Thursday, May 31, 2007
The experience of crafting an experience
While moving around the kitchen early Sunday morning, the phrase "the experience of creating an experience" popped into my head. It kind of summarizes what I'm interested in as research. People that create mediated experiences for others (filmmakers, musicians, teachers, mediators, PHC practitioners) themselves are having experiences and their experience can/should be characterized and understood. Schön et al give us clues to this and of the value of doing it, which I myself am not yet quite able to do, but this question has always occupied me and seemed important. Simon refined the catchphrase as "the experience of crafting an experience", which is better.
Monday, May 28, 2007
Misc. thoughts about the 2007 Compendium Institute workshop at NASA Ames
Some overdue thoughts on our recent Bay Area workshop, held at the NASA Ames Conference Center May 2-3, 2007. Work has been unrelentingly busy since the workshop, so no time to reflect until now. Today is Memorial Day, so a hiatus.
The workshop was small, about 16-17 people, but very engaged. Most people came from the Bay Area though there was a KMi contingent of five people, including me, that came from the UK and NY. We did something different this time than our previous workshops. In the past, we've generally had our standard tutorial on the morning of the first day. (We've been offering versions of that tutorial since the mid-1990s when Maarten and I developed the first version. It's a subject for another day, but even though I think there is a lot of good material in the tutorial, it has never landed with the impact that I'd like. It is too much "in the head", I think; concepts and exercises that, seemingly, assume you have already internalized the "Compendium Way" as we have (drank the Kool-Aid)).
This time we spent almost the entire first day on an experiential exercise rather than a tutorial. This was excellent -- at least for me since it ties into my research. I had prepared some advance materials that people could download with images about space (in honor of NASA, our host) and sample formats (the idea of providing people a set of evocative images to work with in the construction of a dialogic exercise owes much to the Center for Creative Leadership's Visual Explorer tool).
At the workshop we divided people into small groups and gave them the assignment of preparing an exercise that they would lead the larger group in, with the sole restriction that it had to involve getting people to engage with, and add to, Compendium maps. Each group had about 90 minutes to devise their exercise. Since I was going to use this for part of my research data, I kept myself out of it except to help with logistics when necessary. Mostly I flitted around the cavernous ballroom to each of the small group locations, taking pictures and making sure that each group had their Camtasia screen/audio recording going.
It was interesting to see the different group styles that emerged. Some groups jumped right in creating their exercise; one spent 2/3 of the time on a meta-exercise, mapping how they were going to approach the problem. But all were very engaged. To me the main point of Compendium is the engagement with the representation, having maps be the focus of a collaborative effort to express something that matters. Our previous tutorials never achieved that, they were much more individually oriented. This exercise got people doing that from the start. (Since my research focuses on the choices practitioners make in the course of constructing participatory hypermedia representations, this is very encouraging, but that is again a subject for a different day). Each group worked hard to come up with something they thought would work well for the large group exercise.
After this prep period, we took a break and then began the large group sessions. Each small group set the stage for what they wanted the large group to do, usually with one person acting as the facilitator up in front of the room and another serving as mapper (hands on the keyboard). The idea was that each group, particularly the less experienced members (the "masters" -- Simon, Maarten, Jeff, Eugene -- were explicitly instructed not to act as facilitators or mappers for the large group sessions), would get the experience of trying to get the large group to focus on and add to the map, then get feedback on how well they accomplished this and what they could have done better.
Each of the four groups struggled (to varying degrees) to get the large group to focus on the maps and keep the session from being just a normal discussion. In each case the subject matter and people's desire to talk about it directly to each other without focusing on the map itself seemed to hold the upper hand, though some of the small groups were successful at returning the group's attention to the maps themselves. After each of these 15-minute sessions, we had an additional 15 minutes where the "masters" and the other attendees gave feedback to the small group that had just presented. The nature of this feedback ranged from facilitation styles, to Compendium software tips and tricks (quite a lot of learning and sharing of 'best practices' in those bits), to meta-questions on the purpose of Compendium.
OK, I have to digress from the above narrative to discuss the general phenomenon of getting people to engage with maps. We had much discussion at the workshop on the theme of "discussion capture" (someone mapping out the flow of a discussion as it happens) vs. more directly engaged forms of group Compendium use involving collaborative construction of an artifact of some kind. Having done both myself hundreds of times with groups over the years, my bias is toward the latter. What Compendium is especially "good for" is providing the means (through our host of tools, techniques, and concepts) by which a group can engage with a visual map of something they're concerned with -- and more to the point, that the map is not a single artifact but an interlinked set of artifacts, with ideas and objects related to each other in multiple dimensions -- and even more to the point, that the whole corpus is set up in such a way as to be available to other tools and applications and settings, so that what you collectively or individually do in one form is not limited to that form but can be exchanged with, and used in, other forms in all sorts of ways.
Even yet more to the point, for me, is the idea that non-technical people (that is, non-programmers) can do computationally powerful things just by understanding and manipulating the visual and textual relationships (nodes, links, tags, transclusions), without having to know what is going on with the code and database. These principles have underlay (underlied?) everything we have done architecturally with Compendium over the years. And yet, we still often find ourselves talking about Compendium in the same ways as tools that don't do any of these things (e.g. note-taking in Word, or mind mapping software -- nothing against those sort of tools but they are not about the above).
The problems with this set of points are many. The "discussion" trap is one of them. We -- including me -- like to talk to each other directly. We saw that in the large group sessions -- once the participants got warmed up talking about some issue about the space program, any thought of Compendium flew out the window and people got into highly engaged conversations with each other about the topic. The facilitators had to interrupt this flow to get people to look at their ignored maps. But, here is the thing. My feeling is that this is not a fault of Compendium or of the idea of getting people to engage with each other and their subject matter via the vehicle of hypertext maps. Rather it is our relative inexperience with this medium and mode of communicating. We have seen, many times, that it is possible to have deep and engaged "conversations" while in the midst of working together on the Compendium artifact. In some cases people say that they are able to get to a deeper level of mutual understanding and dialogue than they would have done talking normally.
But to me that (whether talking normally is better or not) is not the point. Rather it is how to construct the hypermedia "event" in such a way as to be inviting, engaging, purposeful, and productive -- so that it becomes a form of collaborative authoring that doesn't feel foreign, "technical", or abstract. It becomes a way for people to make something together, the same way that making a film or video (or collage or whatever) requires people to engage in the medium itself as part of their overall interaction -- it is not an either/or. That is what I strive for -- creating tools and artifacts that invite and extend human interaction, not replace it. And I think we are only at the beginning of that. It *can* be done -- we have seen and experienced it many times -- but it is often difficult to do well.
We spoke many times at the workshop about how discussions, transcriptions, notes etc. can be done conventionally, and using Compendium for any of them is often compared unfavorably to these conventional means. To me this misses the point and is a mark of the medium's immaturity. People don't say, why have a concert rather than a discussion; why make a film rather than have a meeting; why engage an architect rather than just start building a house. We engage in those highly developed media forms, that require expertise and artistry to pull off, because they are accepted ways of having a valued experience or producing a particular kind of outcome or artifact.
Constructing Compendium maps together has that same potential. We have to learn how to do it right. I think events like the first day of the workshop are steps on that path. I have seen before that it is not at all difficult to get groups to tightly engage with artifact creation if they have the right structure and scaffolding, as the small groups did. For me personally, when I finish with my current trajectory of research -- I am on the downhill slope of completing a PhD -- that is what I want to concentrate on; creating engaging Compendium events that get people working together on constructing sophisticated hypermedia artifacts that both express something of importance to the group, and bring the participants and authors together in unique and rewarding ways. The focus should no more be on Compendium itself and whether it is better or worse than other tools, than the focus of a film-making effort is on the brand of camera used. What's important is what is expressed in the unique medium, not the medium itself (see this related post).
