07wkict17.pptxThe User: Augmentation, Intermediation and Exclusion
ICT Policy and Strategy
Lecture 7
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Views of technology (reprise 1 of 2)
Technological determinism
Technology develops according to a logic of its own
Technological change drives social change
Social construction/shaping of technology
Technology develops according to a social logic
Technological change is the result of social change
Systems and networks
Social organisations and technical capabilities co-evolve
How technology is used shapes the design of technology and the design of technology influences its use
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Views of technology (reprise 2 of 2)
Several basic tools for analysis were introduced in earlier lectures, each of which is vitally important for public policy and company strategy
Technological trajectories – the potential speed of technological advance
e.g. Kodak entered the digital photography business with a ‘low end’ product and failed to appreciate the speed at which the market would develop – last year they went into receivership
Diffusion
The impact of technological change is only felt when it is broadly ‘taken up’ or deployed – historically diffusion is often slow, but several types of ICT have experienced very rapid diffusion while also failing to follow predictive models
(perhaps due to evolution in demand)
Dynamic tension between standards and innovation
Standards encourage competition which drives prices toward cost of production, innovations offer higher profits but can slow diffusion or lead to ‘orphaned’ users when a rival product becomes the basis for a standard
Platforms
Families of standards create platforms which define ‘entry’ opportunities (e.g. creating a compatible component) and the nature of competition (creating a rival platform involves matching existing (incumbent) platform capabilities
Outline of this Lecture
Defining policy and strategy
The changing nature of users and the evolution of designer objectives
Theories for analysing user involvement
Augmentation
Intermediation
Exclusion and Digital Divides
Implications for Design
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A definition of policy: action taken towards achieving important goals, and involving significant commitment from actors
Strategy involves the same key words and relations and is more often used in a business context where goals are related to business rather than public purposes.
Some useful vocabulary:
Affordance -- An affordance is a quality of an object, or an environment, which allows an individual to perform an action. (Wikipedia)
For example, a law that allows a group of individuals to that allows lever affords twisting, and perhaps pushing, while a cord affords pulling.
Agency – The ability to take action.
For example, when you grant ‘power of attorney’ to another individual allowing them sign (checks, contracts, etc.) on your behalf you are giving ‘agency’ to that individual and we may refer to that person as your ‘agent’
Capability – The pre-requisites of knowledge or skill needed to take action
For example, knowledge of a computer language is a capability usually needed to create software
1. Defining policy and strategy
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Policy and strategy involves choice. However, it is important to ask who has agency in taking this choice.
For example, if it can only be done (the affordance to take decision is only available) to lawmakers (parliamentary or ministerial level) policy can said to be top-down. If groups of individuals or companies are able (have affordance) to take decisions then policy may be said to be bottom-up.
The level at which policy choices or decisions can be made depends upon the granting affordances (top down) or by undertaking collective action (bottom up) to seize affordance. This is one part of the political content of policy.
Policy choices are most often a response to changing circumstances or perceptions
For example, policies in the Western world following 9/11 (a change in circumstance) to re-balance security and privacy because of perceptions that security would be improved by reducing privacy (making a more universal surveillance system).
1. Defining policy and strategy
Policy/strategy as a response to change in circumstance & perception ICT use can be the cause or the result – or both
Internal or external environment changes
Other actors
Relationships
Alter business model
Adjust operations
Need for new or revised strategy or policy:
Actor detects opportunity or threat to goals/needs
Change external environment
Change in Circumstance
PCs become widespread, e-commerce develops
Change in Circumstance and Perception
Small retailer faces online competition
What policy or strategy?
