Life-centered information under the light of 'geoidal' theories

With the development of information retrieval tools and Web 2.0 repositories on the Internet, it is becoming more and more easier to reach information. Users of the Internet may search online, join forums, post a question to their social networks, watch how-to videos, etc. and get enormous amounts of information about a subject of their interest. However, when asked about simple resources used in daily life that we depend on for living, such as, food, water or air, it may not be easy to find answers for the simplest questions. For example, in the domain of food labeling, information about foods are generally represented in a way that is not very easy for users to interpret. Some concerned information seekers may search online to find out the carcinogens and toxic chemicals that may be harmful for earth, which are contained in a given food product; however, it is neither practical to search with dozens of ingredients listed on the food product, nor is it easy to find reliable information about every ingredient. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services regulates food safety and assures that food products are sanitary and properly labeled but the problem is that the labels may be sometimes misleading. When it is written “No Dyes” on a food label, people can infer that “dyes” is not healthy, but they may not always remember to check this ingredient when shopping for other products. And even though people check everything online and find out information about the ingredients of a food substance, they may still not find out anything about the most simplest things such as where and in what conditions the food ingredients were grown or artificially produced and who in what conditions produced them. Therefore, instead of writing “No Dyes”, people would want to know what is really contained in their food, for example, if there are any genetically modified organisms or any carcinogens; or if the food production was fair, if the trade was based on equal exchange, if the production caused environmental pollution, i.e. basic information about life; not just human beings’ life but life in general: all living things, habitat, earth and even whole universe in order to aim at social and environmental sustainability.

So, here I propose using "life-centered" instead of sustainable. Since with sustainability, it is always understood as environmental sustainability, which I think is very important but sometimes may conceal all other issues, like life of workers, life of all living things other than the users. So I use life to mean the whole life including all living things, habitats, earth, and even universe/multiverse. Since now, we manage to pollute the space with our one-way satellites.

So, it is pretty obvious that these are all equally important and we, as human beings, are not the only species in the world. Our existence depend on other species as well as the environment in general. Knowing all these why do we still have governments not signing Kyoto??? Chomsky has given a seminal talk about this and you can find it here. I will try to elaborate on this subject.

People tend to ignore problems until they are affected by them. But when they are affected they are more willing to take action to solve the problem. But for environmental problem or for systemic problems, it is difficult to take action since we don't really see or feel the effects. Now, the important question we need to ask is what will people do if there is a problem that does not affect them directly, but either it affects them indirectly or its effects will be felt many years later? How are they going to start doing something for the solution of the problem? If people know the whole cycle of information are they going to take action? Are people going to be engaged if they become part of the solution seeking process and create this whole cycle together? These are all big problems that we have been facing for many years. However, in order to seek the solution to these problems, I argue that we need geoidal theories.

Why do we need geoidal theories? 
Scientists realized that the world’s shape is neither spheroid nor ellipsoid, it has its own shape, geoid; and it is neither smooth, nor regular due to the many natural or artificial happenstances, such as earthquakes, ground water consumption etc., and unobservables, such as comets, gravity anomaly, external forces, etc. Hence, the term geoidal was chosen as a metaphor to refer to theories that approach problems from a holistic perspective and also incorporates uncertainty and unobservability into their frameworks.

Think about a research that is trying to look at the role of information in persuasive technologies. Actually, I was thinking about such a research for myself. I was thinking that if we show the whole cycle of information to people they may change their behavior. I was thinking about my grandmother. She was living in a small mountain village and she knew the whole cycle of information about life. She knew where her water was coming from, where it goes. She knew how her food was produced, she knew where her waste ended up and how it affected the environment, she knew because she was producing/carrying/discarding/etc. and she was there to see. But now, living in the modern world cities, most of the time we don't know about these cycles. However, I am not sure if knowing the whole cycle would change people's behavior. And moreover, this will be a behaviorist approach that does not include the whole culture and social relations.

Most of the smokers nowadays know how smoking affects their health, they know the whole cycle and they know where they are going to end up. However, there is this whole culture, family, friends, TV, commercials, capitalism, etc. that are affective in smokers' lives. If we only focus on information, we cannot solve the problem.