Along with generating loads of useful research data for me, the first day exercises seemed to bring the workshop's attendees together. Many of the folks hadn't met each other before but by the end of the first day they seemed to be very friendly and informal with each other (see this photo of our happy first night group dinner at the Grand Indian Buffet restaurant in Sunnyvale). Most of the second day (as usual for our workshops) was more conventional talks and presentations on various Compendium topics, but my feeling (shared by at least some of the other organizers) was that the participants were much more engaged and interactive with the presentations than we have often seen in previous workshops, because they had a basis of shared experience (and reflection on that experience) to draw on.
It's a beautiful spring day here in near-upstate New York, so I will stop here for now to get out on the bike while I have the chance. I'll write more about the second day soon. Before closing, though, I have to give special thanks to Maarten Sierhius and Eugene Eric Kim for all the work they did to get the workshop organized. Along with all the advance deliberations (conducted with unremitting harmony and consensus (not)), Maarten got us our terrific setting at the NASA Conference Center and dealt with all the food and drink logistics (an unrewarding but highly appreciated task), and Eugene managed the flow of events during the workshop itself with aplomb, even improvising the schedule on the second half of the second day. We haven't yet planned our next workshop (East Coast USA? UK?) but I think we learned much from this one that will enrich all our subsequent gatherings.
The workshop was small, about 16-17 people, but very engaged. Most people came from the Bay Area though there was a KMi contingent of five people, including me, that came from the UK and NY. We did something different this time than our previous workshops. In the past, we've generally had our standard tutorial on the morning of the first day. (We've been offering versions of that tutorial since the mid-1990s when Maarten and I developed the first version. It's a subject for another day, but even though I think there is a lot of good material in the tutorial, it has never landed with the impact that I'd like. It is too much "in the head", I think; concepts and exercises that, seemingly, assume you have already internalized the "Compendium Way" as we have (drank the Kool-Aid)).
This time we spent almost the entire first day on an experiential exercise rather than a tutorial. This was excellent -- at least for me since it ties into my research. I had prepared some advance materials that people could download with images about space (in honor of NASA, our host) and sample formats (the idea of providing people a set of evocative images to work with in the construction of a dialogic exercise owes much to the Center for Creative Leadership's Visual Explorer tool).
At the workshop we divided people into small groups and gave them the assignment of preparing an exercise that they would lead the larger group in, with the sole restriction that it had to involve getting people to engage with, and add to, Compendium maps. Each group had about 90 minutes to devise their exercise. Since I was going to use this for part of my research data, I kept myself out of it except to help with logistics when necessary. Mostly I flitted around the cavernous ballroom to each of the small group locations, taking pictures and making sure that each group had their Camtasia screen/audio recording going.
It was interesting to see the different group styles that emerged. Some groups jumped right in creating their exercise; one spent 2/3 of the time on a meta-exercise, mapping how they were going to approach the problem. But all were very engaged. To me the main point of Compendium is the engagement with the representation, having maps be the focus of a collaborative effort to express something that matters. Our previous tutorials never achieved that, they were much more individually oriented. This exercise got people doing that from the start. (Since my research focuses on the choices practitioners make in the course of constructing participatory hypermedia representations, this is very encouraging, but that is again a subject for a different day). Each group worked hard to come up with something they thought would work well for the large group exercise.
After this prep period, we took a break and then began the large group sessions. Each small group set the stage for what they wanted the large group to do, usually with one person acting as the facilitator up in front of the room and another serving as mapper (hands on the keyboard). The idea was that each group, particularly the less experienced members (the "masters" -- Simon, Maarten, Jeff, Eugene -- were explicitly instructed not to act as facilitators or mappers for the large group sessions), would get the experience of trying to get the large group to focus on and add to the map, then get feedback on how well they accomplished this and what they could have done better.
Each of the four groups struggled (to varying degrees) to get the large group to focus on the maps and keep the session from being just a normal discussion. In each case the subject matter and people's desire to talk about it directly to each other without focusing on the map itself seemed to hold the upper hand, though some of the small groups were successful at returning the group's attention to the maps themselves. After each of these 15-minute sessions, we had an additional 15 minutes where the "masters" and the other attendees gave feedback to the small group that had just presented. The nature of this feedback ranged from facilitation styles, to Compendium software tips and tricks (quite a lot of learning and sharing of 'best practices' in those bits), to meta-questions on the purpose of Compendium.
OK, I have to digress from the above narrative to discuss the general phenomenon of getting people to engage with maps. We had much discussion at the workshop on the theme of "discussion capture" (someone mapping out the flow of a discussion as it happens) vs. more directly engaged forms of group Compendium use involving collaborative construction of an artifact of some kind. Having done both myself hundreds of times with groups over the years, my bias is toward the latter. What Compendium is especially "good for" is providing the means (through our host of tools, techniques, and concepts) by which a group can engage with a visual map of something they're concerned with -- and more to the point, that the map is not a single artifact but an interlinked set of artifacts, with ideas and objects related to each other in multiple dimensions -- and even more to the point, that the whole corpus is set up in such a way as to be available to other tools and applications and settings, so that what you collectively or individually do in one form is not limited to that form but can be exchanged with, and used in, other forms in all sorts of ways.
Even yet more to the point, for me, is the idea that non-technical people (that is, non-programmers) can do computationally powerful things just by understanding and manipulating the visual and textual relationships (nodes, links, tags, transclusions), without having to know what is going on with the code and database. These principles have underlay (underlied?) everything we have done architecturally with Compendium over the years. And yet, we still often find ourselves talking about Compendium in the same ways as tools that don't do any of these things (e.g. note-taking in Word, or mind mapping software -- nothing against those sort of tools but they are not about the above).
The problems with this set of points are many. The "discussion" trap is one of them. We -- including me -- like to talk to each other directly. We saw that in the large group sessions -- once the participants got warmed up talking about some issue about the space program, any thought of Compendium flew out the window and people got into highly engaged conversations with each other about the topic. The facilitators had to interrupt this flow to get people to look at their ignored maps. But, here is the thing. My feeling is that this is not a fault of Compendium or of the idea of getting people to engage with each other and their subject matter via the vehicle of hypertext maps. Rather it is our relative inexperience with this medium and mode of communicating. We have seen, many times, that it is possible to have deep and engaged "conversations" while in the midst of working together on the Compendium artifact. In some cases people say that they are able to get to a deeper level of mutual understanding and dialogue than they would have done talking normally.
But to me that (whether talking normally is better or not) is not the point. Rather it is how to construct the hypermedia "event" in such a way as to be inviting, engaging, purposeful, and productive -- so that it becomes a form of collaborative authoring that doesn't feel foreign, "technical", or abstract. It becomes a way for people to make something together, the same way that making a film or video (or collage or whatever) requires people to engage in the medium itself as part of their overall interaction -- it is not an either/or. That is what I strive for -- creating tools and artifacts that invite and extend human interaction, not replace it. And I think we are only at the beginning of that. It *can* be done -- we have seen and experienced it many times -- but it is often difficult to do well.
We spoke many times at the workshop about how discussions, transcriptions, notes etc. can be done conventionally, and using Compendium for any of them is often compared unfavorably to these conventional means. To me this misses the point and is a mark of the medium's immaturity. People don't say, why have a concert rather than a discussion; why make a film rather than have a meeting; why engage an architect rather than just start building a house. We engage in those highly developed media forms, that require expertise and artistry to pull off, because they are accepted ways of having a valued experience or producing a particular kind of outcome or artifact.
Constructing Compendium maps together has that same potential. We have to learn how to do it right. I think events like the first day of the workshop are steps on that path. I have seen before that it is not at all difficult to get groups to tightly engage with artifact creation if they have the right structure and scaffolding, as the small groups did. For me personally, when I finish with my current trajectory of research -- I am on the downhill slope of completing a PhD -- that is what I want to concentrate on; creating engaging Compendium events that get people working together on constructing sophisticated hypermedia artifacts that both express something of importance to the group, and bring the participants and authors together in unique and rewarding ways. The focus should no more be on Compendium itself and whether it is better or worse than other tools, than the focus of a film-making effort is on the brand of camera used. What's important is what is expressed in the unique medium, not the medium itself (see this related post).
