Acting with shared purpose and understanding

Simon Buckingham Shum and I are working on a short book based on my doctoral thesis, which will put across the main conceptual and practical aspects of that research in a more digestible form. An early version of the introductory chapter is posted at http://people.kmi.open.ac.uk/sbs/2013/07/new-book-chap1-v01/, and we welcome your comments. 

Below are some further thoughts on the material there that we'll be incorporating into that chapter.

Why bother creating participatory representations? What are they for? What distinguishes this activity from others is that there is overriding goal of not only fostering shared understanding, but actually leading to some sort of action -- at minimum, walking away from a session with a new outlook or solidified insights, but more to create a change or shift in the way people come together around a set of facts, ideas, or issues. The point is to couple "how should we think about this" with "what should we do about this" -- "what understanding should inform our actions, what actions should we take?" Behind this is something even more ineffable than the concept of "understanding", and that is purpose -- the "why" and "what for" behind actions. Understanding alone does not produce action; it is purpose that gives force and direction to any action that rises above simple reflex. 

Representational practice is one way to help people take actions based on shared purpose and understanding, by externalizing these in collaboratively created images, diagrams, maps, text, sound, and other representations. Without some external representation, purpose and understanding are the province of individuals. By focusing on a coherent and expressive representation, querying it and discussing it and modifying it to make it better reflect the aims and needs of a group of people, more faithful to and evocative of what people are saying, thinking, and feeling, participatory representational practice helps to instill and externalize the sense of sharedness behind acting with purpose.

Referencing the story that opens our draft intro chapter: Jackie realized that in order for Tom enjoy his new compass -- to use it -- he'd need to understand what it was, how it workedm and what it meant. She did this by using a spontaneous, improvised, simple but expressive representation that she invited Tom into modifying. She gave Tom direct feedback on the meaning of his modifications, so that he would both understand them and be able to move forward -- to act -- based on a bolstered understanding, sharing her understanding of not only compasses but of how compass directions mattered in their neighborhood, and how the compass could be fun to use -- to act with -- once he understood what it was for (its purpose).

Playing Uncle George's piano

A routine family visit to my uncle's house in Teaneck, NJ in the mid-70s. A teenage boy is banging out blues on a yellow spinet piano in the living room. This upsets his uncle in the kitchen just behind the wall, who can't hear any of the conversation through his hearing aid with the music in the background. After a time (not long enough in the boy's estimation, he needs at least half an hour before his playing runs its course) the uncle comes out and tells the boy to stop. Not without resentment (though there is much love between uncle and nephew), he does.

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I've played music in one form or another since taking clarinet and piano lessons in elementary school. I was in school bands from 4th to 9th grade, switching to bassoon towards the end but never actually practicing it. I quit piano lessons after 6th grade. I never liked reading music much, or more accurately didn't like spending the hours it took to learn a song by reading the notes and picking them out on an instrument. I also didn't much like the avenging-angel style of our piano teacher, who regularly made us cry if we were not well prepared for our weekly lessons.

When I was 14, a few of the kids in my neighborhood started teaching ourselves guitar, picking out chords from songbooks. I had stopped playing piano, but then a friend showed me a blues scale in C, with no written music, and that launched an explosion of piano improvisation for the rest of my high school years, spending hours pounding out chords and runs, mostly playing Allman Brothers songs and the like.

Playing piano like this became something of a lifeline. I was a shy, insecure kid, uncomfortable in social situations. But hammering at top volume on our Yamaha baby grand, or on any piano that would have me, made me feel like I was doing something worthwhile. Low on technique but high on passion, I would go round and round the same 12 bar progressions for hours, barely varying my dynamics because to play as hard as I could felt like I was actually expressing something.

