild”. Akrich argues that the lighting kit script only tolerated docile users – actors who followed the script written for them in the factory – at the exclusion of real users. Real users abandoned the lighting kit. For this reason, actors may not necessarily come forward to play out their roles, or they may define their own roles. Web development is rife with similar scenarios – applications avoided by users or that have to been changed (or “hacked”) to make them more accessible to users.

I would like to argue that by focusing on users so strongly, designers and developers risk losing sight of themselves in the development process: They lose awareness of what they are inscribing into their software. They become in Donna Haraway’s (1997) words the “modest witness” – invisible developers who seemingly leave nothing of themselves, their biases or opinions in the software they write while simultaneously encoding these in. I am interested in the social process contributing to the techno-scientific development surrounding mobile applications, specifically how developers seemingly remain invisible and yet inscribe their views of users and use into their applications: I am interested in how the script is being constructed – What image of the user and the context of use is built into the application; What is excluded/ resisted or built out. Finally, I am interested in how we can remind developers of their own subjectivity, their own partialities and beliefs in the development process.

Being so new to mobile applications development, I can only speculate on what scripts will emerge during my research. A script that is strongly related to ubicomp and that can be found in Weiser’s writing (introduced in the first paragraph of this section) is the blurring between humans and computers. Ubicomp maintains the distinctions between these opposing concepts while simultaneously striking them out. Humans and machines become humans-with-machines a wonderful term borrowed from Susan Leigh Star (1991). An excellent example of humans-with-machines is mobile phone users. Another script I would expect to emerge is the role of “industry standards” in software development. Charles Goodwin (1994) describes how members of a profession have “professional vision”: A socially organized way of seeing and understanding events that is consistent with the distinctive interests of the professional group in which they belong. My experience in web development means I am a sympathetic medium for these scripts.

Methodology

My research methodology is participant-observation. I am inspired by the research strategy used by Sharon Traweek (1988), who spent five years in three high energy physics laboratories, and Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar (1979), who spent two years in a biological laboratory. By embedding themselves in these laboratories Traweek, Latour & Woolgar followed closely the daily and intimate processes of scientific work within these scientific communities. Latour & Woolgar describe participant-observation as providing an advantageous position for researchers to gain understanding: “by being close to localized scientific practices the observer has a preferential situation from which to understand how scientists themselves produce order” (Latour & Woolgar, 1979, p.39).

I am interested in how technological communities produce technological artifacts. In the tradition of Traweek, Latour & Woolgar, I will embed myself in the DigitalNZ community. It may appear unusual for a social scientist to be a technologist at the same time. However, my past experience as a web designer means that an obvious role for me in the DigitalNZ community is that of a developer.

I will therefore build a DigitalNZ iPhone application over a period of three months. I will analyse my own experiences throughout this process by keeping a field (developer) diary. I will also interview six other developers engaged in the production of mobile applications. Throughout this process, I will be clear about my participant (web developer) /observer (social scientist) role.

I would like to acknowledge users and non users as important actors in the shaping of technology (Oudshorn & Pinch, 2003) However, my research focuses primarily on developers, their ideas and the technical artifacts they use and build, so I will limit research participants to developers only.

Research participants will be recruited based on my roles as a developer in the DigitalNZ community and as a student in the HIT Lab (www.hitlabnz.org). Formal consent will be obtained through a signed consent form. My research is confidential and the identities of research participants will be disguised by the use of pseudonyms.

Research participants will be asked to take part in semi-structured interviews. Interviews will take thirty minutes to one hour at a mutually agreed location. Interviews will be audio-taped and research participants will be offered the opportunity to review the interview transcript once completed. Topics likely to be discussed in the semi-structured interviews center around the participant’s development background (e.g. What do you do? How long have you been doing it?) and the mobile application he or she is currently working on (e.g. What is it? How does it work?). Particular attention will be paid to the participant’s idea of the user and the context of use for his or her application (e.g. What is the picture of the user? How does this picture influence development? Does the picture change?). Discussion topics will be generated by putting myself through the development process for a period of one month first.

Traweek (1988) describes participant-observation fieldwork as requiring full immersion in a community over a substantial period of time: Of spending “days and weeks and months within the patterns of the community’s life, moving in spaces shaped by the community and taking part in its activities on its terms” (Traweek, 1988, p.12). Of course Traweek literally moved in the same physical space as the high energy physicists she researched. The technological community I will be researching is likely to be virtual and my interactions with research participants is likely to occur online through emails, chat messages, tweets etc. I intend to collate these online interactions as supplements to real life interviews. The motivation is not to privilege real life interactions as being more authentic and more accurate than online ones. It is to provide an opportunity to clarify or develop any issues raised offline and online (Orgad, 2005). I also intend to share preliminary drafts with research participants and invite them to comment.

A major challenge in participant-observation is to remain critical while maintaining a close relationship with a community. Full integration into a community means losing the ability to question community and personal assumptions. Traweek (1988) advises participant-observation fieldworkers to “remain marginal”. Latour & Woolgar’s strategy for this is to view everything as strange: “By this we mean that we regard it as instructive to apprehend as strange those aspects of scientific activity which are readily taken for granted” (Latour & Woolgar, 1979, p.29). I will similarly be employing a lens of “strange” through which to view and to question my understanding of the technological community I will be immersed in.

I will examine my own assumptions about users and the context of use for my application and ask myself the same questions asked of research participants – What is the picture of the user? How does this picture influence development? Does the picture change? I will pay attention to my internal dialogue during this process. Caughey (1984) argues that imaginary roles and conversations are connected to actual social conduct: Imaginary conversations both reflect and reinforce social beliefs, and the imagined reactions of real people can serve as social controls. By listening to my internal dialogue I hope to reveal any beliefs or constraints I hold about my development role. I will record my observations in a field (developer) diary.