Along with generating loads of useful research data for me, the first day exercises seemed to bring the workshop's attendees together. Many of the folks hadn't met each other before but by the end of the first day they seemed to be very friendly and informal with each other (see this photo of our happy first night group dinner at the Grand Indian Buffet restaurant in Sunnyvale). Most of the second day (as usual for our workshops) was more conventional talks and presentations on various Compendium topics, but my feeling (shared by at least some of the other organizers) was that the participants were much more engaged and interactive with the presentations than we have often seen in previous workshops, because they had a basis of shared experience (and reflection on that experience) to draw on.
It's a beautiful spring day here in near-upstate New York, so I will stop here for now to get out on the bike while I have the chance. I'll write more about the second day soon. Before closing, though, I have to give special thanks to Maarten Sierhius and Eugene Eric Kim for all the work they did to get the workshop organized. Along with all the advance deliberations (conducted with unremitting harmony and consensus (not)), Maarten got us our terrific setting at the NASA Conference Center and dealt with all the food and drink logistics (an unrewarding but highly appreciated task), and Eugene managed the flow of events during the workshop itself with aplomb, even improvising the schedule on the second half of the second day. We haven't yet planned our next workshop (East Coast USA? UK?) but I think we learned much from this one that will enrich all our subsequent gatherings.
Sunday, May 27, 2007
Organizing the main concepts
I've been thinking for a while that I needed to have some kind of clear ordering of the central concepts for my research -- that is, what I've seen as the main components of the PHC practitioner experience: aesthetics, ethics, sensemaking, improvisation, and narrative. This is mostly for communicative reasons. People seem to trip over "aesthetics" and "ethics" when I use them as the organizing principles. The concepts feel too heavyweight.
I saw this again in presentations and conversations at the Connections 2007 conference this past weekend. Some clarity also dawned as a result of the conversations with Chuck, Beth, and Mark during the weekend. Two that stand out particularly: listening to Mark's eloquent responses to Beth's insightful questions while I was stuffing my face with Chinese food on Sunday night, and the later-that-evening conversation and Compendium surfing with Chuck, especially when we were talking about the importance and subtleties of aesthetic shaping on representations like Chuck's Visual Explorer PowerPoints and Compendium maps.
I think that narrative, sensemaking, and improvisation are really the ongoing phenomena in which practitioner aesthetics and ethics -- the things I'm trying to characterize and make distinctions about -- take place. I'll try to illustrate that below.
Two stories grabbed from the Metro section of the Saturday New York Times are helpful illustrations of what I want to say about narrative, sensemaking, and improvisation:
From the "Pet Rescue" story:
Equally of interest are the actions taken by the police and firefighters in these situations. As professionals, they expect and very often deal with such situations, and it is in the way they approach these fraught occurences that we can discern their expertise. They make moves (assembling the right tools, wielding them adroitly (I imagine it takes some skill to throw noose over a python's "neck"), dealing with the aftermath, etc.) that "heal the breaches" (Bruner) and restore order. Put a novice in such situations, and it is quite unlkely that we would be effective.
As the latter story of the botched hunt for Ralph J. Phillips illustrates, even among professionals, things can go wrong. Despite the best tools, procedures, and hundreds of highly motivated troopers and officers, the hunt took months and resulted in death and serious injuries among the pursuers. As with Weick's story of the Mann Gulch fire disaster, sensemaking broke down in the face of competing stimuli and imperatives. Actions taken by these professionals were not effective. Coherence among all the competing narratives was not achieved. It took far longer to restore order than anyone anticipated:
Spence's concept of "narrative recursion" is helpful. People live and act in narratives unfolding at many levels simultaneously. In 'normal' times narrative means 'one damn thing after another', events following each other with comfortable logic and easily understood causation, unquestioned expectations. But things always happen to derail this flow. Things don't happen as planned and expected; the unexpected intervenes and throws things off. PHC practitioners work in such a recursive environment, deal with unexpected breaches, figure out what's going on and what to do, then act. We can look at their actions in aesthetic and ethical terms, and characterize how well they serve to heal the breaches.
Below are a number of formulations (suitable for maps or slides) of how the 5 main concepts relate when analyzing either expert or novice (as I am now going to be doing with the video recordings from the NASA Ames workshop) participatory hypermedia construction (PHC) practice.
I think when looking at PHC, narrative is the mother concept. Sensemaking occurs when narrative coherence is disrupted; things don't go and flow as unproblematically assumed. Improvisation happens at those sensemaking moments. improvisational moves have both aesthetic and ethical dimensions.
Practitioners act in sessions with the goal of creating and preserving *narrative coherence* in the representations, flow, discourse, etc. Events occur that break the flow ('breaches in the canonicity') that create *sensemaking moments*. At such moments, practitioners must *improvise* in order to heal the breaches and return to a coherent flow. These improvisational actions have both *aesthetic* and *ethical* dimensions.
So *narrative* is the ongoing goal and state (we construct narratives, are in narratives, etc.).
When narrative flow (one event seamlessly after another) is disrupted, *sensemaking* occurs.
At sensemaking moments, practitioners *improvise* representational and verbal moves and actions.
These moves have both *aesthetic* (what form the actions take and create) and *ethical* (the implications of the actions for the interests of participants, stakeholders, audiences, and practitioners) dimensions.
When narrative is disrupted, sensemaking and improvisation occurs. Improvisation has both aesthetic and ethical dimensions.
NARRATIVE is disrupted
==> SENSEMAKING occurs
====> IMPROVISATIONAL actions are taken to restore narrative coherence
======> the actions can be characterized in AESTHETIC and ETHICAL dimensions
When NARRATIVE coherence is disrupted it forces SENSEMAKING, which
requires IMPROVISATION, which has AESTHETIC and ETHICAL dimensions.
I saw this again in presentations and conversations at the Connections 2007 conference this past weekend. Some clarity also dawned as a result of the conversations with Chuck, Beth, and Mark during the weekend. Two that stand out particularly: listening to Mark's eloquent responses to Beth's insightful questions while I was stuffing my face with Chinese food on Sunday night, and the later-that-evening conversation and Compendium surfing with Chuck, especially when we were talking about the importance and subtleties of aesthetic shaping on representations like Chuck's Visual Explorer PowerPoints and Compendium maps.
I think that narrative, sensemaking, and improvisation are really the ongoing phenomena in which practitioner aesthetics and ethics -- the things I'm trying to characterize and make distinctions about -- take place. I'll try to illustrate that below.
Two stories grabbed from the Metro section of the Saturday New York Times are helpful illustrations of what I want to say about narrative, sensemaking, and improvisation:
- "Every so often a deer will appear in the 190th Street subway station. Or a 2,000-pound bull will escape from a rodeo and gallop along the streets of Long Island City. A man might arrive at an emergency room in need of stitches, bitten, it turns out, by the 500-pound pet wild tiger that lives in his apartment in Harlem. And once again, a strange but true animal event will have slapped the city out of the soul-leaching funk of $4 coffees and $200 theater tickets with the giddy news that someone keeps rats and mice in the freezer.... Few events so rouse the might and majesty of government at all levels as the discovery of a cache of scary or weird animals and bugs."
- "In Queens Fire, Pet Rescue Take a Turn For the Wild." The New York Times, 19 May 2007
- "The biggest manhunt in state history -- the five-month search for Ralph J. Phillips last year in the backwoods of western New York -- was thwarted time and again by communications problems, command confusion, troopers' misjudgements and over-reliance on an elite mobile unit, a state police report says."
- "Hunt for Fugitive Was Beset By Confusion, a Report Says." The New York Times, 19 May 2007
From the "Pet Rescue" story:
- "On Thursday morning, a Fire Department lieutenant, Ed Ireland, played his flashlight across the darkness of an apartment in the basement of a two-story house on 39th Avenue in Corona, Queens, where a fire had just been doused. The beam of his light stopped near the ground on a pair of eyes, followed immediately by 13 feet of Burmese python.... Nearby was a smallish alligator.... "Oh, my God," Lieutenant Ireland said." ... the Police Department Emergency Services Unit was dispatched, complete with noosed poles to hold the business end of the snake and gator... the police put water on the animals for their burns. Then the snake went into a clean garbage can, with a lid."