This is a complex system and not a single variable can be effective solely, so studying the effects of X on Z, would be a reductionist approach when we have an equation with n variables, like:

a^2-b^5+c^6+.....+x^3+y^2=z^4

That's why, we need geoidal theories that takes into account more complex phenomena and that does not ignore the effects of unobservables.

And, for the environmental crisis we are facing, Wallerstein also wrote a commentary that I found seminal and wanted to share: "Climate Disasters: Three Obstacles to Doing Anything"

Planting in the Forest: A Life-Centered Design Approach

Last year... December 2009. My baby is almost one year old, finally came her age of toys! I am excited to shop for toys; I go to the shopping mall... I have passed through the toys corridor in the shopping mall many times but I have not realized before that they divided the toys according to gender. Does it matter at the age of one if you play with a car or a doll? Does it matter at any age? I am trying to be gender neutral so I also walk through the boys’ section to buy a car for my baby girl... but why are there so many cars? I get disconnected. I will not buy any of the cars making up almost half of the toys in boys section. I would not buy one even if my baby were a boy. I want the earth and life to survive, so I decide to buy a small bicycle that she can roll like a car. I look over all of the corridors but I cannot find any. I go online to shop for a small bicycle but I find only a few, which are over expensive. I then start searching wooden toys and see that Barthes’ (1972) notion of “French toys” is now applied to wooden toys. The substance and the colors are indeed warmer; however, the majority of the wooden toys are designed very much like plastic toys; they “do not allow the child to identify herself as creator but as owner or as user" (p.54). The material does not matter anymore. The message transferred with the artifact is important. I can buy a wooden car, but it still supports a certain set of values. The ultimate particular is important, but I wonder who decides on the general or even the universal... (Nelson & Stolterman, 2003)

This year... December 2010. At the beginning of the semester (Fall, 2010), when our professor, Erik Stolterman, of design theory class introduced our final assignment, which would be a personal position paper about our own design philosophy that we would be able to understand/reflect on during the course semester, I thought that it would be very simple for me to write, since I had my own philosophy of life, which I also use while teaching and parenting and thought that I could use this for design too. And I have actually started writing the day I have heard about the assignment in the first week. I wrote two things on this document concerning my philosophy in life:

1. Respect life.
2. Take good care of earth.

And further I have noted down:

“I could have written: do not show discrimination according to race, gender, sex, age, disability, etc.; show respect to different thoughts, make environment friendly things (recyclable, reusable, durable, ...), do not use toxic chemicals like BPA, phthalates, PVC; take care of people’s physical health so choose the ergonomic design even though it will cost the $2.4 million*,... and keep writing thousands of things under these two things. But whatever I will write will go under either the first or the second. So it is good to keep it simple with only these two!

Now, I am at the last week of the semester, looking at the same document, with the same principles in life but this time what I think is that it is not simple. Moreover, it is complex! A design situation offers “potentially infinite and limitless sources of information, requirements, demands, wants and needs, limitations, and opportunities” (Stolterman, 2008, p.57). The designer has to choose from this infinite space of design and doing the ‘right thing’ is based on designer’s judgment (Nelson & Stolterman, 2003, p.233). And design rationality is expandable (Hatchuel, 2001).

Or is it? I agree, in theory, there are infinitely many choices a designer could take; however, looking at the design outcomes that have already been produced, like in the example of toy cars or even real cars, I am going to argue if there are boundaries that limit the design space in practice.

The Forest
In order to watch the beautiful colors of fall season, we went to a forest nearby Bloomington, IN. It was my first time in US to see a warning sign that was saying “Wipe Your Feet! Please brush your boots before entering this natural area”. Different than my home country, people were entering the indoor places with their shoes and I have not seen any signs concerning cleanness of any area before. That’s why I was surprised to see this sign and even more surprised to see it for an outdoor place. Then, I learned that it is to protect the forest from invader seeds that may be carried by boots.