Social science guidelines for the development of mobile phone applications

Finally, what can social science offer ubicomp? Lucy Suchman (1999) questions how her field, anthropology, could contribute to the design of machine interfaces. Suchman describes being reluctant to translate her research into design terms for the reason that she could not produce results in a universal language that could be handed-off. Suchman argues for a working relationship between social scientists and designers that is based on mutual learning and partial translations. Suchman’s answer to the problem lies in collaboration across disciplines.

While Suchman raises a valuable point, designers and developers value guidelines as evidenced by the popularity of websites like the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library (http://developer.yahoo.com). I believe it is important to engage with and contribute to the design and development community on their ground. For this reason, I depart from Suchman and would like to generate a set of development guidelines for mobile applications that research participants, and the wider design and development community can use. These guidelines will take the form of key questions that developers can ask themselves throughout the development process. This complements the qualitative tradition of giving back to research participants.

I intend to invite collaboration in the creation of these guidelines in a number of ways: by making my DigitalNZ iPhone application publicly available and therefore open to public feedback, by offering research participants the opportunity to review their interview transcripts, by sharing preliminary drafts with research participants, and by releasing the guidelines for public use and comment. In this way I hope to produce theory that is of practical use.

References

Akrich, M. (1992). The de-scription of technical artifacts. In W. E. Bijker & J. Law, (Eds.), Shaping Technology/Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Bijker, W.E. & Law, J. (1992).  General Introduction. In W. E. Bijker & J. Law (Eds.), Shaping Technology/Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Callon, M. (1991). Techno-economic networks and irreversibility. In J. Law (Ed.), A Sociology of Monsters: Essays on Power, Technology and Domination. London: Routledge.

Caughey, J. (1984). Imaginary social worlds: a cultural approach. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Goodwin, C. (1994). Professional Vision. American Anthroplogist, 96(3), 606-633.

Greenfield, A. (2006). Everyware: the dawning age of ubiquitous computing. Berkeley, CA: New Riders.

Haraway, D. (1997) Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium. FemaleMan_Meets_OncoMouse: feminism and technoscience. New York: Routledge.

Klein, H. K. & Kleinman, D.L. (2002). The Social Construction of Technology: Structural Issues. Science, Technology & Human Values, 27(1), 28-52.

Latour, B. (1992). Where are the missing masses? The sociology of a few mundane artifacts. In W. E. Bijker & J. Law, (Eds.), Shaping Technology/Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Latour, B (1987). Science in Action: How to follow scientists and engineers through society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press

Latour, B. & Woolgar, S. (1979). Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts. London: Sage Publications.

O’Reilly, T (2005). What is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for Next Generation of Software [Online] Available: http://oreilly.com/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html

Orgad, S. (2005). From Online to Offline and Back: Moving from Online to Offline Relationships with Research Informants. In C. Hine (Ed.), Virtual Methods: Issues in Social Research on the Internet. Oxford: Berg.

Orlikowski, W. (2000). Using Technology and Constituting Structures: A Practice Lens for Studying Technology in Organizations, Organization Science, 11(4), 404-428.

Orlikowski, W. & Barley, S. (2001). Technology and institutions: What can research on information technology and research organizations learn from each other? MIS Quarterly, 25(2), 145-165.

Oudshorn, N. & Pinch, T. (2003). How Users Matter: The Co-Construction of Users and Technology. Cambridge; MIT Press.

Pinch, T. & Bijker, W. E. (1987). The Social Construction of Facts and Artifacts: Or How the Sociology of Science and the Sociology of Technology Might Benefit Each Other. Cambridge; MIT Press.

Star, S. L. (1991). Power, technology and the phenomenology of conventions: on being allergic to onions. In J. Law (Ed.), A Sociology of Monsters: Essays on Power, Technology and Domination. London: Routledge.

Suchman, L. (1999). Working relations. In D. MacKenzie & J. Wajcman, (Eds), The social shaping of technology. Buckingham: Open University Press.

Traweek, S. (1988). Beamtimes and lifetimes: the world of high energy physicists. Cambridge, Mass; Harvard University Press.

Weiser, M. (1991). The Computer for the 21^st Century. [On-line]. Available: http://www.ubiq.com/hypertext/weiser/SciAmDraft3.html

Filed under: study , thesis

Through the Looking-Glass

Nearest Tube

SekaiCamera

TAT augmented ID

Twitt ARound

Filed under: study , thesis

Towards a Master’s thesis idea

In 1991, Mark Weiser from the Palo Alto Research Centre (PARC) published a seminal paper describing an embedded computing world where;

“The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.”

Almost twenty years later pervasive and ubiquitous computing is fast becoming reality. Computer processing is increasingly moving from desktops and servers into our streets, homes and clothing.

The street as platform beautifully imagines a data saturated street circa 2008.  A concerned citizen uses his iPod Touch and the library’s free wifi to report a pothole on a council website; A woman uses Google Maps on her mobile for directions to a cafe – it perceives her location and tells her the quickest way to get there; Joggers wear Nike+ shoes that synchronise pre-set running targets with playlists. These imagined scenarios are far from fictional. It’s happening here in Aotearoa/New Zealand today.

There is something undeniably sexy about this embedded computing world where lives are meant to be made better by alluring, networked, plug and play devices. But what’s going on behind the shiney?

We as designers cannot assume that pervasive and ubiquitous technologies are neutral in and of themselves. Moreover, the streets and homes in which we deploy these technologies are not empty or neutral. They are already populated by people and practices. I’m interested in how social and cultural theories can inform the design of ubiquitous technologies.

I’d like to explore this in more detail as part of my Master’s thesis.

Weiser saw writing as the first, ubiquitous, information technology.

Filed under: study , thesis