Weeknotes: design, the ending of things, unexpected perspectives
Designing systems is quite different from designing, say, computer interfaces. I don’t identify as a designer, and I’m fascinated by the range of activities of people I encounter who do; and also by the people who clearly design things but don’t see their work as design. They might be creating business models or figuring out a system for aid delivery, say.
At Doteveryone, we identified one of the underlying causes of problematic technology today is the focus on user-centric design — optimising for a single user, and neglecting larger groups (be they families, communities, society at large). Cassie Robinson wrote a great post about this in late 2017.
Design also came up in a conversation with Oli Sylvester-Bradley this week, talking about the new distributed, decentralised applications which would be enabled by new systems such as Holochain. So much of today’s user experience / user interface design practice is based on a set of now well-established ideas — data lives in a database in the cloud, and an app presents this data (or offers opportunities to change it or add to it). If we want real distributed systems, which are actually useful, there’s an expectation that data will come from many places; and it may be processed somewhere else or in several places (we’re also thinking about a privacy-preserving future, so where code runs may not be where it runs today). Ideally I’d have some personalisations which are specific to me too. But I don’t want to have to run half a dozen apps or to have a multitude of busy things on my small phone screen to cater for all possibilities. Systems like this will need fundamentally different design practices — and that’s just thinking about the individual user, let alone collective needs. The information architecture and business model or economic design will also be closely integrated with the user experience and interface design — these would be a key part of the shift to a new distributed system. I wonder who is doing good research in this area now, and whether there might be ideas from early internet human computer interaction work in the 80s and 90s now worth revisiting.
So it’s timely to see Cassie’s recent thoughts, sketching out some different kinds of design, framed around ideas of collective intelligence, consequences, ecosystems. Useful to think about different forms of design, and then the tools and techniques that might be used.
(As noted in my yearnotes, Don Norman seems to be thinking along collective and community lines too. He’s just published an outline of an upcoming talk.)
Cassie is also doing some wonderful thinking about the ending of things as part of a new enquiry — the Farewell Fund.
The shorter post is useful in highlighting the different kinds of role one can take in supporting change — nurturing new ideas, supporting people and organisations through change, or helping wind things down. Another form of wind-down is very traditional in business — even in modern tech and Silicon Valley, people are brought in to wrap things up. Via Logic magazine, I came across this Guardian piece:
Silicon Valley’s failure industry runs on discretion and convenient amnesia. Sherwood Partners is a place of memory and a place of failure.
This goes on to say:
Silicon Valley thinks it has failure figured out. Even beyond the cliched embrace of “failing better”, a tolerance for things not going quite right is baked into the tech industry. People take jobs and lose them, and go on to a new job. People create products that no one likes, and go on to create another product. People back companies that get investigated by the SEC, and go on to back other companies. They can even lie on behalf of a company like Theranos without any taint whatsoever. In Silicon Valley, it seems, there is no such thing as negative experience.
Ouch.
On the plus side, this from the FT’s Alphaville points out that if technology is everywhere, we can’t treat it as a special category or one with a particular premium attached, so maybe we can start thinking more about what consumer oriented technologies look like if they aren’t Valley-special.
Nicolas Colin’s recent book, Hedge, explores ideas for how a better social safety net might look for a modern era of networked people, with uncertain income, which considers mobile (and less mobile) populations, and housing costs in urban areas. He calls for entrepreneurial thinking around worker support (perhaps new kinds of union), social insurance and more. Hedge doesn’t offer detailed solutions, but anything that moves popular startup culture thinking on this beyond universal basic income is good. (Nicolas is a co-founder of The Family, which has a rather lively website.)
I’m just not using gifs like that. Yet. Where do you go, if you’re fairly digitally-savvy, but want to update your social media game, to be more modern? Surely someone is offering a course on this — how to work with very short-form video, how to find out whether a meme is wholesome and/or suitable for a professional mode of communication, how to be a power user of Instagram stories for an organisation, and so on. From conversations in the last couple of months, there’s a ready audience of forty-something women in cities around the UK ready to pay for such a thing.
