Among my readings of the weekend, the paper by Saul Greenberg, who revisits the concept of context and analyzes why designers find it so difficult to build context awareness applications.
He gives a brief explanation of three theories of context: Situated Actions, (our most beloved) Activity Theory and another approach I have never heard of before, the "locales framework".
According to the author "the Locales framework was developed as a principled approach to help people understand the nature of social activity and work, and how a locale (or place) can support these activities ... In many ways, the Locales framework is about the social construction and use of context, and it too recognizes its dynamic properties. Locales (the site and means) are the external contributors to context; although locales can be fixed, most are fluid.
His overall argument, though, is more interesting: if in many cases some contextual situations are fairly stable, discernible and predictable, there are many others that are not.
That implies that 1) it may be impossible to determine an appropriate set of canonical states of context 2) determining what information is necessary to infer a contextual state may be difficult and 3) determining an appropriate action from a given context may be difficult, because the kind of responses that people expect from a context-aware application are very situation-dependable.
So here I must agree with Suchman when she says that human beings don't plan anything: they just react. We do, we are opportunistic creatures who optimize the path to accomplish a task that will require the least effort.
From his brief description of the "context theories", general perceptions arise:
- interactions evolve over time, therefore the historical character of activity is relevant for understanding the interaction
- people have particular views of the same things (or places, or practices) so the individual's history counts when analyzing a context
- artefacts are the media by which people achieve goals, they are not (or shouldn't be) the goal itself
We should aim to design interactions, not applications.
Showing posts with label Bibliography. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Bibliography. Show all posts
Tuesday, 6 May 2008
Tuesday, 29 April 2008
Little attention to work practices? Here I go!
Singer et al 1999 showed that online newsrooms are filled with young journalists with different educational backgrounds than their print counterparts and that their main activity is known as "shovelware": 'taking information generated originally for a paper's printed edition and deploying it virtually unchanged onto its website'.
However, Boczkowski says that this trend is being reverted and that there is more original material being produced by online newsrooms (is it true?). Moreover, he suggests that original material may be a more appropriate ground to examine changes in the technologies and practices of newspapers as it moves from the paper to the screen.
He also suggests that despite the great amount of work that has been done in investigating newspaper technological changes, the majority of this work "has remained confined to the familiar landscape of notions and models such as gatekeeping, agenda-settings", etc, commonly investigated in new media studies. He complements his reflection by saying that further research is needed that could lead to a multidisciplinary theory building about online newspapers, such as the fields of sociology and anthropology and contextual approaches to knowing, such as activity theory and distributed cognition (Horray!!)
Even better: he says that little attention has been paid to the role of technology in the actual work practices of editorial personnel -- something which is not surprising given the neglect of technology's role in most studies of news-making in print and broadcast media.
And gets better and better: "further research is needed to illuminate what goes on in the creation of original content, taking advantage of the the web's unique technical features...and more conceptually, examining the role of technology in news-making, a long-overdue theme in sociology of news production... Potential issues include (4) the changes in gathering, processing and delivery of news content in relation to having multiple media for storing ad conveying information" (this guy read my proposal... ) :)
Dammm!
However, Boczkowski says that this trend is being reverted and that there is more original material being produced by online newsrooms (is it true?). Moreover, he suggests that original material may be a more appropriate ground to examine changes in the technologies and practices of newspapers as it moves from the paper to the screen.
He also suggests that despite the great amount of work that has been done in investigating newspaper technological changes, the majority of this work "has remained confined to the familiar landscape of notions and models such as gatekeeping, agenda-settings", etc, commonly investigated in new media studies. He complements his reflection by saying that further research is needed that could lead to a multidisciplinary theory building about online newspapers, such as the fields of sociology and anthropology and contextual approaches to knowing, such as activity theory and distributed cognition (Horray!!)
Even better: he says that little attention has been paid to the role of technology in the actual work practices of editorial personnel -- something which is not surprising given the neglect of technology's role in most studies of news-making in print and broadcast media.
And gets better and better: "further research is needed to illuminate what goes on in the creation of original content, taking advantage of the the web's unique technical features...and more conceptually, examining the role of technology in news-making, a long-overdue theme in sociology of news production... Potential issues include (4) the changes in gathering, processing and delivery of news content in relation to having multiple media for storing ad conveying information" (this guy read my proposal... ) :)
Dammm!
Sunday, 27 April 2008
Bannon and Bodker
Another brilliant discussion about the limitations of the cognitive psychology approach to HCI.