Using the metaphor of forest for the field of design, and Buxton’s (2007) branching tree model of “design as branching exploration and comparison” (p.388), what I think is that, before proceeding on to the branches of a tree, first, the designer should know the forest, the soil and learn about the flora and the weather conditions and other conditions that affect the forest; only then s/he can start planting new seeds; otherwise, there is always a risk of invasion or exclusion.

Here, I have to open a parenthesis and say that, the idea of “expandable rationality” or ‘infinitely many’ choices a designer could take is encouraging and promising; however, before exploring the ‘infinitely many’ alternatives, walking around the forest and seeing the big picture is important. That’s why; I want to continue my paper with discussing the ‘boundaries’ of “expandable rationality” in terms of meaning created by different stakeholders and the system as well as the designer’s own lifeworld, which have certain places in the big picture.

Design as ideological world-system apparatus.
In his essay of “In Praise of Idleness”, Bertrand Russell (1932) brings a new perspective to Adam Smith’s pin manufacturing example, which is used to explain the division of labor to produce more pins. With an illustration, Russell explains that if a new system is discovered to produce twice as much pins at the same amount of time, and the need for pins is met, then in a rational world, the pin factory workers do not need to work eight hours a day; therefore, the daily work time could be reduced to four hours. However, in the actual world this scenario does not work like this. The employees still work eight hours and too many pins are produced. But the system finds some other solutions for this overproduction (Leonard, 2007, 2010):

• Externalizing the costs
• Selling the product under its value by cutting down the wages or insurance costs of workers
• Designing disposable pins
• Designing the pins easily breakable
• Designing for the dumb

One can see that the majority of the solutions are related to the design of the things. Althusser (1971) said it is the ideological state apparatuses (religious, educational, family, legal, political, trade-union, communications, cultural ISA) that shape our lives and reproduce the conditions of production and the means of production, but actually it is not just the state or states or governments anymore; it is the world-system, the capitalist world-economy (Wallerstein, 1979), in which design plays an important role.

The above picture drawn for pin production and consumption is not much different in the area of electronics too. In 1960s when Gordon Moore said that the processor speed could double approximately every two years, he did not mean that we should discard our electronic devices every two years (Leonard, 2010). And if the release dates of iPhone and its several generations are observed, it is easily seen that the electronics are now even more frequently discarded. And iPhone was designed with the idea of downloadable applications so that people do not need to update their devices frequently.

Of course, these results are not surprising. It is the government and the world-system working together telling people to “produce more consumer goods to ramp up the economy” since at least the World War II, or “to shop” in order to overcome the shock of 9/11 (Leonard, 2007). However, neither the world is an infinite resource, nor is it an infinite garbage can (Chomsky, 1988). And buying green or living simple is not going to solve this problem (Jensen, 2009).

Also it is not only the physical artifacts that pollute the planet. What about the software? Don’t they cause the pollution of the planet in an indirect way? When one sits in front of the computer for several hours, can she still be energetic? If the technology makes her life easy, she should be “delightful in her leisure” so that her quality of life will increase and so the worlds’ “moral qualities” (Russell, 1932)? Where do people spend their leisure times; in front of computers? Does technology pollute life? And there are so many questions that could be asked but at this point what I want to ask is, who is responsible for all these? Is it the user, the designer or the client?

‘Naïve’ designer facing the “evil of design”.
Design is very powerful; it has the power to change the world but at the same time it has consequences that occur naturally, accidentally or intentionally, which Nelson and Stolterman refer as “the evil of design” (2003, ch.12).

When Madam Curie discovered radioactive elements, she would not know that her discovery was going to be used in building nuclear weapons, nor did she know that it was going to cost her life because of the radioactivity she was exposed when she was working with those elements (Bloom, 2008). Can we say that Madam Curie is accountable for the nuclear weapons, or Einstein for the atom bomb? It may be easier to decide on these situations then to decide on a design situation. The design case is more complex. “In the design process, the client is responsible for making judgments, but the designer has [also] an impact on the client’s realm of judgments” (Nelson & Stolterman, 2003, ch.8).

