The Second Dialogue on Quality of Use or Life
In this dialogue Practitioner and Scholar discuss how to evaluate the quality of use—and life—and how that influences our thoughts about design that contributes to a just society. They identify usability and user experience as the main paradigms of the quality of use in human-centered design. They identify and scrutinize users’ interests and the standpoints where usability and user experience post users, and they notice that the different standpoints lead to conflicting interpretations. They find a user with a multiple personality disorder who simultaneously plays the roles of a sponsor, beneficiary, operator, and experiencer.
Once they have identified the various standpoints, Scholar and Practitioner suggest that user experience increases as users make greater efforts, and decreases in step with the results generated by the interaction. User experience starts to equal anti-usability.
They expand the evaluation space by introducing an impartial “neighbor’s” standpoint on the use of the design. The “neighbor” is interested in the impact of use on the development of practices without having any direct or immediate role in interaction. For her, the evaluation criteria of use, results, and resources have different kinds of meanings. Scholar and Practitioner link the neighbor’s stand to Gilbert Cockton’s idea of worth-centered design.
Scholar and Practitioner continue with a fictive example dealing with digital technologies for spatial design. They suggest replacing the poorly justified assumptions underlying usability and user experience with a more impartial and thoughtful foundation for the quality of use. Practitioner concludes by saying we need to design for the neighbor’s peace of mind.
The dialogue begins …
P: Hi, Scholar. I’m here again to bother you with my questions.
S: Hi. Don’t worry. Sit down. I’m not bothered. What’s our topic today? Do you want coffee?
P: No thanks, I just had some. I’d like to discuss the consequentialist avenue of responsible design a bit more.
S: Okay.
P: During our last talk, we focused on virtues. That was eye-opening. I didn’t really think that one way of ensuring that design benefits a just society would be to improve the practice of design. I’m glad we learned that, but I still think we need to be able to somehow articulate how our work contributes to societal justice by paying attention to what we can offer to the users.
S: That sounds reasonable.
P: Good. What I mean is that I work face to face with the future users of our products—every now and then at least—and I think I should be able to articulate what good I can provide them. If I were to present the “the internal good of design” argument to a nurse or a forklift driver, that wouldn’t motivate them to collaborate with me. I should be able to say what I provide to him or her.
S: Sure. That’s fine with me. How shall we begin?
P: Products are designed to be used. Thus, for us to be able to evaluate whether they are good or not and our efforts have any moral merit, we should address their quality of use. I might be naïve but I believe that products that are good to use somehow justify our efforts.
S: Maybe.
P: But I’m confused about the ways we study the quality of use these days.
S: Not all products are meant for practical use. And they are not necessarily used for purposes we consider good.
P: True, but I speak about those that are. I believe we can say that the quality of interaction between a human user and a piece of equipment in context is a major concern in design. We should be able to evaluate that properly.
S: I agree that this applies to a great many products.
P: Let’s speak about those.
S: Fine.
P: Ultimately we want to ensure that the encounters between people and products are more good than bad, not only from a practical but also from an ethical perspective. To this end, we need to harness a range of things, from designers’ skills and design processes to design tools, collaborative platforms, and such.
S: We also need insight, persistence, and luck.
P: Yes. And don’t you think we also need criteria for evaluating the quality of use? They would help us strive towards higher quality of use.
S: Criteria or a framework helping us to identify issues that have or might have an impact on use would be beneficial for our reflective exploration. That is true. But I don’t believe in the effectiveness of a formula seeking to predetermine what is good or just use. A loose framework gives us direction, but preserves the conceptual slack (Schulman 1993) to consider what is relevant in a particular case and doesn’t excuse us from doing something just for the sake of the framework.
P: Fine.
S: Last time, I mentioned the three consequentialist approaches. Do you want to continue with them?
P: Perhaps we can get further if we look closer at the use of products and the indicators of quality of use. Maybe the goals of achieving happiness or capabilities are too distant, as there are too many intervening variables in play. That’s the impression I got after our previous discussions. I think quality of use might be something we have a reasonably good possibility of influencing with our designs.
S: I see. You want to link the justice of design to an operational framework, which can quantify the quality of use.
P: Wouldn’t that be good?
S: Perhaps the framework might merely help us to justify the decisions that have been made.
P: Well, that would be useful as well.