"...It seems like we have to take the use process, and not the artefact, as the central object of our study. The way cognition is viewed in human activity theory is socially and historically situated, and it is tied to the physical conditions in which it takes place. Whatever action a human being makes in the world, this action is mediated by artefacts. In this view, the study of mediation becomes central to HCI".
Engerström (1987) look at change processes in organizational settings says that “the reason for someone to want a change is a contradiction between this person’s activity and the surrounding activities” (:244). He suggests studying contradictions between tools currently in use and the object created and the norms of the praxis and the division of work. He gives the example of a secretary who wants to do a better layout for a document and ends up using paper and glue, for the non existence or her lack of access to advanced designing tools.
These contradictions, he claims, may explain why the artefact may not work, which we wouldn’t have found out just by analysing the steps in the actual process (by doing a task analysis, for example). If we had just looked at the use of the word processor, nothing would have come up as “wrong”, because the processor would have been used anyway. What the AT framework provides is a wider look into the system. Engerström argues that “artefacts are used differently from original intentions, and that is why the need for new artefacts arise”:
"...It seems like we have to take the use process, and not the artefact, as the central object of our study. The way cognition is viewed in human activity theory is socially and historically situated, and it is tied to the physical conditions in which it takes place. Whatever action a human being makes in the world, this action is mediated by artefacts. In this view, the study of mediation becomes central to HCI".
Engerström (1987) look at change processes in organizational settings says that “the reason for someone to want a change is a contradiction between this person’s activity and the surrounding activities” (:244). He suggests studying contradictions between tools currently in use and the object created and the norms of the praxis and the division of work. He gives the example of a secretary who wants to do a better layout for a document and ends up using paper and glue, for the non existence or her lack of access to advanced designing tools.
These contradictions, he claims, may explain why the artefact may not work, which we wouldn’t have found out just by analysing the steps in the actual process (by doing a task analysis, for example). If we had just looked at the use of the word processor, nothing would have come up as “wrong”, because the processor would have been used anyway. What the AT framework provides is a wider look into the system. Engerström argues that “artefacts are used differently from original intentions, and that is why the need for new artefacts arise”:
Thursday, 17 April 2008
Activity Theory - why we should all love it
So I resumed my readings about Activity Theory and had a nice chat with Ian about it. I was glad to read in a chapter of Nardi's Context and Consciousness one more of the main reasons why I am sympathetic to this theory: they way it views people.
(these are extracts from the notes I took when reading the text yesterday that I thought it would be nice to post here, just in case I forget in the future why I like AT so much)
"Another very important very important difference between DC and AT is in how they see the relation between people and artefacts. In AT, artefacts are seen as mediators of activity. The theory perceives humans as carriers of motive and consciousness, which objects and machines aren’t. Therefore people and artefacts can’t be seen as symmetrical or equivalent.
Conversely, DC treats both people and objects as “nodes in a system” and conceive a rather difficult to understand notion of artefacts as ‘cognizing entities’. However, a human can act in an unpredicted, unexpected, self-initiated way, according to social or personal motives. A machine or an object will always act in a foreseen, programmatic way. Therefore, a theory that posits equivalency between humans and machines damps out sources of systemic variation and contradiction that might have important ramifications for a system. So, the AT position would seem to hold greater potential for leading a more responsible technology design in which people are viewed as active beings in control of their tools for creative purposes rather than as automatons whose operations are to be automated away, or nodes whose rights to privacy and dignity are not guaranteed.
About the difference between AT and Situated Action (:44) about the three men that go nature walking: the bird watcher, the meteorologist and the entomologist. If the first two were only videoed, their behaviour would look exactly the same, but their goals are completely different: one looks for clouds, the other for birds. Now, suppose that the bird watcher is on a mission to create a list with all the birds in North America. This we would never learn only from observing these people. That is what AT brings to front: people’s motives. It gives us a vocabulary to talk about the walker’s activities in meaningful subjective terms and gives necessary attention to what a subject brings to a situation.
So if we want a world where technology is a means to an end, is a mediator that serves thinking, critical, active and reactive human beings, who are capable of planing and adapting to the circumstances, instead of just behaving as "nodes in a system", then AT is a good path to follow".
I find it strange the rejection it has in the academic melieu. I find it specially interesting how the lecturers from my course presented it to us with an almost deprecating way. The result, as expected, is that nobody from my course can hear about it and find me a weirdo for finding it interesting.