McCarthy and Wright (2008) cite Mattelmäki and Battarbee, saying that “they see design empathy as a personal connection between designer and user that facilitates seeing and understanding users [...] as people with feelings rather than test subjects”. Usability engineering is criticized in design field (Buxton, 2007; Greenberg & Buxton, 2008). Although I agree with them, I do not think that the alternative so called ‘user-centered’ approaches are that naïve, since one part of understanding users is to sell the design. And the evil of design in this area may go wild and target even small children, either selling them unhealthy or poisonous things and worse, raising them as life-long consumers (Consuming Kids, 2008). In this case, the designer conducting a user-centered design process, running focus groups, arranging parties to get feedback from children is not that naïve, so should be hold at least as much accountable as clients and different stakeholders.

The boundaries are not always created by the system or stakeholders directly or indirectly in a design situation; the design space is also limited to the designer’s lifeworld. And in order to cultivate our lifeworlds, expand our horizons we need to see the big picture. Otherwise, even though we do it for the design, with our best wills, the forest will be under risk.

A life-centered design approach
User-centered approaches or experience design approaches are generally centered on people. However, the consequences of design do not only affect people. It affects the whole life. Just one example, discussed in news this year was the decline in bee population. There were other causes, such as agricultural pesticides, the effects of climate change, associated with the decline of the bee population but researchers at Panjab University conducted a three months experiment and found that cell phone radiation also causes the bees to stop producing honey, queen bee halving the egg production and as a result hive size reducing dramatically (Herriman, 2010). What was more dramatic though, the bees were discussed in terms of their economic values and how the problem is going to affect people’s lives.

Life may mean different things to different people. Hereby, I should stop and explain what I mean by life. I do not want to write a definition that will restrict the future findings, however, I should say that, life is not an attribute that is associated with animals and plants and all living things; this is only one part of life, which belongs to a larger system. And the earth does not belong to us; it belongs to this larger system, universe as we now so far. If we continue seeing life as something belonging to people, our existence in the forest will be ‘invasion’ and this means that there will be no ‘forest’ soon.

Another thing I want to say about life is that it is not something material. For example, the effects of technology are not always physically observed. Each day, new software is being released to block people’s relationship with some websites. After Web 2.0 Suicide Machine (Savicic, 2009), which 90,000 people are waiting to have the service to delete their online identities (Beanlan, 2010), new software, Anti-Social, was released this year with a similar purpose (Stutzman, 2010). Also one can easily find out by using a search engine, that there is high demand for Internet blocking or filtering software. We need to take a closer look at the interaction between human and computer, however, these results still tell us something. At least we can see that there are people who want to be onlife, not online.

* * *

Design situation is indeed complex. However, “complexity does not always brings problems, it also brings positive experience” (Stolterman, 2008 p.57). Taking this positive experience and challenge of complexity, I want to continue my research on life-centered design.

To grow alternative seeds in the forest, we need to work more. For now, I can say that we need to come up with good design that has soul, and at the same time engaging. If we want to make a toy that is alternative to car or cars, it should be at least as engaging as cars. If the engaging is the message now, and the message is determined by culture, politics and the world-system, in order to disseminate our alternative seeds, we need to build our design culture and design artifacts with the idea of “ensouled design”, which is related to the notion of caring (Nelson & Stolterman, p.285). If we care for life and forest, it is urgent that we see the big picture and change our focus to life-centered design approaches.

_____________________

* In a real world problem (Project Ernestine), GOMS model was used to show that the proposed design for telephone operators would cost the company $2.4 million a year. The company did not switch to the proposed design even though it was ergonomic for the operators. (Atwood, Gray & John, 1996; John, 2003).

** This paper was written for HCI Design Theory class taught by Eric Stolterman at School of Informatics and Computing at IUB.


Bibliography:
Althusser, L. (1971). Ideology and ideological state apparatuses. In Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays. London: New Left Books.

Atwood, M., Gray, W. & John, B. (1996). Project Ernestine: Analytic and empirical methods applied to a real-world CHI problem. In Rudisill, M. et al. (Eds.), Human-Computer Interface Design: Success Stories, Emerging Methods, and Real-World Context (pp. 101- 121).