Equally of interest are the actions taken by the police and firefighters in these situations. As professionals, they expect and very often deal with such situations, and it is in the way they approach these fraught occurences that we can discern their expertise. They make moves (assembling the right tools, wielding them adroitly (I imagine it takes some skill to throw noose over a python's "neck"), dealing with the aftermath, etc.) that "heal the breaches" (Bruner) and restore order. Put a novice in such situations, and it is quite unlkely that we would be effective.
As the latter story of the botched hunt for Ralph J. Phillips illustrates, even among professionals, things can go wrong. Despite the best tools, procedures, and hundreds of highly motivated troopers and officers, the hunt took months and resulted in death and serious injuries among the pursuers. As with Weick's story of the Mann Gulch fire disaster, sensemaking broke down in the face of competing stimuli and imperatives. Actions taken by these professionals were not effective. Coherence among all the competing narratives was not achieved. It took far longer to restore order than anyone anticipated:
- "...the report said that field commanders often did not communicate instructions clearly to 1,400 state troopers and hundreds of officers from local, county, and federal agencies as the elusive woodsman stole cars, lived off the land and moved across the New York-Pennsylvania border at will. The report also cited equipment problems and faulted planning and interagency communication."
Spence's concept of "narrative recursion" is helpful. People live and act in narratives unfolding at many levels simultaneously. In 'normal' times narrative means 'one damn thing after another', events following each other with comfortable logic and easily understood causation, unquestioned expectations. But things always happen to derail this flow. Things don't happen as planned and expected; the unexpected intervenes and throws things off. PHC practitioners work in such a recursive environment, deal with unexpected breaches, figure out what's going on and what to do, then act. We can look at their actions in aesthetic and ethical terms, and characterize how well they serve to heal the breaches.
Below are a number of formulations (suitable for maps or slides) of how the 5 main concepts relate when analyzing either expert or novice (as I am now going to be doing with the video recordings from the NASA Ames workshop) participatory hypermedia construction (PHC) practice.
*
I think when looking at PHC, narrative is the mother concept. Sensemaking occurs when narrative coherence is disrupted; things don't go and flow as unproblematically assumed. Improvisation happens at those sensemaking moments. improvisational moves have both aesthetic and ethical dimensions.
*
Practitioners act in sessions with the goal of creating and preserving *narrative coherence* in the representations, flow, discourse, etc. Events occur that break the flow ('breaches in the canonicity') that create *sensemaking moments*. At such moments, practitioners must *improvise* in order to heal the breaches and return to a coherent flow. These improvisational actions have both *aesthetic* and *ethical* dimensions.
*
So *narrative* is the ongoing goal and state (we construct narratives, are in narratives, etc.).
When narrative flow (one event seamlessly after another) is disrupted, *sensemaking* occurs.
At sensemaking moments, practitioners *improvise* representational and verbal moves and actions.
These moves have both *aesthetic* (what form the actions take and create) and *ethical* (the implications of the actions for the interests of participants, stakeholders, audiences, and practitioners) dimensions.
*
When narrative is disrupted, sensemaking and improvisation occurs. Improvisation has both aesthetic and ethical dimensions.
*
NARRATIVE is disrupted
==> SENSEMAKING occurs
====> IMPROVISATIONAL actions are taken to restore narrative coherence
======> the actions can be characterized in AESTHETIC and ETHICAL dimensions
*
When NARRATIVE coherence is disrupted it forces SENSEMAKING, which
requires IMPROVISATION, which has AESTHETIC and ETHICAL dimensions.
Friday, March 23, 2007
Shared Compendium over the Web -- it can work!
Courtesy of Mark Aakhus at Rutgers, I saw how sharing Compendium (MySQL) works over the web via Citrix. So far what I've seen -- via both DSL from home and via an EV-DO aircard from my laptop at Rutgers -- is way beyond "raw" over-the-Internet access to shared Compendium. The performance was excellent, quite usable (unlike what we've experienced using shared Compendium over the Internet). And this was true multi-user shared Compendium - multiple users accessing even the
same map at the same time.
This is kind of epochal, at least for me. I haven't truly interacted with a shared Compendium or QuestMap project since more than 10 years ago with QuestMap on a LAN, and even then it wasn't over the 'net. I have been happily interacting with this project for the last couple of days, seeing the potential of true collaborative (that is, asynchronous and multi-user) Compendium.
same map at the same time.
This is kind of epochal, at least for me. I haven't truly interacted with a shared Compendium or QuestMap project since more than 10 years ago with QuestMap on a LAN, and even then it wasn't over the 'net. I have been happily interacting with this project for the last couple of days, seeing the potential of true collaborative (that is, asynchronous and multi-user) Compendium.
Sunday, February 04, 2007
Mastery in presentation
Recently I've been impressed by how masterful presenters, like Steve Jobs and Al Gore, use presentation software (I think in both cases Apple's Keynote, but not sure). For the iPhone launch, Jobs starts off by saying that Apple is going to introduce three new products -- a mobile phone, a widescreen iPod, and an Internet communicator. He has slides on each one then weaves them together to show that it is really one product -- the iPhone. Throughout his talk and demoes he uses the slides as both content and backdrop, and the whole production appears seamless, entertaining, and convincing. Similarly in the film An Inconvenient Truth, Gore gives an amped-up version of his famous slideshow. I found it riveting and utterly persuasive (might have to go along with my wife's wish to trade in our Sienna).
In neither Jobs' nor Gore's cases is the presentation or the software used to produce it itself their focus, though clearly they have spent huge amounts of time, effort, and artistry to produce and fine-tune their presentations, and take advantage of many power-user features (not to mention professionally produced graphics). There are shots throughout An Inconvenient Truth of Gore mousing around on his Powerbook, tweaking the slideshow. They are primarily interested in the message they are trying to get across, its persuasiveness and evocativeness, rather than the medium itself. They are after a "vertical" of getting across particular meaning rather than the "horizontal" of making the software itself, and what it can do, their focus.
With Compendium, however, the software itself, the methods to produce its "presentations", and the horizontal potential of these, have been my focus. Sometimes that feels like kind of a tech-weenie mission. Rather than focusing directly on a societal problem as Gore does, I have spent years of effort on a tool and approach that may or may not ever be used to make a social difference. I spend loads of time working with the rest of the small Compendium team on technical details. It is true that for me, as well as for many of the rest of us, there is a social impetus behind this work, but again it is horizontal in nature, having to do with enhancing our ability to communicate with and understand each other. Sometimes -- usually -- this feels necessary and worthwhile, but after watching Gore's film it can feel excessively indirect.
In neither Jobs' nor Gore's cases is the presentation or the software used to produce it itself their focus, though clearly they have spent huge amounts of time, effort, and artistry to produce and fine-tune their presentations, and take advantage of many power-user features (not to mention professionally produced graphics). There are shots throughout An Inconvenient Truth of Gore mousing around on his Powerbook, tweaking the slideshow. They are primarily interested in the message they are trying to get across, its persuasiveness and evocativeness, rather than the medium itself. They are after a "vertical" of getting across particular meaning rather than the "horizontal" of making the software itself, and what it can do, their focus.
With Compendium, however, the software itself, the methods to produce its "presentations", and the horizontal potential of these, have been my focus. Sometimes that feels like kind of a tech-weenie mission. Rather than focusing directly on a societal problem as Gore does, I have spent years of effort on a tool and approach that may or may not ever be used to make a social difference. I spend loads of time working with the rest of the small Compendium team on technical details. It is true that for me, as well as for many of the rest of us, there is a social impetus behind this work, but again it is horizontal in nature, having to do with enhancing our ability to communicate with and understand each other. Sometimes -- usually -- this feels necessary and worthwhile, but after watching Gore's film it can feel excessively indirect.