Ten years ago, I was working in “edtech”, I suppose, researching and developing ways to use the internet actually usefully to enhance learning (at CARET). I was reminded of this twice this week. Firstly, the Open University’s new report on Innovating Pedagogy via Martin Weller’s excellent blog, The executive summary is worth a read , covering topics I would expect (playful learning, action learning, making thinking visible), topics I was glad to see (decolonising learning, learning through wonder, place-based learning) and slightly surprising ones (learning with robots, drone-based learning — which are not as frivolous and hype-ridden as they may sound).
Secondly, via Twitter, I found this delightful call for papers for the Salon des Refusés 2019 — Dialectics for new computer science.
Salon des Refusés (“exhibition of rejects”) was an 1863 exhibition of artworks rejected from the official Paris Salon. It displayed works by later famous modernists such as Édouard Manet, whose paintings were rejected by the conservative jury of the Paris Salon. We feel that a similar space is needed to explore new ideas and new ways of doing programming research and computer science.
Many interesting ideas about programming struggle to find space in the modern programming language research community, often because they are difficult to evaluate using proofs, measurements or controlled user studies. As a result, new ideas are often seen as “unscientific”.
To provide space for unorthodox thought provoking ideas, we take inspiration from literary criticism. Papers that provoked an interesting discussion or criticism among the program committee members are presented together with an attributed critical review that presents an alternative position, develops additional context or summarizes discussion about the work.
And there, on the Programme committee, is my former CARET colleague Antranig Basman.
(I found this link because I retweeted it when I saw it. Annoyingly, it’s not obvious to me whose retweet of the original I actually saw. Anyway, whoever you were, thank you.)
Like many others, I’m enjoying the Well’s annual State of the World. A couple of highlights for me so far:
from James Bridle
Under modernity, time was produced in the Metropolitan centre, and trickled out to the periphery. Now, like colonial violence, it’s returning to the centre, and the things and people at the edges are those who are living in the future. The deep ocean, the desert, the coastlines and the tundra: it’s in the most distant places that the effects of the hotter, wetter, more entangled and deranged future are being felt first, but they’re coming for all of us, and sooner than we think.
and from Paulina Borsook
also, ‘travel’ has become again a certain kind of class marker — and also a marker for those who don’t have caregiving responsibilities -tying them down-. or (mostly) don’t have disabilities themselves. caregiving; disabilities; oh so not -interesting-. these are among the perennials of the suffering human condition
A big report by The Prepared, which gives a great overview of the challenges of manufacturing goods in Africa, through case studies looking at different products and supply chains in different countries. Really enlightening.
Also on supply chains, I was reminded of this Miriam Posner article from Logic magazine from April 2018 which quotes:
In some sense all gold is the same, so you just buy the cheapest gold you can get. But if you look at it in another way, it matters how it was mined and transported. And then all of the sudden, every piece of gold is a little bit different. And so it becomes very difficult to compare these things that, in terms of your actual manufacturing process, are almost exactly the same.
Something similar happens with data. Whilst people are aware of this in industry, I’m not sure there is much systemic reflection on it. Information provenance is still a cutting edge area of thinking in academic research (I share an office with some of the people working on this area, on compliant and accountable systems, lead by my colleague Jat Singh). How does this play out longer term? Who is thinking about this? Talking with the Cambridge Centre for Smart Infrastructure and Construction recently, Jennifer Schooling mentioned the challenges of trusting sensor data from systems installed by a team you don’t know, maybe only a decade earlier. You have the data — which in itself is not guaranteed — but do you have confidence in how it was gathered, and what it means? And that’s without it becoming commingled.
Back to the article:
It’s entirely possible to have an astoundingly effective supply chain while also knowing very little about it. Not only is it possible: it may be the enabling condition of capitalism at a global scale.
..
It’s not as though these decentralized networks are inalterable facts of life. They look the way they do because we built them that way. It reminded me of something the anthropologist Anna Tsing has observed about Walmart. Tsing points out that Walmart demands perfect control over certain aspects of its supply chain, like price and delivery times, while at the same time refusing knowledge about other aspects, like labor practices and networks of subcontractors.
Looking ahead.
Douglas Rushkoff is speaking at the British Library next month. Looking forward to this.
A sobering conversation with one of my cohort from the RAEng Engineering Leadership Award scheme, about upcoming house moves; she would not consider anywhere less than 20m above sea level. (Also a good reminder of some of the other kinds of engineering which are less visible in daily life and the media today, but still rather critical to our modern existence.)