The Art and Science of Everything

Dan Gruen usefully points out that folders are a system where the usefulness of, say, your email folder for a project is very brittle. If you dutifully file 90% of your project related mails but fail to file 10%, you still will need to use search to locate project related emails.

So when are folders useful? Maybe if they help you breakdown the problem. When there isn’t a rush of emails coming in such that you’re likely to fail to folder. When you can learn and suggest a folder to facilitate filing with a single click.

People who reported email has high work importance tended to use work email as clean inbox work to do list

People who checked email more often reported lesser feelings of email overload. Restricting when they checked increased overload. Using folders and filing messages associated with increased feelings of overload
Limitations of laura’s method (by her own admission):

- cross-sectional analysis gives correlations but not causal accounts

People’s coping mechanisms for life in general don’t explain all the variance Laura saw in the email overload feedback.

What would it mean to generalize this topic from email overload to communication overload?

Folders are harmful!  12% of people spend their time filing. Dan Gruen points me to this paper by Olle Balter which will have some references to how folders fail people over time.
Remail IBM system that Dan Gruen worked on looks cool.  It has thread view like gmail, but they’ve added visualizations showing relation of emails to calendar events as well as thread visualization diagram for context (Gmail shows this if you scroll down the thread, also doesn’t show thread structure). Cool mobile feature is that it shows thread structure in bottom right of email being viewed so you know whether to reply to a mail you’re looking at or if you should just reply right there.

• During the reflective 20 years of CSCW panel, Lucy Suchman said that she typically doesn’t believe in innovation coming from just a single person. I put two fists in the air. A few days ago, someone was citing how Doug Englebart was discontinuously innovative and I argued that he was also part of a culture that was in motion, and part of a flow of concepts of personalization, cybernetics, frontier living, and disembodiment. My friend argued that it may be so, but Englebart should be credited with envisioning and championing ideas that many thought were crazy but have since given today’s technologies their shape. I wonder what Lucy would say.
• Paul’s talk on Replacing Space got me really excited. He emphasized that space is not a constant, material truth with socially-constructed place layered on top. Instead, space and place are mutually constitutive. Space affords some range of places as we imbue those spaces with social meaning (or can space take on any meaning?), but we also reshape spaces based on these socially-constructed meaning systems, and the cycle of affordance and reshaping continues. Instead of Marx-inspired base-superstructure, we have messy Foucauldian entanglement. (There is probably a better word than entanglement, but I don’t remember.)

  First, he emphasized that rather than creating a new concept for his elucidation of space, he keeps the same term as it is also used the same way in other fields. If we are to benefit from a body of theory and concepts being built in CSCW-related disciplines, we need to keep pace with their conceptual sophistication where it is useful to us. Second, I love the emphasis on power geometries of space — who has mobility and who doesn’t? How is mobility as labor different from mobility as leisure? I’m very concerned with political and social justice and Paul is communicating useful concepts to frame those dialogs. I’d been drowning in the messiness of my framelessness in my power questions.

• The Bookmarks paper I saw inspired me to write a parser for del.icio.us feeds and build a data structure that encodes a date based histogram of bookmark frequency. I figured out a statistic that I think gives me a sense of burstiness in bookmarking. I need to look at how Bernardo & Huberman get their bookmark user samples, get my own, get myself analyzing. All hail RSS.
• Met Gloria Mark at the BBQ, finally. She recommended I check out her work on multitasking. She also mentioned some new work on networked, bottom up organizations and how information workers tactically manage that. It would be interesting if there is increased informality and that informality somehow has learnings for everyday sensemaking stuff that I’m interested in.
• Really rad conversations with Professor Jan. She gave me some recommended reads, gave me some feedback on a paper I’m halfway through, and we just got to hang out a lot more than we have in a while. I repaid her with some design ideas for the interruption management work she presented at CSCW.
• I love the people I’ve met at this conference. So many ideas! So much engagement! Pretty great papers too. Probably the best of any hci-ish conference I’ve been to.

People wardriving or walking around with laptop trying to find good wifi signal. They’re trying to perceive space using alternative sensory mechanisms. Today, we have radically diff tech landscape and a broader set of spaces of interest to cscw.

How have place/space been taken up?

How might recent developments reinvigorate those interests?
Layer cake model

space is the geometric, mathematical account of the world — the materiality of the world as it “just is” and space as the socially constructed reality we weave collectively

is there a tendency to also perceive social life as layered on top of protocols, hardware, platforms? But the “abstractions mired in TCPIP are mired in social practice.” That materiality is shaped by social concerns.

Likewise, the materiality of space is shaped by social concerns.

Paul proposes that “place” is concerned with uniqueness, difference, separation, identity. “Space” concerned with connection, movement, uniformity — the thing that is held more stable through transitions. And both are about social action.

Math is not “natural” — it represents choices made about how to represent the world, and those choices often are made in service of some goal that people have. Edward Hutchins: “Not until the mercator projection  did the straight line have a computational purpose.”