S: I’m not convinced of the benefits of rigid evaluative frameworks of use, as I’ve already said, without proper reflection. However, I agree that the effort needed in defining such a framework can be an enlightening learning experience and reveal implicit assumptions. I believe you have something more in mind to start the discussion.
P: I do.
P: I’m bothered by our conceptualizations of the quality of use. Nevertheless, I think we should employ them as a starting point. In interaction design, we usually employ two main frameworks to evaluate the quality of use. By the way, is it okay if we focus on interactive technologies and the design concepts within them? I think when we speak about use, that is the branch of design that has driven development.
S: Fine with me. For me, interaction is a broad category anyway.
P: Good.
S: So which are the frameworks you have in mind?
P: Usability and user experience. But I think something essential is wrong with them or missing. They don’t cover issues that are necessary to design for the justice of use, but I’m not quite sure where the problem lies.
S: There are other frameworks apart from those that might cover the missing aspects. Under the umbrella of human-centered design, usability and user experience are only two of many approaches. Others include participatory design focusing on user involvement with a view to ensuring a democratic agenda of design as well as design ethnography that addresses use as a grounded practice. Then there are approaches such as service design, transformation design, worth-centered design, and others. After the heyday of usability engineering in the 1990s, these approaches have criticized and departed from from usability.
P: I’m very familiar with this. The main lines of criticism include pointing out the rigid methodology and narrow scope of usability (Boehner et al. 2007; Löwren and Stolterman 2007; Redström 2008), the lack of attention to creative and innovative design processes (Norman 2004, 2005; Cockton 2008b, 2012a, 2012b), neither truly trusting users nor respecting them, and ignoring a range of motivations that drive users in their interaction with products (Hallnäs and Redström 2001; Hassenzahl and Tractinsky 2006). User experience has been mostly criticized for its conceptual vagueness and hedonism. But of all these approaches, usability and user experience are the ones that have aimed to quantify the quality of use. They are, or aim at being, practical. If we stick to them we can also keep our discussion more focused.1 They also have a strong authoritarian stance because they have standardized definitions that are clearly formulated. The normative documents of the alternative frameworks either don’t exist or are more difficult to agree on.
User with a multiple personality
S: Fine. Let’s keep focused and discuss usability and user experience.
P: Thanks.
S: Would you like to summarize how you understand usability?
P: Sure. In the 1980s, information and communication technology became increasingly commonplace at offices and production plants. The adoption of these new technologies and related work practices was not an easy process. The tasks, objectives, contexts, expectations, human capabilities, and system features were not aligned and productivity gains were difficult to achieve. Thus, the quality of use had to be addressed and conceptualized for practical product development purposes. The human–computer interaction community responded by outlining, elaborating, and formalizing the concepts of usability and user-centered design.2 Since then, usability has become a ubiquitous concept and is used in a range of ways (Hertzum 2010), sometimes referring to a discipline, to design and evaluation orientations, sometimes to the qualities of a system, and often to the quality of use (Keinonen 1998: 21–63).
S: The last one is what we’re interested in now.
P: Yes. It’s a contextual view of the interaction between human operators seeking to achieve goals with a system. This is the way usability is defined in the ISO 9241-11 standard, which has become the established default definition of usability (ISO 1998).3
S: Do you remember the exact wording?
P: Sure. According to it, usability is the “extent to which a product can be used by specified users to achieve specified goals with effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction in a specified context of use” (ibid.).
S: But you are not satisfied with usability.
P: I already mentioned how it has been criticized. It borrows from experimental psychology and cognitive science. It focuses on goal achievement and ignores human experience. It also omits creative and constructive design approaches (Jordan 2002; Cockton 2008b, 2012a, 2012b). It deals with measuring rather than improving. It is also difficult for users to assess usability, so its contribution to the commercial success of a product might only be marginal (Keinonen 1998).
S: And it does not say anything—or much—about the ethical quality of use.
P: I was coming to that …
S: Do you still think it helps us to take ethical stands?
P: Well, as I said I had this idea that our designs are just if they are of high quality in the actual contexts of use. But I understand that if we want to see usability through ethical lenses we need something more. At the very least, we need a new point of view.
S: Do you have any suggestions?
P: Not really, just a hunch that we might find something.
S: In that case we could perhaps look at whose interests the usability criteria—effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction—aim at serving and safeguarding.
P: Do you think that would help?
S: I don’t know, but we could give it a try—just a hunch.