Beanland, C. (2010, October). Are Facebook and Twitter becoming an obsession? Then take your life offline... in 52 minutes. MailOnline. Retrieved December 14, 2010, from http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1318772/Are-Facebook-Twitter- obsession-Then-life-offline--52-minutes.html

Barbaro, A. (Producer). (2008). Consuming kids: The commercialization of childhood. [Transcript]. Retrieved December 14, 2010, from http://www.mediaed.org/cgi- bin/commerce.cgi?preadd=action&key=134

Barthes, R. (1972). Toys. In Mythologies (pp.53-55). New York: Hill and Wang. Blom, Philipp (2008). 1903: A Strange Luminescence. In The Vertigo Years: Europe, 1900-1914. New York: Basic Books.

Buxton, B. (2007). Interacting with paper. In Sketching user experiences: Getting the design right and the right design. San Francisco, CA: Morgan Kaufmann.

Greenberg, S. & Buxton, B. (2008). Usability evaluation considered harmful (Some of the time). In CHI 2008 Proceedings, April 5-10, 2008, Florence, Italy. Hatchuel, A.: 2001. “Design theory and organization theory. Collective Action in Design Worlds”, Plenary Lecture at the EGOS Conference, Lyon July 6–8. Working paper.

Herman, E.S. & Chomsky, N. (1988). Manufacturing consent: The political economy of the mass media. New York: Pantheon Books.

Herriman, S. (2010, June 30). Study links bee decline to cell phones. CNN World. Retrieved from http://www.cnn.com/

Jensen, D. (2009). World at gunpoint. Orion, May/June 2009. Retrieved, December 12, 2010, from http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/4697/

John, B. (2003). Information processing and skilled behavior. In John Caroll (Ed.), HCI models, theories, and frameworks (pp. 57-101). San Francisco, CA: Morgan Kaufmann.

Leonard, A. (2007). The story of stuff: Referenced and annotated script. Retrieved, December 12, 2010, from http://storyofstuff.org/pdfs/annie_leonard_footnoted_script.pdf

Leonard, A. (2010). The story of electronics: Referenced and annotated script. Retrieved, December 12, 2010, from http://storyofstuff.org/pdfs/annie_leonard_footnoted_script.pdf

Nelson, H., & Stolterman, E. (2003). The design way. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Educational Technology Press.

Russell, B. (1932/1957). In Praise of idleness; and other essays (2nd ed.). London: Routledge.

Savicic, G. (2009). Web 2.0 Suicide Machine. Retrieved December 14, 2010, from http://suicidemachine.org/

Stolterman, E. (2008). The nature of design practice and implications for interaction design research. International Journal of Design, 2(1), 55-65.

Stutzman, F. (2010). Anti-Social. Retrieved December 14, 2010, from http://anti-social.cc/

Wallerstein, I. (1979). The capitalist world-economy. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press.

Wright, P., & McCarthy, J. (2008). Empathy and Experience in HCI. In CHI Proceedings, Florence, Italy.

6 billion Others: An Avant-garde Digital Ethnography

6 billion Others is a project by Yann-Arthus Bertrand 'aiming to create a sensitive and human portrait of the planet's inhabitants', which I think is an avant-garde ethnography project with aiming 'the enlargement of the universe of human discourse' (Geertz, 1973, The Interpretation of Cultures).

The project team conducted 6,000 interviews in 65 countries and shot 4,500 hours of film, asking participants about meaning of life, happiness, love, anger, tears, discrimination, dreams, their parents, and other topics related to their 'felt life'.

Listening to testimonials is listening to History on an individual scale. Feeling is what we experience from the inside, our emotional perception, an irrational element that moves us all. An individual process, it is also a universal language....

website: http://www.6billionothers.org/

Immediacy & Hypermediacy of Windows

Windows, as an operating system has been very successful that the rivals of it, still are using the similar designs in their systems. The design of the interfaces, menus, toolbars, dialog boxes, buttons, etc, everything is based upon the shape of windows, very simple and no place for multiple interpretations. I think the immediacy of the medium comes from this simple idea.