Uncle George, my father's brother, was a complicated man. He was always kind to me and told me many times that I was his "favorite nephew" (I may have been his only nephew), giving me special gifts and generally being nice whenever we'd visit (much nicer, I realized as I got older, than he often was to his wife and son). He was mostly deaf and wore a large, problematic 1960s hearing aid, the size of a cigarette pack, that often would emit squealing feedback. Using it he could hear, within fairly narrow limits, often needing to move it around to different positions in the middle of a conversation.

After I started playing piano in my mid-teens, I would crave playing wherever we were. This was compounded in any sort of social situation, even -- or especially -- when visiting any of my relatives. I wasn't happy sitting around and talking. If there was a piano in the house I would feel magnetically pulled to it. Not only because I wanted to play, but because I also felt that it would allow me to actually say something worthwhile and be heard, rather than sitting silent and invisible in the midst of chattering family members.

I remember the incident described above clearly. It may not have been the only time it happened, but one stands for all in my memory. I never wanted to be interrupted when playing. This is still the case actually, though I've learned to resist the magnetic pull to play (and bang) somewhat.

This situation is an example of the principle that aesthetic choices, when they directly affect other people in whatever ways -- like playing the piano so loud that it prevented my uncle from hearing -- have ethical dimensions. Those dimensions, properly understood, are multi-faceted. What I'm interested in is the complex of feelings and experiences behind the scenes of a situation involving aesthetic actions. There is no question that playing music loudly in the presence of someone struggling to hear people talking was wrong on the face of it. But I want to try to get beneath the surface, to see how the choice to play or not play in that setting had its own history and dynamics, different for the different people involved.

In this case, the way I was playing -- its loudness and unremittingness -- was a choice. Possibly if I could have played with more restraint it would have been more tolerable for my uncle. But then it would not have been the kind of playing that was about the only way for me to connect to other people from inside, since I found it so difficult to do by just talking. It was saying "this is who I am" to my family. Being interrupted, or even told to play quietly, felt like the only voice I could speak with was being silenced. 

This situation shows how an ostensibly "aesthetic" action, taken in a given moment, has a past, present, and future, and how the meaning of that action can vary for the different people involved. An action can have direct and indirect effects on people, including the people making the aesthetic choice themselves. The ethics of shaping are not limited to the their meaning for the aesthetic object (e.g. music) itself, but also in a situation like this, the effect of not shaping (i.e., not playing the piano) had its own consequences. What I'm interested in is revealing and understanding these kinds of dynamics, even in professional situations. 

Subject for future investigation

Why exactly is it, that sometimes when I pick up a guitar after not playing at all for a while (in this case, several weeks at least), I can play far more fluidly than usual? Especially if not playing that close attention, e.g. while watching a movie at the same time. It's as if my fingers do better if my mind is not watching them. The moment I start paying closer attention -- or even more, if I try to consciously shape what I'm doing -- the fluidity starts to drop away. What, in fact, is going on there? 

Seeing in networks vs trees

Relevant to some recent conversation on the compendiuminstitute yahoogroup, it is worth taking a look at this bravura performance in visual mapping. It's great just for what it is, whether you agree with all the ideas or not.

Among many things I like about it, it resonated for me with what always attracted to the true hypermedia aspect of Compendium -- the ability to show interconnections beyond what you can do in a single view, and why that always felt right. It's a dimension that doesn't seem to matter to many people, but it still feels fundamental to me -- what the tools enable us to show and work with.

It's about a way of seeing more than anything else -- seeing and being able to represent the richness of the worlds we are trying to come to grips with.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=nJmGrNdJ5Gw

At a siding

Close followers will have noticed few postings this year. This is mainly due to a manic focus on writing, defending, revising, and wrapping up my doctoral thesis in the midst of an enormous project at my day/night/weekend job.

Now that the above has mostly calmed, I've been letting the dust settle on the research sphere, at least for now, and thinking more about what's most important to me in this work. That seems very much wrapped up with music, mainly the playing of it. I had mostly put my instruments down over the last ten years, but have been doing a lot of playing in the last couple of months. I've got calluses on my left fingertips for the first time this century. It's a good feeling.