Spatial practice

space is itself enacted

strategic practice = focused on centers of power, like material design of buildings which force people into certain relationships. (force is a little strong, no?) structuring spaces certain kind of way

tactical practices = people going around everyday life, interacting with power forms, but also possible sites of resistance, reappropriation

design is a strategic practice, use is a tactical practice

power geometries 

massey: looking at flows of ppl goods, info and capital, have to look at power arrangements

who moves, doesn’t; who decides on flows; who is liberated or imprisoned

who is mobile, how, and why? mobile computing urban space and consumption, a 20 something year old with a predatory attitude towards city has diff mobility than taxi driver for whom mobilikty is a form of labor

technologies of spatiality 

logics of spatial practice

dangers of “virtual” - the emergence of social and cultural practice around creation of new virtual spaces? dourish suggests instead reconfiguration of existing space

collective legibility of space

“ubiq.” and “seamless” infrastructures? hiding in gps blackspots, exploiting network seams in Treasure.

reading people, objects, and events in space and encountering space as peopled

lilly - what if you could encounter a prison or an interrogation room as peopled? potential for collective action despite spatio-temporal isolation

collaboration w jennifer cole and simon terry - investigating sex offenders in san diego. they’re happy to have a record of where they are as a relief from having police hassle them.

why rewrite space rather than creating new concept? dourish wants to connect space and place in cscw with debates in other disciplines. current accounts of tech in human geography are pretty weak.

Today at CSCW, I attended a panel discussing the typical expectations for ethnography — specifically, implications for design — at CSCW and CHI. The debate was really interesting and covered several points. First, what is the purpose of ethnography for design? In comments, I argued that it serves a two fold purpose — evoking empathy and defamiliarization, and providing analysis to make memorable and comphrehensible complex phenomena in the design context. Paul pointed out that perhaps forcing an implication for design narrows the ethnography down to such a narrow point that it no longer inspires creative imagination. But more than creative inspiration is lost. All the richness lost in cramming ethnography into ACM format is also lost as part of the ethnographic corpus Paul described as being a core concept in anthopological practice.

Today, Bob Sutton’s blog post on workplace dignity highlighted another form dependent on detailed ethnography I fear our CSCW papers will never afford — the meta-analysis of ethnography.

If you want to read the most comprehensive academic treatment of dignity that I know of, check out Randy Hodson’s 2001 book Dignity at Work. He reviewed over 300 in-depth ethnographies – these are academic ethnographies, usually entailing a year or more of intense observation –and ultimately selected 108 cases from 86 published ethnographies for intense quantitative and qualitative analysis. His compact definition is fantastic, “Dignity is the ability to establish a sense of self-worth and self-respect and to appreciate the respect of others.”

What can consumer behavior researchers tell us?

• people are what they possess (William, James)
• (lilly) to what extend is this a western traditional of identity construction?
• Belk and the textended self (Belk, 1988)
• extend self through possessions: body, things, people, places, etc
• connection to self based on distance from core self
• builds on Sartre’s states of existence: having, doing, being
• looks at people who have lost a spouse, possessions in a fire, moving — how does that affect who you are?
• social construction of self
• what do people think of me if they see me using this product?
• what is actually using the product like?
• who do I want to be?
• possessions in our life narratives (erickson 1968; Kleine, Kleine & Allen 1995)
• people have a current understanding of who they are, who they were that they want to hold onto, who they were that they want to discard
• in getting rid of things from our past, we construct our past
• what does this say about japanese culture minimalism? certainly availability of space to move things affects this. infinite space only in parts of the US. (lilly - construct this as prioritizing self?)
• plotting our possessions (kleine, kleine, allen 1995)
• people’s favorite possessions are things that were “like me” and “like we” (reminds me of people in my life)
• applying social identity theory (kleine, kleine kerman)
• social role - what does it mean to be, say, a “college student”
• social identity - waht do they think they are as someone in that social role? often close to social role since they want to be in that role
• ideal identity - who they want to be? often contradictory (partyer who gets straight As), not necessarily deeply rationalized
• social identity perspective on product attachment
• where to go?
• can interactive products help ppl define and move toward their ideal identity?
• can they scaffold the identity construction process, making it epxlicit to the participant?
• can we design products that help people feel better about themselves?
• role expression
• customization, personalization, design-of-self, exhibition
• personal web pages, blogs, digital wish lists, office doros, thermal coffee cups, home, license plates, tennis shoes, sharing playlists, luggage, education, ring tones, background screens…
• role switching
• products used across roles can support switching
• remind me who I am now, here, to you
• ego phone - express availability to different communication channels and different groups (match to roles)
• cosmos - leave personal messages (thought gifts) in space. world is filled with messages from your past. trying to create role confusion
• role enhancement
• music player where mom assembles sample music based on samples created by kids. emphasizes connection to children
• role transition
• high school to college; couple to family; smoker to non-smocker; cared for to care giver; career change
• products for these folks are therapists, life coaches, support groups; professional social orgs, discussion groups
• operationalizing with transitioning to college design study at CMU
• take pictures of things you don’t want to associate with yourself in college (this is sort of a photo collage expression idea, but over time, requiring digital cameras, and open ended)
• can home be made “intelligent” to help parents raise their children and craft their identities? alternative to how ubicomp usually frames problems people have

‘This is Not a Game’: Immersive Aesthetics and Collective Play by Jane McGonigal

Jane analyzes the 2001 game “The Beast,” analyzing the subjective experience of reality created by game authors and explaining how that particular engagement in reality changed players’ orientation towards the world — game, non-game, and in-between. She differentiates immersive games, which make reality the materiality of game play, from pervasive gaming, which typically augments reality with game play devices, firmly placing player activities in a clearly delineated game world.

A particular section I want to follow up on is the discussion of smart mobs as bearing “a strong resemblance to Pierre Levy’s prescription for a socially responsible, politically diverse collective intelligence.” Levy writes “Cyberspace provides us with the opportunity to experiment with collective methods of organization and regulation that dignify multiplicity and variety.” First, is the opportunity really there? And if it is, is it being realized? There are plenty of examples of cyberspace repeating the sociological realities of meatspace. Then how do you design the potential for reaching beyond, or perforating and destablizing those “realities?”

Yet another blog post full of questions with few answers.