Campaign to build public support for local business
monitor, evaluate choices taken
Reorganise, improve efficiency
Specialise in products people don’t buy online
Create customer loyalty card
Renegotiate supply arrangements
Choosing a strategy may require acquisition of affordances or capabilities
(e.g. company may need to master public relations to change external environment)
Possible Choices and Actions
(choices based on circumstance
and perception)
1. Defining policy and strategy
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Nature of the actor (level, structure, history, domain, culture, purpose, resources etc)
Type of objectives or goals (often influenced by perception)
Perception of threats/opportunities (can be considered as a SWOT analysis – strengths, weaknesses, opportunties, threats)
Identifying the type of action which is perceived to meet objective or goals and respond to threats and opportunities
Choice of action (also depending on commitments and risks involved (opportunity costs, resources, path dependencies etc.)
However, choice of action is insufficient without monitoring of outcome and possible revision of choice of action (and perhaps even a change in perception based on experience gained through action)
What monitoring mechanisms are employed?
What outcomes are observable?
What evaluation criteria are relevant?
How to map the features of a policy or strategy
Defining policy and strategy
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The Changing Nature of the User
Early users were computer professionals or scientists, statisticians
Today everyone is a user
This raises two issues:
User as actor
User as target
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User as Actor
In considering users as actors the main questions involve skills (capabilities) and empowerment (affordances, agency)
As we will see skills are also implicated in ‘users as targets’
Skills and empowerment can be considered from the perspectives of
Augmentation – how existing skills, capabilities and knowledge may be ‘augmented’ by ICT design choices
Intermediation – how individual uses of ICTs involve others, some of whom may be ‘intermediaries’ that augment through a voluntary social network or through transactions (fee for service) the user’s skills and the user’s ability to influence outcomes (agency)
Exclusion – how individuals may be excluded or included by definition of entitlement, by skills and knowledge barriers not overcome through augmentation and intermediation, or by social processes that either encourage or discourage engagement
If technology fails for the users, it fails for the organisation
This is true of both small projects and huge expensive ones
The changing nature of users and design
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User as Target
In many cases, it is most straightforward to view the user as ‘audience’ or ‘customer’
Doing so still engages the question of skills but obscures the issue of empowerment
The penalty for failing to empower users is that their engagement must rely on other more transitory motivations – being entertained, seeking specific information, or seeking to make a transaction
In viewing users as targets augmentation, intermediation and exclusion have different interpretations:
Augmentation involves compensation for limits in user skills so that the audience can be increased (e.g. one click shopping at Amazon)
Intermediation is a way to build business models in which the intermediary is compensated (e.g. Amazon as platform for other retailers)
Exclusion may be intentional (to focus on ‘high value’ customers) or inadvertent (incorrect choices about interface design)
The changing nature of users and design
Comparing User as Actor and Target
The advantage of viewing the user as an actor is the possibility of a higher degree of engagement, trust, and loyalty in interaction with other actors
The disadvantage is that the designer must share control with the user and find ways to use the processes of augmentation, intermediation, and exclusion to the advantage of the user to increase their empowerment (a sometimes difficult and costly process)
The advantage of viewing the user as a target is simplicity and selectivity – the user is ‘recruited’ as a customer or participant based upon a specific appeal that they can ‘take or leave’ – and this leaves much more control in the hands of the designer
The disadvantage is that the designer cannot expect more from the user than the choices that the design directs – augmentation becomes only a compensatory process, intermediation reinforces the disempowerment of the user, and exclusion obviously disempowers those who are excluded.
All of these consequences of viewing the user as target will reduce their engagement, trust, and loyalty.
The changing nature of users and design
Augmentation
Cutting more deeply into the concepts of augmentation, intermediation and exclusion….
The changing nature of users and design
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Thinking about people as users of technology
Common sense perspective
People use technology to help them do things more effectively
Technical and moral dimensions to the relationship – what we can do, what we should/may do with technology
This view tends to equate technology with tools, instruments, machines, sets of instructions, applications of knowledge
A deeper view
Humans are constituted by capacity for action (agency), technology changes what we do as well as how we do it: our nature as actors is influenced by our nature as users
before there were aeroplanes no one could be a pilot or air passenger (aeroplanes are an affordance for those who wish to fly)
Humans and tools cannot be separated; the relationship is more than instrumental (i.e. a tool can be used to solve a problem) – technology augments agency (i.e. a tool expands the range of problems that can be solved and therefore the perception of ‘solvable problems’)
The changing nature of users and design
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Capabilities: What is augmented?
