Critique as a resource and resourceful critics

I chose this paper because I am interested in the challenges associated with doing design work or participative research with eighty somethings. I am also interested in the methodology of using ‘questionable concepts’ or design probes because most of the research which I have done in the past has been very ‘talk-based’ (usually focus groups and interviews) and I am curious about the different insights that might be generated by introducing different techniques into the research process.

In this article Vines et al (2012) report the findings of a series of participatory design workshops with ten people over 80 years old (the design phase). The focus of the workshops was new banking technologies for the ‘older old’. Prior to the workshops the researchers had conducted in-depth interviews and ethnographic work with 12 eighty-somethings (the exploratory phase). This exploratory work led them to identify key themes for the ‘financial biography’ of this group and key banking-related problems to consider.

From the key themes the design team developed concept cards which illustrated 11 ideas for new financial services (example shown in picture). The cards could also capture participants’ responses to these ideas. The design concepts were deliberately ‘questionable’ thus facilitating criticism and debate. Some of the designs were purposefully left ambiguous, following Gaver et al [1], in the hope that this would create a resource for participants to respond to.

The participants were very critical of the design concepts and this critical stance led to productive insights, not just into older people’s experience of banking technology but also the nature of modern banking and arguably the dominance of a neoliberalist agenda within HCI.

I really enjoyed reading this paper and there were three aspects of it which I found particularly interesting.

Firstly, I thought the paper highlighted the heterogeneity of eighty somethings and I think this is an important lesson for us as researchers that we need to keep re-learning whenever we work with what we might perceive to be ‘a group’. The participants involved in the exploratory phase were sociodemographically different to the participants involved in the design phase and this fundamentally affected how the design ideas were conceived and perceived.

Secondly, the issues around one of the designs (the PIN thimble) being misunderstood showed the tension for this kind of work between communicating what a design is supposed to do/be but with sufficient ambiguity to allow for multiple interpretations.

Thirdly, I was fascinated by the way this work allowed the researchers to critically reflect on the dominance of certain interests and ideologies within HCI, for example the banking sector and consumerism. Perhaps the most valuable aspect of work of this type is not just using critique as a resource for designing particular ‘things’ but the opportunity it allows for reflection on the political interests behind technological development and even behind HCI as a collection of disciplines.

[1] Gaver, W., Beaver, J., and Benford, S. Ambiguity as a resource for design. CHI ’03, ACM (2003), 233-240.