This connection is personal as much as anything else. I've been playing with local friends and neighbors and have no ambitions for it, such as recording or performing, and that feels just right. It's the doing in the moment that matters. Sometimes it reaches a level beyond just the fun of it, and that's great when it happens. I want to reconnect musically with some of my non-local friends and am making plans to do that. Some of those friends are also my closest research and Compendium colleagues, which is probably not coincidental.

Which brings me to what I wanted to say in this post. As I've written elsewhere*, I'm really not  interested in making claims about success if you follow this or that technique or approach. Such claims are all wrong anyway, at least in the sense that there will ever be any kind of silver bullet that will guarantee certain outcomes. It will always come down to what people are able to do in a specific situation. Each situation has its own character, each one is unique. Period. So what matters is who you are and what you do in that situation, the choices you make and the things you're able to achieve, or not.

That is not a formulation that is likely to get me many followers, but it's what I believe. What I care about now is learning how to be effective, when you're doing something that involves creativity and communication and some kind of aesthetic medium, whether that is music or talk or drawings or designs or whatever, and how to talk about what that means.

I think about this kind of thing even in the course of playing music with my local friends. Sometimes you have to make choices about which matters more -- having a fun time with a bunch of people of widely varying abilities, vs. giving some particular song the best possible rendition (which might, for example, mean waiting for some of the less able players to go get a drink in the other room). There's not an inherently right or wrong answer (though these days the fun and warmth of a big group making music together are more important to me than virtuosity).

The point is that these are ethical choices about aesthetic matters. That's what I'm interested in. Along with the aesthetic making itself.


* I'd forgotten about this post which touches on some of the same themes. So does this one, and this one, and especially this one.

Making Representations Matter - thesis published

The final version of my doctoral thesis has now been published online in the Open Research Online repository: Making Representations Matter: Understanding Practitioner Experience in Participatory Sensemaking.

Comments welcome here.

R. I. P. Steve Jobs

The first 'PC' I had any real exposure to was a Mac in 1984. I was a film and video person with little computing background (one intro to programming class, in Pascal). The Mac made perfect sense to me -- moving pictures of documents and folders around on a desktop, drawing things, painting things. When I later saw what most computers were used for, and what their UIs were like (this is the mid-1980s), I was dumbstruck. Text and numbers on black or green backgrounds, arcane text commands, etc.

I started working in IT not much later and pushed every project I worked on (even terminal-based applications for beverage manufacturing and the like) in the direction of the "right" paradigm -- what I learned about what computing could and should be, from the Mac. Even today, when we've moved from the Iron Age to the Iphone Age, I still find myself thinking about UIs with the 1984 Mac OS as my reference point.

R.I.P. Steve.

Transparency in design

I want user interfaces, and for that matter all representational artifacts intended to help people do or make sense of something, to be clear and transparent. When it comes to design, this is the ethic that possesses me. One should not need pre-existing specialist (arcane) knowledge to make sense of a UI, or at least the need for such knowledge should be minimal, and not require knowledge of arcane aspects of the UI itself.

This is an endemic problem for enterprise UIs since they are so often built on previous legacy systems. Veterans of the older systems know the terms, functions, and acronyms so well that they become "natural" -- but they're not. The effects of these kinds of preconceptions are something I constantly work to alleviate when designing new or replacement systems. Knowing what the business purpose itself is (for example, selling and servicing telecommunications products for residential and small business customers), and understanding the business itself, and the customers, should be the only prerequisite knowledge for using the new system, rather than “just having to know” how things have been done and what things have been called and abbreviated and acronymed in the previous generations of systems.

Having said that, achieving effective transparency, like all design in the real world, is a balancing act. You don't want to clutter up the UI with too much explanation and exposition, and you want to enable experienced and expert users to move rapidly though their tasks. It comes back to practitioner skill: knowing the right trade-offs to make.