Sunday, December 10, 2006
Particularity of the medium
One of Dewey's key concepts is the particularity of the artistic medium. For any kind of aesthetic production, the specific situation is interwoven with the specific medium. Aesthetics and ethics can't be understood apart from the very specific experience and situation. Artists work with, think in terms of, suffer through, slave over in terms of that medium. They have something they are trying to do or express, and the way they need to do that is in and through that medium, not through scattershot vocalizations or collections of different media. They force need and meaning through the funnel of their chosen medium, the resistance and obstacles it throws in their way, but also the unique potential and affordances it alone provides to them. They steep themselves in the nuances of the traditions of how that medium has been used before, and those filter into the unique constellation of the present situation and the state of the artist's current orientation to their subject, their environment, and the tool -- what they've tried to do and have done before, what they want to do now. All of this seems central to what I'm trying to go after with my research, and what happens for me when I work in the medium itself.
There is something I'm trying to get to and get at with Compendium and what surrounds it (e.g. publishing exports on the web, writing about it, etc). Each time I plunge myself into actually making something, shaping, planning, redoing, battling with why some aspect isn't working or isn't going the way I want it to -- each time, as Dewey says, is unique, and is only and uniquely done through the purpose and lens of Compendium as a medium. I could do some aspects of what I'm trying to do in other media, and also could (and sometimes do) make stuff within Compendium in a repetitive, non-original manner, but I don't want to. There are particularities and specifics of Compendium that are part and parcel of why I'd want to make the current object in the first place and how I want to go forward. I want to achieve or make or express the thing, but I want it to be achieved/made/expressed in Compendium. I want Compendium to rise to the occasion, to be the tool I need it to be, to become the tool I want it to become. There is an ongoing project, some long-term goal (what Wright & McCarthy would talk about as the future-orientation of the work) or purpose that I'm after, that keeps me returning to this medium to try again, to apply it to something else. The more I'm away from it I feel like I am not doing what only I can uniquely do, the more I work with it the more I want to do it. At the same time I tend to leave things unfinished or incomplete -- that's part of it, part of the nature of the medium I am obsessed with, is that it can always be queried, used in dialogue, extended, reshaped. Every object I've made has been done with that intent and in that spirit; not as a finished product or end in itself, though I always want them to serve the purpose that I intended during the making. But I also want them to be taken up as dialogic objects, used for further communication, with all the particularities and nuances of how that can work in Compendium (which I have been trying to get and extend and improve for the past 14 years).
As Dewey talks about, it is not external approval (though I do want that too) or measurement against some standard that motivates me and keeps me at this. There are potentially thousands of people who could make better Compendium artifacts that I can. I have seen spectacular things from Simon, Ale, Clara, Nick, and others. I am not trying to be better than them or even measure what I produce against theirs (though seeing beautiful work can inspire me, give me ideas, and it is always gratifying to me personally because I know those works would not have existed in that form without my contribution to getting the tools and methods where they are now over the years). It's more that there is a degree or kind of Compendium creation out there --- maddeningly elusive -- that pulls in all the things the medium is capable of. We will never be as good as what the potential is, it's a supermagnet in front of us, continually pulling away. There may well be some geniuses of the medium already working or lying in wait out there -- Compendium Shakespeares -- who could do something measuring up to this ultimate standard -- but even then they would never use it up. "OK now that this is done there's nothing left to do, except to imitate it". In that it is the same as any other artistic medium. Many (or most) people would now not even consider Compendium as a real or worthy medium, for whatever reason -- it's not enough of this, it's not seen enough as that -- but that is irrelevant to me. I would want to do this even if no one else did (though at the same time I passionately want more people to).
Dewey really gets at the inseparable emotional (as well as intellectual) aspects of aesthetic production, the intensity with which someone caught up in the making and doing feels it, sees it, thinks about it, grapples with it. Almost anywhere I open up Art as Experience something leaps out at me as being exactly and poetically stated about the experience (which, as he also points out, is or can be common to both making and perceiving). Like the following:
Why did he think to write this, and know to write it that way? The book is full of that stuff -- so direct, so lacking in gobbledygook. If all philosophers and theorists could write with that kind of clarity, maybe I would be able to read and understand a lot more of it.
There is something I'm trying to get to and get at with Compendium and what surrounds it (e.g. publishing exports on the web, writing about it, etc). Each time I plunge myself into actually making something, shaping, planning, redoing, battling with why some aspect isn't working or isn't going the way I want it to -- each time, as Dewey says, is unique, and is only and uniquely done through the purpose and lens of Compendium as a medium. I could do some aspects of what I'm trying to do in other media, and also could (and sometimes do) make stuff within Compendium in a repetitive, non-original manner, but I don't want to. There are particularities and specifics of Compendium that are part and parcel of why I'd want to make the current object in the first place and how I want to go forward. I want to achieve or make or express the thing, but I want it to be achieved/made/expressed in Compendium. I want Compendium to rise to the occasion, to be the tool I need it to be, to become the tool I want it to become. There is an ongoing project, some long-term goal (what Wright & McCarthy would talk about as the future-orientation of the work) or purpose that I'm after, that keeps me returning to this medium to try again, to apply it to something else. The more I'm away from it I feel like I am not doing what only I can uniquely do, the more I work with it the more I want to do it. At the same time I tend to leave things unfinished or incomplete -- that's part of it, part of the nature of the medium I am obsessed with, is that it can always be queried, used in dialogue, extended, reshaped. Every object I've made has been done with that intent and in that spirit; not as a finished product or end in itself, though I always want them to serve the purpose that I intended during the making. But I also want them to be taken up as dialogic objects, used for further communication, with all the particularities and nuances of how that can work in Compendium (which I have been trying to get and extend and improve for the past 14 years).
As Dewey talks about, it is not external approval (though I do want that too) or measurement against some standard that motivates me and keeps me at this. There are potentially thousands of people who could make better Compendium artifacts that I can. I have seen spectacular things from Simon, Ale, Clara, Nick, and others. I am not trying to be better than them or even measure what I produce against theirs (though seeing beautiful work can inspire me, give me ideas, and it is always gratifying to me personally because I know those works would not have existed in that form without my contribution to getting the tools and methods where they are now over the years). It's more that there is a degree or kind of Compendium creation out there --- maddeningly elusive -- that pulls in all the things the medium is capable of. We will never be as good as what the potential is, it's a supermagnet in front of us, continually pulling away. There may well be some geniuses of the medium already working or lying in wait out there -- Compendium Shakespeares -- who could do something measuring up to this ultimate standard -- but even then they would never use it up. "OK now that this is done there's nothing left to do, except to imitate it". In that it is the same as any other artistic medium. Many (or most) people would now not even consider Compendium as a real or worthy medium, for whatever reason -- it's not enough of this, it's not seen enough as that -- but that is irrelevant to me. I would want to do this even if no one else did (though at the same time I passionately want more people to).
"Indifference to response of the immediate audience is a necessary trait of all artists that have something new to say. But they are animated by a deep conviction that since they can only say what they have to say, the trouble is not with their work but those who, having eyes, see not, and having ears, hear not. Communicability has nothing to do with popularity." (Art as Experience, p. 109)
Dewey really gets at the inseparable emotional (as well as intellectual) aspects of aesthetic production, the intensity with which someone caught up in the making and doing feels it, sees it, thinks about it, grapples with it. Almost anywhere I open up Art as Experience something leaps out at me as being exactly and poetically stated about the experience (which, as he also points out, is or can be common to both making and perceiving). Like the following:
"Sense qualities are the carrier of meanings, not as vehicles carrying goods but as a mother carries a baby when the baby is part of her own organism." (p. 122-3)
Why did he think to write this, and know to write it that way? The book is full of that stuff -- so direct, so lacking in gobbledygook. If all philosophers and theorists could write with that kind of clarity, maybe I would be able to read and understand a lot more of it.
Choices in creating maps from others' email
The main point of this blog is to talk about the idea of knowledge art from the perspective of actual practice, not to pontificate or make grand claims. Or at least, if I do pontificate, to have it emerge from and be grounded in instances of practice. This post is meant to be an example of what I should be doing most of the time.
A few minutes ago I constructed two maps in Compendium based on an ongoing discussion from the Compendium Institute yahoogroup. The discussion concerns options for a shared/collaborative of the software. The maps themselves are here. Some observations on the making of these maps follows.