First, in the epistemological sense, we are so used to rectangular shaped opening and closing windows that the shape of the interfaces are transparent to us. Paintings, photographs, televisions, cinemas, computers, etc; almost everything we see around us are in the shape of rectangles. Secondly, in the psychological sense, we love the act of watching."Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak" says John Berger (Ways of Seeing, 1972). However, what we see is brought within our reach. Therefore, living in the socially constructed worlds, we learn watching: we watch the outside through the windows, we watch TV, we watch the vitrines of the shops, we watch the cinema, we watch people, we watch people fighting and on and on; and in many times just the act of watching. So, offering so many screens for us to watch, windows of Windows disappear and the objects inside them become present to us.

What about the hypermediacy? I think, in its epistemological sense, the knowledge of the world -maybe just the social world for some, political world for another or the business and so many different worlds at the same time for most- comes us through the Windows. We learn the new ways of communication with our friends (windows messenger), we learn the new ways of listening to music (windows media player), we learn the new ways of researching (windows explorer), we learn the new ways of shopping (windows marketplace), and lots of other features that we have to spend lots of hours to learn all. Also we learn about the mediation itself. The menus and toolbars are always there within the broader window surrounding another one. But in the psychological sense, some parts are falling away from the experience of the 'real'.

Of course the notion of 'real' is socially constructed and it can vary according to different people. However, taking the word 'window' in the meaning of "wind's eye" (vindauga -where the word originates from) or in the meaning of "eye-hole" we see that the sharp rectangular shape of the windows falls behind the 'real life' ones'. Also the orderliness of the windows with all the menus and buttons attached, and the precise timing and falling into the screen while opening the windows is another feature which is an 'unrealistic' experience too.

I don't mean a non-geometrical shaped window, like the real shape of an eye would be much more realistic; but according to me, rounded shapes feels much more gentle, natural and humane -like the ones in the wii interface.

Creating choices in our multiple choice lives

We are living in an age of multiple choices. We can choose our schools, our cars, our computers, our igoogle or blog skins, background colors, etc. But we always choose from the given ones, and our choice is influenced by our ideology/life-worlds.

In his book 'Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses', Althusser writes "Ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence". He explains this with a simple metaphor. Althusser says that we can think ideology as the water in an aquarium; and, a fish living in this aquarium understands an external object not with its real dimensions but within an imaginary size because of the water in the aquarium.

As fishes in an aquarium we are supposed to choose what is offered to us; but what if we don't want and pass to the other side of the aquarium? Althusser (1970) argues that, it is impossible to live out of an aquarium; whether that one or another you are surrounded by some water. Or from a phenomenological and hermeneutic point of view ‘nobody has a true access to external reality’.

So why do we care about reality? As Dilthey (1976) says ‘what should come first is experience’. Maybe it is impossible for us to pass to the other side of the aquarium and perceive the the objects with their real sizes (i.e. access to reality); but it is still very exciting to travel to the sea, like once Nemo ‘did’. But in order to this, first of all, we should suppress our sweet life-world and cultivate it in order to survive in the other.

Magical Journey

After reading Dr. Bonk's post about 'teachers as online concierges', I have prepared this slide. Dr Bonk stated that "Life, and hence, learning, is a journey. And in this magical journey, our tour guides are important. We are living in an age of interest rather than age of information. So, I think, we as future tour guides, should work hard to arouse interest for students to enter right ways in this matrix.

Releasing From Your Chains!

"In order to have a large number of values in common, all members of the group must have an equable opportunity to receive and to take from others. There must be a large variety of shared undertakings and experiences. Otherwise, the influences which educate some into masters, [also] educate others into slaves." says John Dewey in 1916. After 87 years, in 2003, Swan notes that students perceive online discussion as more equitable and more democratic than traditional classroom discourse. First of all, all students have a voice and no student can dominate the conversation. The unique nature of asynchronous discussion makes it impossible for even an instructor to control.

Moreover this ensures the quality, since you don't just say the ideas which come to your mind. You think twice. When you write, you have the chance to see your mind on 'paper', so check it and correct it; then of course distribute it in order to share with the others! So, release from your chains! Do not become a slave of a traditional discourse or web 1.0!