P: Right. Well, the ISO 9241-11 standard doesn’t mention, not explicitly anyway, whose point of view it takes.
S: Then we need to find out ourselves. What do you think?
P: I believe it serves the interests of the industry and some say the interests of psychologists and other behavioral scientists (Cockton 2008b, 2012a, 2012b). By the way, I guess we could use ISO 9241-11 as our reference for usability without broadening the discussion beyond that.
S: Let’s be focused and stick to that.4 But back to your answer: I’m not referring to the interest groups behind the standard, but the more immediate stakeholders of the use of a product as implied by the standard—though at the end of the day they might be identical.
P: The standard doesn’t specify the stakeholder groups. It only mentions a generic user.
S: I think that the users’ roles are quite clearly described there, but we have not really thought much about them. However, they can be deduced from the criteria set out in the standard.
P: How?
S: Usability depends on effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction in goal-oriented use. Effectiveness includes the accuracy and the completeness of the results. Efficiency refers to the ratio of effectiveness and resources. Resources include financial resources, time, and effort. Efficiency and effectiveness are both desirable parameters of use (ISO 1998).
P: Right. User satisfaction is also one of those.
S: Let’s get back to that later. In whose interests, do you think, is effectiveness?
P: The users.
S: Do you think that using a product means that you can enjoy the results of the use?
P: Well, not necessarily.
S: Exactly. The results are valuable for those who own the results or have a right and an opportunity to enjoy them. Indirectly also those who are influenced by the results should care. The user, I mean the one who interacts with the product, doesn’t necessarily own the results or have the right to enjoy them.
P: For her the results can actually be meaningless.
S: Yes. The one who interacts and the one who enjoys the results are not necessarily the same individual. Let’s call the ones who own the results and can enjoy them beneficiaries, but exclude those who are influenced only indirectly. The beneficiaries, in their roles as such, don’t have any other link to the use apart from their interest in the outcomes that they might enjoy themselves or allocate forward, for instance, by exchanging them.
P: Let me think what this would mean.
S: Sure.
P: There might be, for instance, an instrument, say a clinical laboratory analyzer—I used to design those a while ago—operated by a nurse. The desirable results of the interaction are accurate, error-free, and complete analyses of a sample such as a patient’s blood. The substance concentrations need to be measured exactly and all the relevant substances need to be identified. These results are useful for the doctor diagnosing the patient, the patient who gets a correct diagnosis and is provided with the right care, and the owner of the healthcare center whose business depends on the results. If we broaden the network, we might identify even more beneficiaries. The different beneficiaries might have different interests concerning the results.
S: They might, and probably do, but let’s leave that for future discussions. What about the resources of use then?
P: The standard gives examples that include time, money, and effort allocated to use. Efficiency is calculated by dividing effectiveness by resources consumed. Thus, everything else being equal, increased resource consumption reduces usability.
S: Correct. In whose interest is it to save resources?
P: The user’s … I mean the user who owns the resources. Or perhaps the owner is actually not the user in the meaning of the word that we usually apply. I say those who own the resources are interested in efficiency.
S: True, and if I generalize a bit more we could say that these are the people to whom the resources are valuable and who can decide about the ways they are allocated: whether they are applied for a particular use, for another purpose …
P: … or saved for future use.
S: Exactly.
P: What should we call them: owners, possessors?
S: Let’s call these people sponsors. Their interests are limited to saving and efficiently consuming the valuable assets they own or manage.
P: In my clinical analyzer example, the sponsors would include the healthcare center, which has invested in the equipment, is perhaps leasing it, and pays the salaries of the nurses operating it. I think that the nurse can also be seen as a sponsor, as her effort is needed for its use. And obviously the health insurance company sponsors the use, as it pays the healthcare center’s invoice. The patient may end up paying too. The patient and the doctor can be seen as sponsors if we think that they invest their time into the use of the analyzer. Also, a taxpayer is a sponsor when we speak about public healthcare. There is a whole network of sponsors as there are beneficiaries.
S: True, they are a heterogeneous group, but all share an interest in efficiency of use. Is there anybody else who might have an interest in use?
P: The usability criterion of satisfaction addresses the viewpoint of the agent, who is the “person who interacts with the product” (ISO 1998). We already mentioned the nurse as a sponsor.
S: Let’s consider that person as a particular type of sponsor. ISO 9241-11 calls this person a user, but I propose we choose another term for clarity and call these agents operators.