Even making these, which were completely based on content that others (e.g. Ron Wheeler, Dick Karpinski, Jack Paulus) had created, and were just simple argument maps, involved making aesthetic and ethical decisions on the fly. Aesthetic, because I had to decide how much of which email entry to put in what kind of node, and how to link it to the others, among other choices; ethical, because I made decisions on how to represent the speech of other people, in ways which may or may not convey their intent, not to mention possibly influence how other people would see and understand their comments. Whether or not I (or any practitioner) am aware of these as ethical choices, whether or not I want to take on the responsibility that making representational choices is an ethical act, to me it remains that it unavoidably is one.
Except for Dick Karpinski's entry, which was (helpfully in this context) already laid out in a clear IBIS format, the others did not in all cases lend themselves to 1:1 rendering as questions, answers, pros and cons, easily and clearly linkable. This is almost always the case in real life, trying to map discussions as they occur (Jeff Conklin writes about this masterfully in his Dialog Mapping book). The mapper needs to make on-the-fly decisions about how to represent the conversation, trying to stay both faithful to the intent and meaning of the person who made the statement, and to the conceptual framework the mapper is trying to use to structure the conversation coherently and usefully (in this case, the framework was IBIS). For example, the original email had a number of clearly stated, distinct requirements, which could easily be mapped (though this itself was a choice I made, not given in the material) as Answers to an (implicit) Question node.
e.g. the original email had statements like:
"1. User can add and access files and documents
2. Works without installing software on client
3. Nodes and links have intuitive, easy-to-find tags one can link to
to arrive at that particular node or link via web"
etc.
I copied all this into the Detail of a Question node in Compendium, separated each numbered paragraph with an empty line, clicked the "Convert page text into nodes" button, which created separate Note nodes linked back to the Question. I changed the node types of all of them to Answer, tagged each with a "requirement" tag, then deleted the text from the Detail of the original Question and changed its label to "Basic requirements?". This was implicit and an interpretative choice on my part, since there was no such question in the original email (the way Ron had prefaced it was "This is the original list:"). I cleaned up the new requirements nodes some, making sure the labels were clear, but then had to figure out how to incorporate the comments/arguments in subsequent emails into this map.
Some of this was straightforward and did not require much representational decision-making on my part (e.g. Ron helpfully tied his argumentation back to the numbered requirements in his email, with statements like "7) Is a basic Compendium function. Vote +1"). Some was not so straightforward, such as portions of Jack's subsequent email ("I am comfortable with the compendium client and could see it working in that tool but we, as members of this list, are a self-selected sample that do not represent the average user, an average user that would benefit greatly from such a tool."). This was fairly clearly a comment on requirement #5 ("5. No software need be installed on the client machine."), but possibly also #2 ("2. Works without installing software on client"). I could have decided to combine #5 and #2 into one node, but that would have messed up the replying comments/arguments Ron had made, not to mention imposing my own interpretation on the original text. Also, since Ron had later commented on Jack's points, I needed to choose a way to represent that chain, which I did as a Con node pointing to the Pro node I had made from Jack's comment.
There were a ton of other such choices made in the less than 10 minutes it took me to construct the maps, make web and XML exports, put them up on the Compendium Institute website, and create an index page to point to the exports (all of which also comprised a number of choices). I wanted to do all this very quickly so that I would get back to the writing I have to do (the weekend is ebbing away rapidly), so I did not belabor the choices and spend a lot of time tweaking and perfecting. My hope is that someone else will take the XML and rework it in a better form -- in fact, that has been the hope I've had with almost all the Compendium work I've put up on the web in various places, though it has yet to happen -- rather than trying to perfect it on my own.
I could probably spend the rest of the day just describing what I did in this short exercise of creating the maps from emails, talking about the intended audience, the trajectory I see / hope that the maps will take, the subject matter itself, my own use of Compendium and the web in this one instance and how it ties to the other work I've done and foresee doing. But that would indeed take at least the rest of the day. As Dewey says, "A lifetime would be too short to reproduce in words a single emotion" (Art as Experience). I just wanted to get at least a little of this down quickly here. To me this -- trying to make such practitioner choices primary subject matter -- is ongoing work, a huge and endless subject, that my research is pointed towards, and that I hope to engage others in.
A few minutes ago I constructed two maps in Compendium based on an ongoing discussion from the Compendium Institute yahoogroup. The discussion concerns options for a shared/collaborative of the software. The maps themselves are here. Some observations on the making of these maps follows.
Even making these, which were completely based on content that others (e.g. Ron Wheeler, Dick Karpinski, Jack Paulus) had created, and were just simple argument maps, involved making aesthetic and ethical decisions on the fly. Aesthetic, because I had to decide how much of which email entry to put in what kind of node, and how to link it to the others, among other choices; ethical, because I made decisions on how to represent the speech of other people, in ways which may or may not convey their intent, not to mention possibly influence how other people would see and understand their comments. Whether or not I (or any practitioner) am aware of these as ethical choices, whether or not I want to take on the responsibility that making representational choices is an ethical act, to me it remains that it unavoidably is one.
Except for Dick Karpinski's entry, which was (helpfully in this context) already laid out in a clear IBIS format, the others did not in all cases lend themselves to 1:1 rendering as questions, answers, pros and cons, easily and clearly linkable. This is almost always the case in real life, trying to map discussions as they occur (Jeff Conklin writes about this masterfully in his Dialog Mapping book). The mapper needs to make on-the-fly decisions about how to represent the conversation, trying to stay both faithful to the intent and meaning of the person who made the statement, and to the conceptual framework the mapper is trying to use to structure the conversation coherently and usefully (in this case, the framework was IBIS). For example, the original email had a number of clearly stated, distinct requirements, which could easily be mapped (though this itself was a choice I made, not given in the material) as Answers to an (implicit) Question node.
e.g. the original email had statements like:
"1. User can add and access files and documents
2. Works without installing software on client
3. Nodes and links have intuitive, easy-to-find tags one can link to
to arrive at that particular node or link via web"
etc.
I copied all this into the Detail of a Question node in Compendium, separated each numbered paragraph with an empty line, clicked the "Convert page text into nodes" button, which created separate Note nodes linked back to the Question. I changed the node types of all of them to Answer, tagged each with a "requirement" tag, then deleted the text from the Detail of the original Question and changed its label to "Basic requirements?". This was implicit and an interpretative choice on my part, since there was no such question in the original email (the way Ron had prefaced it was "This is the original list:"). I cleaned up the new requirements nodes some, making sure the labels were clear, but then had to figure out how to incorporate the comments/arguments in subsequent emails into this map.
Some of this was straightforward and did not require much representational decision-making on my part (e.g. Ron helpfully tied his argumentation back to the numbered requirements in his email, with statements like "7) Is a basic Compendium function. Vote +1"). Some was not so straightforward, such as portions of Jack's subsequent email ("I am comfortable with the compendium client and could see it working in that tool but we, as members of this list, are a self-selected sample that do not represent the average user, an average user that would benefit greatly from such a tool."). This was fairly clearly a comment on requirement #5 ("5. No software need be installed on the client machine."), but possibly also #2 ("2. Works without installing software on client"). I could have decided to combine #5 and #2 into one node, but that would have messed up the replying comments/arguments Ron had made, not to mention imposing my own interpretation on the original text. Also, since Ron had later commented on Jack's points, I needed to choose a way to represent that chain, which I did as a Con node pointing to the Pro node I had made from Jack's comment.
There were a ton of other such choices made in the less than 10 minutes it took me to construct the maps, make web and XML exports, put them up on the Compendium Institute website, and create an index page to point to the exports (all of which also comprised a number of choices). I wanted to do all this very quickly so that I would get back to the writing I have to do (the weekend is ebbing away rapidly), so I did not belabor the choices and spend a lot of time tweaking and perfecting. My hope is that someone else will take the XML and rework it in a better form -- in fact, that has been the hope I've had with almost all the Compendium work I've put up on the web in various places, though it has yet to happen -- rather than trying to perfect it on my own.