Capability is the ability to pursue functions that are value (these include cognitive functions such as aesthetic appreciation, e.g. of art)
ICT gives us tools for
Thinking
Learning
Communication
Interaction
Self-expression
We use a huge variety of routines for meeting our needs and extending our cognitive abilities – these routines make use of technologies as well as our own habits and customs
People find a way to perform desired routines and then ignore or forget what they had to learn in everyday performance of the routine
This means that our behaviours (the collection of routines that we employ) are likely to be ‘sticky’ – they persist until we are again motivated to find a ‘new way’ to do the routine or until we need a new routine
The consequence is that our capabilities depend on the frequency with which we wish to or need to change
The changing nature of users and design
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Some categories of ICT
Perceptual tools – access to the world
Symbolic tools – language, numbers – ways to represent information and ideas
Inferential tools – reasoning, logic, arithmetic – ways to process information
Communication tools – ways to transmit representations and engage in collective forms of processing
Storage technologies – writing – ways to record information
ICT does not necessarily mean computers – our alarm clocks and paper note pads are also ICTs
The changing nature of users and design
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Technological Augmentation Clark and Chalmers’ ‘extended mind’ thesis
Inga and Otto both want to go to an art exhibition.
Inga stops and thinks, then remembers where it is.
Otto has Alzheimer’s and has to rely on information in the environment to function as his memory.
Otto carries his notebook computer everywhere with him and records all sorts of things in it. He consults his notebook, which tells him where the exhibition is.
Is the notebook part of or just a tool for Otto’s brain? Does it matter?
Inga and Otto both function effectively and achieve the same goal even though Otto is using a mediating technology
The changing nature of users and design
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Bridging Augmentation and Intermediation
Otto’s notebook is an intermediary device use to communicate with himself
See the movie Memento (2000) in which the main actor has severe retrograde amnesia which prevents him from forming new memories – he collects information and when convinced it is accurate has it tattooed onto his body – the tattoo is an intermediary device in the same way as Otto’s notebook
Like Inga’s memory, Otto’s notebook is a one-to-one private communication, where producer and receiver are the same person
The picture gets much more complex when we use mediating technology to send and receive messages between different people.
Why is the inter-personal more complex?
The changing nature of users and design
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Intermediation
The changing nature of users and design
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Social scientists have used the term ‘intermediation’ in a variety of ways
Economists use it in the simplest terms – intermediation is the process of bringing together transactions that would not or might not otherwise take place
Example 1: banks serve as intermediaries between savers and borrowers. It is certainly possible to loan someone money directly, but perhaps it is better to deposit your money in the bank where risk is collectivised and depersonalised.
Example 2: a farmer who grows peanuts (ground nuts) might sell their crop directly to a processor or an individual might take on buying of peanuts from many producers selling them to many processors. Farmers don’t have to rely on the business health of the processors, processors don’t have to rely on specific farmers. As this reduction in risk (and limitation of market power) has value, the peanut merchant is able to make money.
The changing nature of users and design
Sociologists use the word intermediation and a number of related words to speak of a more diverse collection of relationships than buyer and seller.
A teacher is an intermediary between knowledge resources and the learner. This does not necessarily mean that a teacher ‘knows more’ than a student, they may know different things. But the teacher may have a better capability to find things out or express them in a way that ‘catalyses’ or ‘stimulates’ learning
There are many intermediaries in social networks. Mark Granovetter, a sociologist has demonstrated that people utilise ‘weak’ ties (e.g. the friend of a friend) to amplify their reach in activities like searching for a job.
Neither of these cases immediately suggests a ‘transaction’ type business model – both are ‘facilitative.’