P: Why not user?
S: Sponsors also “use” the system by fueling it with resources, and beneficiaries “use” it by harnessing and exploiting it for valuable outcomes. They are all users, but we are now trying to understand the different standpoints of users in their different roles.
S: Operators’ interests lie in being “free of discomfort and having positive attitudes towards the use” (ISO 1998). The operators in that role don’t sponsor the use or own the results, so they have limited—or, if we are strict and consistent, no—interest in the effectiveness and efficiency of the use. Of the three roles—sponsor, operator, and beneficiary—only the operator contributes human effort. Only she provides the effort, even though the sponsor might compensate her for it with a salary or some other form of compensation.
P: The operators of the clinical analyzer are the nurse who loads it with samples and inputs patient data, the maintenance and cleaning staff of the facility, the technical experts who install and calibrate the system, and perhaps the technicians who develop new analyses for the machine, and so on.
S: Yes. They interact, but neither sponsor nor enjoy the benefits.
P: I see that the three different roles make sense with the analyzer example, but when I’m exercising with my heart rate monitor there are no sponsors, beneficiaries, and operators—only me, using the gadget.
S: The three standpoints don’t need to refer to three separate agents.
P: You’re saying that the standpoints exist independent of particular agents holding them.
S: Yes. It’s possible that one single agent assumes all the roles, that is, becomes the beneficiary, sponsor, and operator. This is the case when individuals, like you, use their private time and independently possessed resources to sponsor their own interaction with a system. In such cases, agents have the right to own, enjoy, and apply the outcomes for their own purposes. The roles of the sponsor and the beneficiary often overlap, as the sponsor typically needs a rational reason to allocate resources to the use—one such reason is to obtain the results. This is the case in regular occupational settings where an employer invests in equipment and employees to use a system to create outcomes that belong to the employer. In the analyzer example, the healthcare center takes on both of these roles. Other combinations of the roles are possible. What is essential is that the three roles are needed to explicate the interests implied by usability as a quality of use. Of course our analysis of the roles is preliminary and still very rudimentary, but I think the basic setting is quite clear.
P: The emphasis that usability puts on sponsors’ and beneficiaries’ interests, although it’s not explicated in ISO 9241-11, is compatible with a use scenario in which information technology is applied in industry and business settings.
S: Yes.
Sponsors’ interest has been used as the indicator of the quality of use and we have thought that this is human-centered.
P: Putting it this way, usability appears to be equally investor-centered and user-centered as a measurement of the quality of use—or actually even more investor-centered.
S: It is. In fact, it’s quite peculiar that the interests of the sponsors and beneficiary have been used as the indicator of the quality of use and that we’ve thought of this as being a human-centered approach.
P: Money-centered design.
S: Something like that.
P: It would be much more human-centered if there was an assumption that the human operator owns the resources and results of the use.
S: There isn’t anything like that apart from the ISO standard saying that human effort as such matters, not only as the denominator of efficiency.
P: I’m starting to think that user experience is much more ethical and fundamentally more user-centered than usability. It focuses solely on the users and on their holistic experience.
S: Let’s move on to user experience. As you said, we’re starting to see why it’s been regarded as a necessary concept. How would you explain it?
P: In the 1990s, interactive technology began to penetrate domestic and leisure spheres. Consequently, usability as a framework for the quality of use became unsatisfactory.
S: Why?
P: I think that a big problem with usability, apart from other major issues such as the lack of user-centeredness, was its instrumental conception of use. Use was understood as something that creates value independent of the use itself. Usability ignored the way the interaction is subjectively perceived.
S: The usability criterion of satisfaction brings a subjective angle to usability evaluation.
P: Yes, but it didn’t provide the means to deeply and emphatically address the intrinsic, emotional, and hedonic values of use and push the idea of use beyond the achievement of practical goals. It didn’t help us to design products that people like to use.
S: I would add that its focus on resources and outcomes became problematic because allocating less time on a rewarding, internally motivating activity is hardly a relevant measurement of increasing quality of use (McNamara and Kirakowski 2006; O’Brien 2010). So something else was needed and people started to call that user experience.5 But before going any further, how would you define user experience?