I could probably spend the rest of the day just describing what I did in this short exercise of creating the maps from emails, talking about the intended audience, the trajectory I see / hope that the maps will take, the subject matter itself, my own use of Compendium and the web in this one instance and how it ties to the other work I've done and foresee doing. But that would indeed take at least the rest of the day. As Dewey says, "A lifetime would be too short to reproduce in words a single emotion" (Art as Experience). I just wanted to get at least a little of this down quickly here. To me this -- trying to make such practitioner choices primary subject matter -- is ongoing work, a huge and endless subject, that my research is pointed towards, and that I hope to engage others in.
Saturday, December 09, 2006
Sensemaking in the zeitgeist
This follows up on an earlier post that mentioned the conflict between principled vs intuitive approaches to design.
Much of my interest since the 1980s has been in the idea of sensemaking, what happens when individuals or groups in the course of their work hit something they don't understand or can't get past. Communication and other breakdowns often occur at such times, people don't know what to do or have conflicting or confused ideas as to the right actions to take. I think I'm pretty good at coming up with structures, tools, and interventions to help at those moments, whether that's UI design, user guides, presentations, training materials, facilitation, hypermedia discourse, etc.
This is in the face of, and often in opposition to, situations where everyone seems to know what needs to be done, how it needs to be done, what it means in the context, how things should be prioritized, often with much greater clarity, nuance, and in more dimensions than I do. I often feel not very intelligent about understanding the bulk of what is generally known, at least at first blush. If I throw myself into the situation, get immersed in the details and how they relate together (often in the context of having to create one of the interventions I spoke of above), then I can get some of that understanding. I'm pretty good at looking deeply at something, getting its nuances in pursuit of some specific end; but not very good at just generally picking up the zeitgeist, slipping unproblematically into the shared pool of knowledge that others seem to pick up just by being around.
I've seen this very clearly at my job (in a large systems development organization). Most everyone else seems to better understand the technical stuff -- servers, security processes, testing protocols, configuration management, etc., and also the subject matter of the applications we develop, especially how all the systems and processes relate to one another. Even in an area I'm ostensibly more expert in, user interfaces, many seem often to know more fluidly and quickly than me what needs to be in an application's UI, what the user experience should and shouldn't be. The kinds of interventions and comments I make often seem more superficial, "cosmetic", on the wrong or at least a not very important level (not as important as other levels and interventions that have to happen). Engineering, logistical, and operations considerations trump all else, and this is not to imply that this is wrong; these considerations are indeed often much more what matters, or at least what needs to minimally be done and done right for the application to get delivered on time and function in its environment at all. I feel that I ought to have more insight, due to my experience, level, skills, enlightened worldview, etc., but paradoxically I often seem to have less. Part of this is good, if humbling. I don't (or at least, constantly realize I shouldn't) inflate my own importance and wisdom. I listen more to the insights of others and recognize their skills and experience.
On the other hand, there are limits to what the zeitgeist, the common wisdom, the generally known, produce. From an IT application development point of view, this often comes out in the level of quality and usability that a particular system attains. The zeitgeist seems programmed to deliver functionality that can be attained by a certain date, within constraints, and that 'works' in the existing environment, but the rub lies in what it doesn't do, the things that don't add up, that are invisible or given less attention than they need, until the system hits the factory floor. There is usually not the time or resource to give these considerations their due in the system development lifecycle. When they come up, they present dilemmas and conundrums -- akin to the sensemaking moments I was talking about above. They require a different level of thought and intervention and the zeitgeist doesn't help much. The considerations are unique, not generic, and have deeply to do with the intricacies and subtleties of the relationships of the parts to the whole, especially as a user will encounter them. And they are usually not things that simply asking a user could have surfaced in advance -- they only come out when the new application exists, when it has tangible form that someone can interact with (though certainly, as user-centered design advocates would argue, sometimes the problems could have been avoided through upfront user research, low-fidelity prototypes. But only sometimes). It takes a ton of work to get to the point where you can even see the problems emerge. At that point, different skills are required. I'm happier and feel less stupid there. But those points are not the preponderance of what goes on.
Much of my interest since the 1980s has been in the idea of sensemaking, what happens when individuals or groups in the course of their work hit something they don't understand or can't get past. Communication and other breakdowns often occur at such times, people don't know what to do or have conflicting or confused ideas as to the right actions to take. I think I'm pretty good at coming up with structures, tools, and interventions to help at those moments, whether that's UI design, user guides, presentations, training materials, facilitation, hypermedia discourse, etc.
This is in the face of, and often in opposition to, situations where everyone seems to know what needs to be done, how it needs to be done, what it means in the context, how things should be prioritized, often with much greater clarity, nuance, and in more dimensions than I do. I often feel not very intelligent about understanding the bulk of what is generally known, at least at first blush. If I throw myself into the situation, get immersed in the details and how they relate together (often in the context of having to create one of the interventions I spoke of above), then I can get some of that understanding. I'm pretty good at looking deeply at something, getting its nuances in pursuit of some specific end; but not very good at just generally picking up the zeitgeist, slipping unproblematically into the shared pool of knowledge that others seem to pick up just by being around.
I've seen this very clearly at my job (in a large systems development organization). Most everyone else seems to better understand the technical stuff -- servers, security processes, testing protocols, configuration management, etc., and also the subject matter of the applications we develop, especially how all the systems and processes relate to one another. Even in an area I'm ostensibly more expert in, user interfaces, many seem often to know more fluidly and quickly than me what needs to be in an application's UI, what the user experience should and shouldn't be. The kinds of interventions and comments I make often seem more superficial, "cosmetic", on the wrong or at least a not very important level (not as important as other levels and interventions that have to happen). Engineering, logistical, and operations considerations trump all else, and this is not to imply that this is wrong; these considerations are indeed often much more what matters, or at least what needs to minimally be done and done right for the application to get delivered on time and function in its environment at all. I feel that I ought to have more insight, due to my experience, level, skills, enlightened worldview, etc., but paradoxically I often seem to have less. Part of this is good, if humbling. I don't (or at least, constantly realize I shouldn't) inflate my own importance and wisdom. I listen more to the insights of others and recognize their skills and experience.
On the other hand, there are limits to what the zeitgeist, the common wisdom, the generally known, produce. From an IT application development point of view, this often comes out in the level of quality and usability that a particular system attains. The zeitgeist seems programmed to deliver functionality that can be attained by a certain date, within constraints, and that 'works' in the existing environment, but the rub lies in what it doesn't do, the things that don't add up, that are invisible or given less attention than they need, until the system hits the factory floor. There is usually not the time or resource to give these considerations their due in the system development lifecycle. When they come up, they present dilemmas and conundrums -- akin to the sensemaking moments I was talking about above. They require a different level of thought and intervention and the zeitgeist doesn't help much. The considerations are unique, not generic, and have deeply to do with the intricacies and subtleties of the relationships of the parts to the whole, especially as a user will encounter them. And they are usually not things that simply asking a user could have surfaced in advance -- they only come out when the new application exists, when it has tangible form that someone can interact with (though certainly, as user-centered design advocates would argue, sometimes the problems could have been avoided through upfront user research, low-fidelity prototypes. But only sometimes). It takes a ton of work to get to the point where you can even see the problems emerge. At that point, different skills are required. I'm happier and feel less stupid there. But those points are not the preponderance of what goes on.
Sunday, November 26, 2006
Converting materials
Although you would not know it from the last few entries, the subject of this blog is not "things I do to avoid doing the writing I need to do." I have actually spent a fair amount of time writing in the past few days. However, I have spent a lot more time on a flood of email, Compendium work, web publishing, and general messing around on computers. I don't get to do this very often, usually only on vacations (the last time, really, was last Xmas break), and almost all of it was stuff I was happy to get done (long-term residents on my to-do list), though many hours were spent in things like searching through old XML files and .sql backups on 3 computers to find Compendium stuff I'd done a few years back (I did find most, but not all, of what I was looking for).
One of the things I got done was finding and rehabbing some of the fictional stories I'd done in Compendium in 2003, putting them up on the web, and creating some materials to surround them. The result is here.
