HCI2003 Feature: How Design creates Society

The HCI2003 workshop on "Designing for Civil Society" began with big questions. 'Can there be a social movement or civil society informatics?' asked co-organiser Steve Walker of Leeds Metropolitan University. Then he acknowledged, as many more participants would during the day, that naming the area that we were in the process of defining was a significant challenge. While defining it was essential, a meaningful name was necessary to communicate, particularly necessary as the goal that emerged was to bring together disparate groups with different cultures: coders and non-governmental organisations (NGOs), developers and communities, citizens and technologists.

Walker introduced the field as an extension of community informatics, including a focus on trade unions, environmental issues, concerns of e-government and e-democracy as well as access and equity. Participant interests ranged from methods of consultation, to building scaleable tools, from how to connect small NGOs together, to how to involve the designed-for in the designing process.

Common ground was issues such as the digital divide, volunteering (getting, keeping and working with), the nature of transnational applications... but within this, everyone's context was different. Some people were working with well-defined challenges, where information and persuasion could produce a workable design that met the intention of the promoters. Others' whole design was negotiable, an emergent property of a collaboration between champions (ideally with money as well as vision) and beneficiaries. This introduced the ethical and practical matters of getting and managing participation during goal-setting and designing a process, by contrast to only involving people in a previously agreed structure.

Another common quality to all the participants was a belief in the value of equitable participation in social and political processes. 'The world would be a better place if designers served the poor' went up on a flipchart as part of general discussions after lunch. Is this kind of assertion too obvious to make nowadays? Or is it too political? Does it seem naïve, perhaps, in a world driven by big businesses developing technologies as they choose?

The day's energy was in asking such questions and resisting current norms. It began with presentations to share projects. Following Walker's introduction to themes, fellow co-organiser Andy Dearden of Sheffield Hallam University considered design, stressing that more than building technical infrastructure could be understood by this: 'Is work and task all there is to society? ...Campaigning using the net is a form of HCI. ...How do we think of ease of use in this context?'

I am not going to summarise all twelve participant presentations here: some had more bearing on the relation of usability practices to designing for society than others. For instance, Wendy Olphert of Loughborough University, of the former HUSAT, spoke about how the 'classic repertoire worked in theory, but not in practice' when she came to design a means of exploring how to overcome barriers in switchover from analog to digital TV (DTV). DTV is seen as a way of bridging the digital divide in the UK, by providing services through interactive television for people unable or unwilling to get to grips with computers.

'Design methods for DTV must not only facilitate the identification of those stakeholders who are at risk of exclusion from the new technologies, but also facilitate their engagement and participation in the design and development process itself,' she concluded.

Potential end users need to be actively engaged in the identification and articulation of their objectives, aspirations and needs, and in the validation of resulting requirements, she said.

Further, participative activities need to strike users as relevant and motivating and should create an engagement process which promotes understanding about potential choices and emerging opportunities and which offers them a chance to be 'a more informed user consumer of ICT products, systems and services'.

'We need new approaches to enable people to shape their future,' she wound up.

Dearden is working on components for The Pattern Language for Living Communication project, which aims to develop a pattern language to help activists and communities design their efforts and interventions to promote positive change.

And David Newman of Queen's University Belfast told the tale of a change in cooking system in Kenya that saved scarce energy resources and developed a new local industry, but only after a context-based research and testing iteration cycle of which anyone would be proud. 30 NGOs had proposed new cooking ovens to save fuel; when context and skill had been allowed for, only 3 out of the 30 improved on the energy consumption of the traditional three-stone method used by savvy African women used to eking out wood. 'European men can't make fire as efficiently,' he pointed out.

Other design points, specifically dealing with remote working, to come out of the day included:
* It is easier to change track face-to-face than using technology for consultation, so mull through the conceptual issues and build in maximum flexibility to the process.
* Online consultation still has a credibility problem.
* Whereas companies working across cultures and language barriers have professional compulsion, and often a good grasp of English, to unite participants, civil projects often lack these. They are more likely to be brought together around an external event or issue.

The day progressed through a consideration of key questions of process, technology, context and how the three relate, to a discussion about what might come out of the event as future activities. Proposals included writing a manifesto; choosing a real-world problem and doing something about it; collecting, building and publicising resources to support activists and NGOs in finding the technical resources they need; and exploring ways of mediating between different interest groups and helping them to become self-sufficient in understanding each other’s needs. Tom Steinberg told the group that he is in the process of setting up a fund to pay for civil-society-type projects by programmers and is looking for interest from potential contributors.

The day also produced a blog (see link below) and the promise of a game for supporting groups in their choices around process and technology, both courtesy of David Wilcox of Partnerships Online. A group will come together to play, modify and test a new version of his game at some point soon. If you are interested in this, or other aspects of the work mentioned here, consult the blog.

Progress from this day will have all the challenges of working with idealistic, motivated and distributed volunteers, and all the strengths too.

Associated Link: The blog

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