Societies have developed ‘institutions’ (rules, norms, and standards) that help create such intermediaries – e.g. do onto others as you would have others do onto you
The changing nature of users and design
Disintermediation
One of the reasons for the dot.com bust at the turn of the century was the belief that the Internet had dramatically reduced the costs of economic intermediation on the Internet
Investors believed that the ‘new intermediaries’ would be able to take advantage of e-commerce much more effectively than the incumbent intermediaries. In displacing them, there would be an enormous wealth transfer from existing to new players.
Once this expectation took hold it created an investment bubble which burst when business results made apparent that the new intermediaries were not so able at replacing their established rivals as investors had expected.
There were a few exceptions – Amazon, e-Bay, and Craig’s List…
The changing nature of users and design
Social Networking and Intermediation
The current excitement with social networking reflects a new use of the Internet to grasp some of the value coming from social interactions that are not based on transactions as such
Like other social networks, however, there is not a clear business model other than advertising for supporting these activities
That may not matter a great deal, capturing a fraction of the advertising that Google receives by exposing information networks and semantic links is a very big market in its own right
The changing nature of users and design
Exclusion and Digital Divides
The changing nature of users and design
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Differences among ICT users
Child S (11 years, West Sussex, UK)
The changing nature of users and design
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Mr Y (29 years old, Luxor, Egypt)
Mr Y has a number of important resources e.g. - boat
- campsite work skills - mobile phone - local Internet café - network of friends, contacts - reputation, trust - tourists And several big problems: - poverty - dependent relatives - illiteracy - difficult living and business conditions
The changing nature of users and design
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The social context of Child S and Mr. Y is obviously very different which makes for very different understandings of the value of the use of digital technologies
For Child S, digital technologies are a form of entertainment, a way to make school more interesting, and ultimately a means of building skills that may prove useful in future employment
Mr. Y, on the other hand, sees the technologies as a way to make connections that might otherwise be difficult – to find tourists who will hire his boat or engage him as an intermediary in securing, setting up and maintaining campsites
The form of Mr. Y’s exclusion is largely down to his illiteracy rather than an exclusion from access to technologies – in this sense skills (in this case literacy) may be the most important source of exclusion
However, Mr. Y may negotiate intermediation (he may have a friend read and write Internet messages for him)
The changing nature of users and design
Users may differ more than uses
Wellman et al (2002) report on a survey of Internet use in 178 countries:
User populations outside N America differed from N American users: non-American users were more elite (young, male, well educated) and American users more diverse
Frequent users everywhere had similar online behaviour
Combines social, functional and recreational use
Combined online with face-to-face and telephone contact
‘Global research suggests that the Internet is not a self-contained online world. Rather than operating at the expense of the “real” face-to-face world, it is a part of it, with people using all means of communication to connect with friends and relatives.
The Internet is another means of communication, which is being integrated into the regular patterns of social life.