P: This is a tricky one. Some have said the only thing that can be agreed on about user experience is that it is difficult to define (Law et al. 2009). The range of definitions and angles that have been suggested as belonging to user experience has made it a very inclusive and vague concept. They cover pleasure of use, long-term use including past experiences and future expectations, the social and collaborative nature of use, the aesthetics of interaction, and holistic and empathetic conceptions of users and use.6 It can be just “something desirable” (Law et al. 2009, italics original).
S: The conditions influencing user experience and the indicators of good user experience are difficult to define, but our approach might provide some clarification. User experience assumes a particular standpoint on the evaluation of the quality of use. Which is that?
P: The user’s.
S: Hmmm …
P: Sorry, I need to be more specific. The operator’s, but not exactly in the manner we just defined.
S: Yes. We used ISO 9241 part 11 to define usability so let’s continue with the newer part 210 of the same standard and use it as our reference for user experience.
P: Okay. As we said, user experience is difficult to define, but we need something. ISO is a tried-and-true standard. It’s a safe choice.
S: The definition is also very inclusive. Do you remember it?
P: Sure. According to it, “user experience” is a “person’s perceptions and responses resulting from the use and/or anticipated use of a product, system or service” and “includes all the users’ emotions, beliefs, preferences, perceptions, physical and psychological responses, behaviours and accomplishments that occur before, during and after use” (ISO 2010: clause 2:15).
S: Good. “User” in the standard refers to persons who themselves interact with the systems.
P: We have already identified an operator’s standpoint.
S: Introducing another is necessary to clarify the differences between usability and user experience. Let’s further specify the standpoint of the operators by assuming that they have extrinsic motivation to use a system. This is compatible with the definition of usability as a goal-oriented activity. Other standpoints derived from usability consider use as instrumental for achieving goals that are external to the use itself. So do the operators. Because of this the operator doesn’t get pleasure from the use of the device as such.
P: The nurse as an operator of the analyzer doesn’t get kicks from interacting with the device, but just wants to get the work done without any hassle. Her motivation is to help people to recover from whatever condition they have, or something else, but not the machine or interaction with it.
S: That’s the idea that I tried to express.
P: And for user experience we need another kind of user whose motivation is intrinsic.
S: Agreed. Let’s call her an experiencer. She interacts with a product because the interaction is rewarding and gives positive experiences. Or she has another reason for interacting with the product, but the experience is a welcome side effect that motivates her in some way.
P: I can operate and experience at the same time.
S: As I said, an agent can assume several standpoints. A person interacting with a product may be both an operator and experiencer depending on the phases of interaction, or maybe even simultaneously.
P: So, for explaining user experience two standpoints are needed, both of which belong to agents in immediate interaction with a product.
S: Yes. The different interests involved in the standpoints are related to the motivation for use and the value of interaction itself. For the operator, interaction creates discomfort that should be minimized by design, and for the experiencer it is rewarding, and good design provides more of that. The definition of user experience in ISO 9241-210 puts a clear emphasis on subjectivity and individualization of the quality of use, which is compatible with many other user-experience approaches. The experiencer is influenced by the resources spent and results achieved with a system, but these matter only insofar as the experiencer perceives and responds to them. The conception of user experience does not require positions of interest other than that of the operator and experiencer, and in the standard there are no explicit or implicit references to others whose interests would matter.
P: We need to assume that others’ opinions and reactions have an impact on the users’ responses.
S: We can also assume that their influence on the quality of use is channeled through the users’ holistic experiences. Co-experience (Battarbee 2004, Battarbee and Koskinen 2005) is a branch of user experience that emphasizes the social nature and reciprocal processes involved in generating experiential value in use. Still, I think, the angle can be seen as fundamentally subjective and individualistic.
P: What do you mean?
S: Take a situation in which others enjoy making fun of me or my gadget or my clumsy use of it. Even though I’m participating in a fun event that provokes laughter, it isn’t a positive experience for me.
P: They might also share your experience, build on it, and amplify it.
S: That can also be explained as the impact of the social context on the user’s individual experience.
P: You might be building a straw man argument. Another more socially oriented stand would be defendable, but let’s work on the individualistic interpretation.
S: Different stands can be taken. I agree.
User experience has narrowed the evaluation of the quality of use.
P: Let me now try to compare usability and user experience based on your approach. Compared to usability, on the one hand, user experience has narrowed down the number of standpoints to be considered by dismissing the viewpoints of the beneficiaries and sponsors—unless all these roles coincide within a single agent. On the other hand, user experience seems to be a utilitarian type of dimension. It includes everything that influences the experience and is thus more inclusive than usability. Everything can have an influence on an experiencer’s perception and interpretation.