Apparently there is this guy Dan, who is working as a free lancer for Amberlight, who is interested in a commercial application of AT. I am curious to talk to him about it, specially, what does he think of the time span for an AT application. I am concerned about the time scale I would need in oder to, for example, see the historical changes in an environment. Or is it something that is possible to do at The Newspaper?
(these are extracts from the notes I took when reading the text yesterday that I thought it would be nice to post here, just in case I forget in the future why I like AT so much)
"Another very important very important difference between DC and AT is in how they see the relation between people and artefacts. In AT, artefacts are seen as mediators of activity. The theory perceives humans as carriers of motive and consciousness, which objects and machines aren’t. Therefore people and artefacts can’t be seen as symmetrical or equivalent.
Conversely, DC treats both people and objects as “nodes in a system” and conceive a rather difficult to understand notion of artefacts as ‘cognizing entities’. However, a human can act in an unpredicted, unexpected, self-initiated way, according to social or personal motives. A machine or an object will always act in a foreseen, programmatic way. Therefore, a theory that posits equivalency between humans and machines damps out sources of systemic variation and contradiction that might have important ramifications for a system. So, the AT position would seem to hold greater potential for leading a more responsible technology design in which people are viewed as active beings in control of their tools for creative purposes rather than as automatons whose operations are to be automated away, or nodes whose rights to privacy and dignity are not guaranteed.
About the difference between AT and Situated Action (:44) about the three men that go nature walking: the bird watcher, the meteorologist and the entomologist. If the first two were only videoed, their behaviour would look exactly the same, but their goals are completely different: one looks for clouds, the other for birds. Now, suppose that the bird watcher is on a mission to create a list with all the birds in North America. This we would never learn only from observing these people. That is what AT brings to front: people’s motives. It gives us a vocabulary to talk about the walker’s activities in meaningful subjective terms and gives necessary attention to what a subject brings to a situation.
So if we want a world where technology is a means to an end, is a mediator that serves thinking, critical, active and reactive human beings, who are capable of planing and adapting to the circumstances, instead of just behaving as "nodes in a system", then AT is a good path to follow".
I find it strange the rejection it has in the academic melieu. I find it specially interesting how the lecturers from my course presented it to us with an almost deprecating way. The result, as expected, is that nobody from my course can hear about it and find me a weirdo for finding it interesting.
Apparently there is this guy Dan, who is working as a free lancer for Amberlight, who is interested in a commercial application of AT. I am curious to talk to him about it, specially, what does he think of the time span for an AT application. I am concerned about the time scale I would need in oder to, for example, see the historical changes in an environment. Or is it something that is possible to do at The Newspaper?
Tuesday, 8 April 2008
Bibliography
Again, no much news in this side of life.
Reading:
Crabtree, A. (2003) Designing collaborative systems: a practical guide to ethnography London: Springer.
“…the rationalist mentality embedded in methods of description so prevalent in the human sciences keeps us from looking at the essential issues in the workplace, which is to say that the rationalist methodologies gloss over and obscure the real world, real time character of work”. (p.46)
Dey, I. (2004) Grounded Theory. In Qualitative research practice edited by Clive Seale [et al.] London: SAGE p. 80-93
Good historical account of the origins of Grounded Theory, synthetic explanation of Strauss and Corbin's three phase coding system and sufficient critique of the method.
"Concepts can both reduce and enrich data: they reduce in the sense that they summarize a range of observations and they enrich because concepts convey connotations that facilitates connections with other concepts".
“Posing questions isn’t the same as presuming answers”
Hammersley, M. & Atkinson P. (1995) Ethnography:principles in practice 2nd ed.. London: Routledge.
Action
Replied Jirotka's email asking for an appointment
Reading:
Crabtree, A. (2003) Designing collaborative systems: a practical guide to ethnography London: Springer.
“…the rationalist mentality embedded in methods of description so prevalent in the human sciences keeps us from looking at the essential issues in the workplace, which is to say that the rationalist methodologies gloss over and obscure the real world, real time character of work”. (p.46)
Dey, I. (2004) Grounded Theory. In Qualitative research practice edited by Clive Seale [et al.] London: SAGE p. 80-93
Good historical account of the origins of Grounded Theory, synthetic explanation of Strauss and Corbin's three phase coding system and sufficient critique of the method.
"Concepts can both reduce and enrich data: they reduce in the sense that they summarize a range of observations and they enrich because concepts convey connotations that facilitates connections with other concepts".
“Posing questions isn’t the same as presuming answers”
Hammersley, M. & Atkinson P. (1995) Ethnography:principles in practice 2nd ed.. London: Routledge.
Action
Replied Jirotka's email asking for an appointment
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