Useful Computing: Reclaiming a Lost Vision
Useful Computing
Computers are supposed to make our lives easier; technology should serve us.
It is a simple idea, but one that seems to have been forgotten. As more and more businesses have moved online, and shifted to service-based or ad-based business models, there has been a shift in design. The user-centred approach is dying. Technology today is designed with one question in mind: “What do we want the user to do?”. For example, Apple recently removed the standard headphone port from its new iPhone in order to sell more wireless headphones. Twitter closed its APIs (upon which many useful applications were built) in order to prioritise monetisation over user functionality. Designing for users is now often reduced to simple usability rather than consideration of the user experience as a whole.
A parallel of this schism between putting the user at the centre of things or building for a specific purpose only is seen in the field of ubiquitous computing: as Greg Abowd wrote, the future of computing is programming for individuals in their environments, rather than specific devices. Cheap, low-cost components and new ways of thinking about interaction, such as tangible user interfaces, allow us to design computing experiences that are not constrained to a single application on a single device.
Another computing paradigm that applies some of this human-centric thinking and tries to turn the current service-centric thinking “inside out” is the concept of the Personal Data Locker, as laid out in this video by David Siegel:
But personal data lockers and ubicomp are just some of the many tangents of this research area, and there are others too:
- Semantic analysis will also be important as we try and teach computers to better understand our world
- The quantified self may come into play as well.
- Filter bubbles are relevant too, and data ethics is an important topic for digital civics.
- Intelligent agents and conversational UIs may offer a different way of thinking about human-centric interactions.
To bring us back to the core idea, I would say that my research interest centres on “helping computers to help us better“. Time and again, providers are putting their own needs or their own blinkered view of what their users want ahead of the human-centric perspective, hindering the usefulness of the overall user experience in the process. I want to expose these technologically-imposed barriers that are making our lives harder, not easier, and empower people to make more informed choices about where they put their data, which services they use and what products they buy. This is a problem which is impossible to work on in a commercial context, as the goals of human-centric, useful computing run contrary to market forces, which encourage locked-in, locked-down user experiences.
Here in OpenLab we are ideally placed to explore this area, and I believe it is a civic issue. Much of the current studies in semantic unification of information have been theoretical and not built with user experience at the forefront. For my MRes, I hope to take some first steps into this by undertaking some qualitative research into what barriers affect people’s daily lives, and how, perhaps by developing a bespoke, in-situ reporting tool. I also hope that undertaking such exploratory work will go some way towards finding evidence for my theories, as well as help me to identify the most appropriate civic domain for exploring these ideas.
My vision for the future is that computers might be better able to understand the human world. Computers should think like humans – we shouldn’t have to think like computers.
Civic Engagement
My colleague Dinislam Abdulgalimov has a research interest in promoting and exploring the use of digital technologies to promote civic engagement. He sees this as a local issue, where communities and groups need a digital channel to make their views known, through commenting or voting, to the relevant authorities. Technologies such as Tor, FireChat, Tox and Liquid Democracy may be applicable here, though Dinislam’s concern is to explore the application of these and other technologies in real-world situations; his view is that much of the existing work on digital civic engagement has been too theoretical. Anonymity is an important feature in this too, but Dinislam is less interested in the fringe/whistleblowing aspects. He wants to explore ways to give everyday citizens (as well as employees within organisations) a voice to express themselves and be heard. Buy-in from authorities will be important; he plans to find local organisations to work with and he wants to begin with some participatory design work involving citizens and authorities.
Further Reading
The further reading I have found for myself is “The social shaping of technology” by Robin Williams and David Edge, published in Elsevier’s Research Policy journal. While there seems to be very little applied research in the area of technology barriers to usefulness, this 1996 paper does provide a useful theoretical springboard for looking at the ways in which social and economic factors can shape technology design, and recognises that this in turn will socially impact the users of that technology. The social impacts of technology is a topic I have been contemplating for nearly a decade, so this paper seems a good fit. Its extensive references may also yield some useful further reading.
The further reading I have found for Dinislam is “A Civic View: Bridging the Gap between Citizens and City Government” by Sarah Henry in the Magazine of the User Experience Professionals Association. This explores the use of novel technologies in providing real-world insights from citizens to their local government, and its problem statement seems to strongly overlap with Dinislam’s perspective.
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