S: That is a good summary. The advocates of user experience claim that usability is a part or an element of user experience and that user experience subsumes usability (Norman 2004; Hassenzahl 2008; Vermeeren et al. 2010). Now we’ve noticed that this is a misleading interpretation, because user experience acknowledges a different and more limited range of standpoints than usability. User experience does not recognize that sponsors’ and beneficiaries’ interests would matter.
P: Also the advocates of usability have tried to include user experience as one of its aspects by adding the experiencers’ standpoint into the newer definitions of usability (Bevan 2009, 2010).
S: This standpoint reveals that the claim would require essential redefinitions of usability and poses the danger of leading to internal inconsistency of the idea, because the goal orientation of use is so central to usability. But naturally developing bridging interpretations are always possible.
P: True.
S: So, now we have the stakeholders.
P: What next? Are we any closer to understanding the connections between quality of use and the justice of design?
S: You were interested in quantitative measurements and indicators of the quality of use. I had some doubts, but let’s go there now. I know that speaking about quantitative criteria turns many people off. I don’t believe that these qualities can be expressed in exact numbers, either, as I hinted earlier.
P: But when we say X is better than Y we’re already close to engaging in quantifying and that’s something that we wanted to be able to do.
S: You’re right. A driver for developing usability criteria has been to enable the presentation of quantitative hard facts for decision-making purposes. Quantifying user experience is not a completed mission. However, amounts matter in experiences too and so do the standpoints. So how would you value the quantitative criteria of use from the different standpoints?
P: What do you mean?
S: For a user in standpoint X, would more or less of quality Y be preferable?
P: Okay, I see. But isn’t this quite self-evident?
S: Let’s see. First, think about the operator.
P: Operators along with the sponsors appreciate the sparing use of resources. Their dream interaction would be as brief as possible and in which little conscious effort is required. Not touching the product or thinking about the use would be the best.
S: The experiencers’ view is different, isn’t it?
P: I believe experiencers who are internally motivated consider time and effort spent on use as something valuable. They would spend more if possible, because that is something they like to do.
S: Or to be more exact I would say that their voluntary use of resources can be seen as an indication of higher quality of use. If the experiencers have an opportunity to do so, they spend more resources on use: their resource expenditure becomes a positive indicator of the quality of use.
P: What about the results of use, then? I guess for experiencers, any results external to the use itself are secondary.
S: They might even consider results that the beneficiary is interested in as incentives necessary to externally motivate them to do something that they don’t want to do. But of course only the results they themselves experience matter to them.
P: Do you mean that if results are needed to motivate the experiencer, whose standpoint is supposed to be internally motivated, there’s something wrong with the experienced quality of use?
S: Yes. In that case incentives are needed. If I only play to win money, that doesn’t say anything good about the user experience of the game. If the game gets even worse, I’d need to win even more to continue playing. The results of the interaction become indicators of lower quality of use.
P: Though this sounds very counterintuitive.
S: I don’t think it’s counterintuitive. If the playing is rewarding, I’m ready to pay—and people indeed do. I don’t need to be paid. Thus, the pay—results I mean—can be used as a measurement of the unpleasantness of the activity. The results necessary to keep the interaction happening become an indicator of the experiencers’ aversion.
P: Quite a radical view.
Voluntary resource spending with decreasing incentives is an indicator of increasing user experience.
S: Thanks. It has its logic and it leads to a conclusion that voluntary resource spending with decreasing incentives is an indicator of increasing user experience.
P: You’re saying that user experience is the anti-usability.
S. I think it sort of is.
P: I haven’t heard that, even though there are quite a few ways to understand user experience.
S. I think it’s logical.
P: But then one product cannot be good in both respects.
S: In practice when dealing with real-world interactions, we need to assume that operators’ and experiencers’ interests swap during the use, with both internal and external motivations playing roles. This makes it difficult for us to see my point in practice.
P: Let’s leave the practicalities of analysis for later discussion. It seems that we have arrived at a conclusion: in the usability and user experience paradigms, the qualitative indicators of the quality of use are the inverse of each other. Still, the experts claim that one is a subscale of another. I’m no longer surprised that I’ve found those concepts confusing.