It all does go together, though. The writing I'm doing -- going back through my notes on Dewey, Schön, Wright/McCarthy, and others and trying to write something coherent that relates the ideas to where I'm going with my PhD work -- is making me think hard about what I am really seeing and saying there. One problem I always have in doing such work is that nearly every line by the original authors seems so insightful and compelling (and so beyond what I could come up with) that I want to quote them all, and then my writing becomes just stringing together of what others have said. As Dewey puts it:
One of the things I got done was finding and rehabbing some of the fictional stories I'd done in Compendium in 2003, putting them up on the web, and creating some materials to surround them. The result is here.
It all does go together, though. The writing I'm doing -- going back through my notes on Dewey, Schön, Wright/McCarthy, and others and trying to write something coherent that relates the ideas to where I'm going with my PhD work -- is making me think hard about what I am really seeing and saying there. One problem I always have in doing such work is that nearly every line by the original authors seems so insightful and compelling (and so beyond what I could come up with) that I want to quote them all, and then my writing becomes just stringing together of what others have said. As Dewey puts it:
"The abiding struggle of art is thus to convert materials that are stammering or dumb in ordinary experience into eloquent media."In my case it's my own thoughts and ability to bring coherence that are stammering and dumb, but in the working over of all the stuff, the struggle to get it to make sense and mean something, they do, usually or at least often, get somewhere. And all this messing around in html, xml, Compendium, etc. that I've done over the last few days, will hopefully be at least a step on the path to making something eloquent. Not just, or only, procrastination.
(Art as Experience)
Friday, November 24, 2006
Granular reuse
One of the core aspects of Compendium for me has always been the concept of granular reuse of knowledge elements, even back in QuestMap days. This means that you can make use of the same elements (nodes and links) in multiple contexts, even in completely different projects or databases. The work you did to create the elements in the first place can be leveraged many times for different purposes. It can happen on many different levels -- for example, just the text, or the way you have constructed a whole node with its images, tags, etc., or sets of nodes and links and maps together. I wrote about it in this 1998 paper.
Granular reuse is one of the things that makes Compendium different from other approaches, like concept mapping, because the work you do in one context can be so easily and multiply reused in another. The more familiar and fluid you are with the different techniques and concepts, the more you can make use of your knowledge elements over and over, getting new and different value each time.
I spent so much time over the last few days constructing my first portfolio map -- a View by Time. It wasn't the linking and arranging of the map itself, but rather the construction of the individual nodes -- finding good URLs of the items (in some cases they'd moved or dropped off the web at some point); getting the bibliographic info for the publication; messing around with the text; doing repeated copying of the HTML files to the KMi server, seeing something that needed fixing, changing it in Compendium and re-generating the exports, re-copying the files, etc. Last night, when dropping off after the usual Thanksgiving glut, I had the thought that although I liked how the View by Time had come out, I also wanted to see the portfolio in different ways, like grouped thematically. So this morning I sat down to construct that view (and yes also to continue procrastinating on the writing I need to do).
This time it was way quicker to create even though the view itself was kind of involved, because all I had to do was transclude the nodes from the View by Time into the new View by Type map. Most of the other work was done for me (by me) already, this was just making a new arrangement of the elements. What makes it 'granular reuse' is that, as with all transclusions, if I make changes to any of the individual nodes they will be made in both views (a kind of magic that I am always amazed by). And the some of the ancillary stuff I'd done in the first view, like the "Related Links" navigation (some which point to web pages and some which are views in the same Compendium project), were immediately reusable although I modified them for the new view. I also realized that the titling and background, which I had done for the first view in by laboriously arranging the titles and category headings in Powerpoint, saving them as a JPG then using that as my map background, could more easily be done with icon-less Compendium nodes and Scribble-layer drawings. So now both views are 100% Compendium constructions, and in the same database so I could easily make new views with some or all of the same elements.
When I was making the second view, it became a lot more apparent to me how I should be tagging the nodes. I used the categories that I'd shown as Questions in the View by Time (e.g. "co-authored papers", "Compendium experiments", etc.) as the seeds for the tags. As I started to tag the nodes I realized that I could do it better by having attributes separated out into different tags. For example, at first I had one tag for "co-authored papers" and another for "papers" (meaning I'd written those alone); I realized it would be better to have a tag for "co-authored" that could be applied to anything that I'd done with others, such as papers, book chapters, workshops, and so on. A more elegant structure, but more to the point of this post, it will allow me to do other reuse activities later, such as constructing a view that shows things I've worked on with other people. All I'll have to do is search for anything with "co-authored" as a tag, insert it into a new map, and go. Using the new Tags interface was a joy (thanks Simon and Michelle!).
I don't feel that I am getting across what I'd like to here, the power and fluidity of Compendium's granular reuse mechanisms, so I will probably have to revise this at some point when I'm better inspired. Now this is the last thing on my list of must-procrastinate-because-this-is-also-worth-doing items for today; heading to the writing table (arghh! just spent another 15 minutes cleaning up the Home Window of my Compendium PhD database, which was also on my list).
Granular reuse is one of the things that makes Compendium different from other approaches, like concept mapping, because the work you do in one context can be so easily and multiply reused in another. The more familiar and fluid you are with the different techniques and concepts, the more you can make use of your knowledge elements over and over, getting new and different value each time.
I spent so much time over the last few days constructing my first portfolio map -- a View by Time. It wasn't the linking and arranging of the map itself, but rather the construction of the individual nodes -- finding good URLs of the items (in some cases they'd moved or dropped off the web at some point); getting the bibliographic info for the publication; messing around with the text; doing repeated copying of the HTML files to the KMi server, seeing something that needed fixing, changing it in Compendium and re-generating the exports, re-copying the files, etc. Last night, when dropping off after the usual Thanksgiving glut, I had the thought that although I liked how the View by Time had come out, I also wanted to see the portfolio in different ways, like grouped thematically. So this morning I sat down to construct that view (and yes also to continue procrastinating on the writing I need to do).
This time it was way quicker to create even though the view itself was kind of involved, because all I had to do was transclude the nodes from the View by Time into the new View by Type map. Most of the other work was done for me (by me) already, this was just making a new arrangement of the elements. What makes it 'granular reuse' is that, as with all transclusions, if I make changes to any of the individual nodes they will be made in both views (a kind of magic that I am always amazed by). And the some of the ancillary stuff I'd done in the first view, like the "Related Links" navigation (some which point to web pages and some which are views in the same Compendium project), were immediately reusable although I modified them for the new view. I also realized that the titling and background, which I had done for the first view in by laboriously arranging the titles and category headings in Powerpoint, saving them as a JPG then using that as my map background, could more easily be done with icon-less Compendium nodes and Scribble-layer drawings. So now both views are 100% Compendium constructions, and in the same database so I could easily make new views with some or all of the same elements.
When I was making the second view, it became a lot more apparent to me how I should be tagging the nodes. I used the categories that I'd shown as Questions in the View by Time (e.g. "co-authored papers", "Compendium experiments", etc.) as the seeds for the tags. As I started to tag the nodes I realized that I could do it better by having attributes separated out into different tags. For example, at first I had one tag for "co-authored papers" and another for "papers" (meaning I'd written those alone); I realized it would be better to have a tag for "co-authored" that could be applied to anything that I'd done with others, such as papers, book chapters, workshops, and so on. A more elegant structure, but more to the point of this post, it will allow me to do other reuse activities later, such as constructing a view that shows things I've worked on with other people. All I'll have to do is search for anything with "co-authored" as a tag, insert it into a new map, and go. Using the new Tags interface was a joy (thanks Simon and Michelle!).
I don't feel that I am getting across what I'd like to here, the power and fluidity of Compendium's granular reuse mechanisms, so I will probably have to revise this at some point when I'm better inspired. Now this is the last thing on my list of must-procrastinate-because-this-is-also-worth-doing items for today; heading to the writing table (arghh! just spent another 15 minutes cleaning up the Home Window of my Compendium PhD database, which was also on my list).
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