Designing culture

Josh Tenenberg, a visiting faculty from the University of Washington (Tacoma), gave a talk to the HCI crew at the School of Informatics yesterday, “Designing Culture: Walls and Mirrors.” Josh used metaphors of walls and mirrors to discuss the embedded influences the impact design.

With a Computer Science background, Josh has a nice perspective of both sides of that fence. He says it feels strange to preach requirements in this environment (HCI) but perfectly normal in his primary domain. The ideas he put forth, though, are very much rejecting the positivist notions of the world, where a designer — be she an interface prototyper or a hard-cord applications programmer — cannot do her thing in a vacuum. The world is impacted by and impact upon the designer, and so it is wise to take those things into account. Josh talks about some key ideas by looking at different kinds of walls (itself a metaphor that read differently in a CS context).

Design Space
The first wall is from a studio workshop. After teaching up at South Bend for eight years, Josh wanted to start doing education research but didn’t know how to enter a field so vastly different than computer science. So he developed a workshop to create a community of practice and put people with greater expertise and experiences in the same room. They used paper on walls and sticky notes, aggregating data and reuniting to repeat the process over the years. Out of this group has come some 40 publications. Participants benefited from a shared vocabulary that helped to connect their work. This same kind of practice will be attempted in 10 days at the local RootsCamp I’m trying to set up, only the domain of interest is political activism and the experts are a diverse group of citizens. All of this is to illustrate the notion that design springs from people designing within traditions. The big question this insight begs to answer is, how do we create such spaces to allow people to become designers of knowledge?

Technology as an Extension of Ourselves
Another wall was one in the home of a blind woman, living alone. Josh had encountered this woman through research that began by focusing deeply on a particular user. On that wall was a photo collage, which struck Josh as amazing since there was no way for the woman to ever see it. The collage, though, existed for sighted friends who came over to visit. This woman rejected technology that may have helped her, such as preferring a mechanical watch to a talking one, because of the fear of stigmatization. Her view of the world, though, was one embedded in sightedness. Small problems also became bigger problems in her world. A CD rack in the home was disordered in the same way it might be in many homes, but her ability to order had a new scale of problems not anticipated by looking at the CD rack out of context. When we design for people, we design for culture as well. Technology restructures human relationships. It is important to understand whether that restructuring is constructive or not. This was the key insight, in a way, of our mPath project a couple years back: Technology should not discourage or displace human interaction for seniors.

Design is Embedded within a Tradition
The final wall was a work of ephemeral art by Andy Goldsworthy, author of the book Stone. He builds stone structures and art that is not meant to last, talking about the process. In particular, he speaks of the difficulty of working with a “stonesmith” who possessed much tacit knowledge about the craft. Andy had to discover that tacit knowledge through his human interactions, at the same time understanding what tacit knowledge was brought through his own experiences to the project. Designers are cultured. Design is the discovery and arrangement of the designer’s culture within somebody else’s culture.

In the end, the questions Josh raises concern design being not a thing but a relationship. In answering how design affects interactions with other people, Josh suggests that we study “HID/c” (Human Interaction Design, mediated by computers). He sees a need for designers to aborb other traditiosn through social interactions, finding ways to make your own tacit assumptions explicit. Like the cognitive dumps that move ideas from internal thought to external physicality, human interaction is the means by which we see our personal cultures revealed. Without fully understanding our own culture, we may be embedding things in our designs that we would not want to be there.