Other research done by Wellman and associates suggests that this integration of online and offline life is also true for “communities of practice” at work’
The changing nature of users and design
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Inclusion is not a Universal Goal
While inclusion may have social value, exclusion can create important
business value
Customer relations management (CRM) systems are often adopted with the aim of identifying and catering to ‘better’ customers (ones that deliver higher profits)
Such business strategies are exclusive in the sense that not all customer receive the same attention or service
In a similar fashion, advertising media markets always involve a tradeoff between trying to find more users (with some advertisers wanting such large audiences) and finding a particular group of users that are more likely to be interested in what is being advertised (providing access to such audiences supports a higher price for advertising)
The changing nature of users and design
Summary (1)
Augmentation, intermediation and exclusion are basic concepts that may be applied very broadly with regard to ICT and the Internet in particular
When the user is seen as the target for messages (advertising and other forms of information) the nature of these concepts has a particular interpretation –
Augmentation is about compensating for any deficiencies in the user’s capabilities for receiving the targeted information or engaging in transactions with the information provider
Intermediation is something that the information supplier attempts to capture in order to focus user attention and participation – ideally the information provider (who may also be the supplier of other goods and services) wants to be at the centre of user networks
Exclusion is something that can be seen as a positive aim rather than always a negative
The changing nature of users and design
Summary (2)
There are definite limits to the strategy of seeing the user as a target
for information
Doing so discards many of the technological capabilities of the Internet and other ICTs which might result in a greater engagement of the user and hence higher levels of trust, loyalty and interaction
To view the user as an actor, the designer has to devise a strategy in which the user is empowered and engaged with opportunities to personalise and deepen their involvement with technologies
This has led to ‘user-centred’ perspectives on digital design and to a better recognition of the ‘political’ nature of design
The changing nature of users and design
User-centred design – Taking Account of the User in Design
New type of users – non-engineers
New forms of use – complex interactive sequences in multiple contexts
Development of user-centred approaches to design, particularly with the rise of interactive ICT:
‘designing interactive products to support people in their everyday and working lives’ (Preece, Rogers & Sharp)
‘design of spaces for human communication and interaction’ (Winograd)
This is more than an engineering skill – products must work AND be emotionally, aesthetically appealing to users, sustain long periods of interaction, be intuitive and rewarding to use – architecture rather than civil engineering
In field research, we have found that Internet service companies are much more interested in the ‘user experience’ than any other single feature of service design
Implications for Design
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The process of interaction design
Investigate what people currently do and how they feel about it
Identify needs, establish requirements
Develop designs that meet requirements
Build prototypes
Test, evaluate, revise
Basic principles
Iterative process
Users involved at all stages – consultation and observation/testing
Evaluation in terms of usability AND user experience
Implications for Design
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Usability, efficiency and experience goals (Preece, Rogers &Sharp)
Implications for Design
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Design is political
Multiple interests – sometimes conflicting – can be at stake in design
Users, clients, other stakeholders
Some interests may not be represented – most design occurs in a commercial context
WHO WILL DESIGN FOR THE POOR?
Computers are being exported to poor countries in large numbers and we have huge publishing enterprises dedicated to supplying ‘knowledge for development’ online
But very little knowledge about users and their needs
Research in KwaZulu-Natal (South Africa) suggests some very negative attitudes
Listservs: ‘I would have to go and study in the library before I felt I could understand and take part’
The Internet: ‘we don’t have any problems because we have no knowledge of this technology and doubt if we need this knowledge’
Computers: ‘we don’t really need people who sit in offices with the computers because we want to help people…in the community’
Implications for Design
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… individuals’ engagement with ICTs is based around a complex mixture of social, psychological, economic and, above all, pragmatic reasons. Engagement with ICT is therefore less concerned with issues of access and ownership but more about how people develop relationships with ICTs and how they are capable of making use of the social resources which make access useable
(Selwyn, italics added)
Note the application of the ideas of augmention (to enhance people’s relation with ICTs) and intermediation (to activate the social networks supporting access) to address issues of exclusion
Implications for Design
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Is this enough to bridge the digital divide?
Digital Divide is the idea that exclusion from ICT deepens existing inequalities
Different models of exclusion
Physical access – PCs in libraries, schools, rural telecentres
Access as usability, user education – information literacy, relevant content
Warschauer: need to engage multiple resources to enhance powers of the poor:
Physical resources - computers
Digital resources - content
Human resources - literacy
Social resources – communities, institutions
These ideas are relevant not only to the poor but to all excluded groups (elderly, children, disabled, minorities)
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References not in the course outline
Clark, A and Chalmers, D (1998) ‘The Extended Mind’, Analysis 58, pp. 10-23
Dahlbom, B (1996) 'People and Technology.' Studies in the Use of Information Technology, Report 13
Warschauer, M
(2002) ‘Reconceptualising the Digital Divide’, First Monday http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue7_7/warschauer/
(2003) Technology and Social Inclusion
Further important resource for the study of users
Pew Research Center http://pewresearch.org /
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