When I glance at position descriptions for user experience professionals, they often seem to miss the point (which is probably inevitable when you are throwing descriptions out to the masses). They list discrete skills (personas, wireframes, HTML 5, Flex, etc.) as if having such skills are what add up to an effective UX designer. But what really matters most is having the ability to understand user needs as well as business or organizational imperatives and technical capacities and constraints, among other factors, all of which require both listening and "speaking" skills in addition to “design” skills.

You need to understand what people (including developers, clients, executives, as well as end users) need and can do, and you need to be able to synthesize these, come up with design approaches, and advocate (sometimes passionately) for the integrity and value of your design given those needs, capacities, and constraints. Any specific skill or technical ability is secondary to these constraints (and a good UX professional should be able to quickly learn any new technique or tool in any case).

Often a first design proposal will not be the perfect solution (however perfect it may be in your own mind, or in the abstract), but it helps shake loose the thinking and creativity of the people you're working with and for, and the dialogue that follows from considering a well-crafted design gives the best clues for how to evolve the design in the best possible direction given all the constraints and sometimes conflicting needs and desires. Listening, making, and speaking are the lather, rinse, and repeat of user experience design. You have to be able to do them all.

Slides and video from the 8 June KMI webcast

I gave a talk at KMi on 8 June, summarizing the research that led to the thesis (I had passed the defense a day earlier; watch this space for updates on thesis revisions).

Here is a link to the video from the webcast. The slides are below.

View more presentations from alselvin

Thesis title, abstract, and cover art

Update 23 April
Submitted versions: thesis, abstract.
Final version after 7 Jun w/corrections & acknowledgements.




I've recently completed a draft of my PhD thesis, which I'll be revising over the next few weeks for final submission. Here are the working title, cover art*, and abstract.

Making Representations Matter: Practitioner Experience in Participatory Sensemaking
Albert M. Selvin
Knowledge Media Institute, Open University

Abstract
This thesis develops and applies a method to analyze, characterize, and compare instances of participatory representational practice in such a way as to highlight experiential aspects such as aesthetics, narrative, improvisation, sensemaking, and ethics. It extends taxonomies of such practices found in related research, and contributes to a critique of functionalist or techno-rationalist approaches to studying professional practice. Appropriating new technologies in order to foster collaboration and participatory engagement is a focus for many fields, but there is relatively little research on the experience of practitioners who do so. The role of technology-use mediators is to help make such technologies amenable and of value to the people who interact with them and each other. When the nature of the technology is to provide textual and visual representations of ideas and discussions, issues of form and shaping arise. This thesis examines how practitioners make participatory visual representations (pictures, diagrams, knowledge maps) coherent, engaging and useful. It studies how fourteen practitioners using a visual hypermedia tool engaged participants with the hypermedia representations, and the ways they made the representations matter to the participants. It focuses on the sensemaking challenges that the practitioners encountered in their sessions, and on the ways that the form they gave the visual representations (aesthetics) related to the service they were trying to provide to their participants. Qualitative research methods such as grounded theory are employed to analyze video recordings of the participatory representational sessions. Through three iterative cycles, analytical tools were developed to provide a multi-perspective view on each session, followed by comparative analysis that also incorporates responses to an informant questionnaire. Conceptual and normative frameworks for understanding the practitioner experience in participatory representational practice in context, especially in terms of aesthetics, ethics, narrative, sensemaking, and improvisation, are proposed. The thesis places these concerns in context of other kinds of facilitative and mediation practices as well as research on reflective practice, aesthetic experience, critical HCI, and participatory design. The thesis concludes by describing areas for future work with special attention to adapting the dimensions and framework for practitioner self- and peer assessment, including discussion of two preliminary proof of concept such sessions held with practitioners and researchers.

* Thanks to Harriett Cornish at the Knowledge Media Institute for the artwork.