S: Me neither. But explaining our point can be difficult, because people are already accustomed to thinking about user experience as an aggregated criterion of subjective wellbeing, as something that’s always a desirable property of interaction. According to our approach it is not.
P: I feel that we’re still missing something essential and I’m afraid that it will further complicate the evaluation of the quality of use. I think that all these standpoints have a problem when it comes to using them in ethical evaluation.
S: What is that?
P: The cost–benefit analysis of usability evaluations and the subjectivity of user experience somehow look at use from very particular standpoints, don’t they?
S: They do.
P: The immediate interests of these stakeholders, I feel, are too strongly represented.
S: We tried to clarify those.
P: They seem selfish to me.
S: Well …
P: I feel we should also establish distance from the strong personal interests we identified. I don’t know if I’m right when I say I should have the possibility of complaining, or being happy, about the way others use technologies even if I’m not an experiencer, an operator, a sponsor, or a beneficiary. My opinion should still count. I think the five standpoints are too exclusive, only allowing the insiders to decide! According to usability and user experience, my opinion about you using something has no role if I don’t sponsor your use or enjoy the results of use myself, and even that was something that we realized only a while ago. It’s funny to put it this way, but I think that we tend to be too user-centered in user-centered design.
I’m not an experiencer, an operator, a sponsor, or a beneficiary but my opinion should count in the evaluation of the quality of use.
S: I agree that you should have a say. Even if you don’t use the design, your views should matter. Since the 1990s and the appearance of user experience in our vocabulary, interactive technologies have become increasingly ubiquitous in our society. There has been a lot of fuss about intelligent, ubiquitous, and this and that, but we’ve also faced plenty of actual changes in the ways services are provided and the kinds of technologies and practices people are expected to master. Interactive technologies are no longer used only in certain work practices. They are part of the service infrastructure that’s vital for everybody’s normal active way of life and wellbeing. Using interactive technologies is now almost a fundamental need.
P: It is a fundamental need.
S: I can accept even that. Non-use jeopardizes your autonomy and endangers your access to services that you’re entitled to have. This is something everyone should care about. We should care about how fundamental needs are satisfied. And I don’t want to make a sharp distinction between interactive technologies and other infrastructures.
P: Even though there’s a clear and recognized trend towards the ubiquitous spread of interactive technology, the design community has struggled to respond. I think our focus on user experience has made us concentrate on understanding the experiencer, and the discipline has turned towards private conceptions of the quality of use.
S: I agree.
P: But the impact of people using ubiquitous services is not a private issue.
S: That is exactly the point. The quality of use of ubiquitous interactive services and technologies can, of course, be evaluated and improved by applying the existing frameworks and related standpoints. The standpoints of beneficiaries, sponsors, operators, and experiencers all remain relevant; however, we ignore essential perspectives if we regard the use of designs either as an extremely individualistic matter based on the user experience or as being relevant for a limited number of stakeholders on the basis of usability. That is, we must not dismiss the interests of people who don’t have an immediate role in the use, but whose life is indirectly influenced.
P: Or maybe not even their life, but their beliefs and values.
S: That is important. Thanks.
P: But they need to have some type of attachment to the use. Don’t you agree? Otherwise their stands might be completely irrelevant. Prejudices based on ignorance are a bad foundation for opinions.
S: I think that they are affected and become involved through their membership in the practice within which the use takes place. Thus, when use has impacts on practices, the standpoint of each participant needs to be recognized and respected.
P: Participation is used a lot in design talk. Could we choose another term? And as I suggested they don’t need to participate. It’s bad enough that their values are violated. Our term should refer to someone who understands the design, cares about it, is close to it, and might be impacted by it, but has no direct or immediate role.
S: What do you suggest?
P: Perhaps a neighbor would be an apt name.
S: Neighbor?
P: Yes.
S: I like “neighbor.” Neighbor is someone who is close to you but not directly involved.
P: Neighbors need to tolerate each other and help when there is an obvious need.
S: But otherwise they respect privacy.
P: Good neighbors do.
S: The word has also the Christian meaning referring to anybody who might need your help.
P: You said that neighbors’ link to the use is via their interest and involvement in the practice. That sounds good, but why not speak about culture or something else that is even broader?
S: Staying within practice rather than extending to culture has the benefit that practice allows us to be specific with regard to particular value systems that might be important for design. I think that “practice” builds a tighter link between the neighbor and issues taking place within practice than “culture” does. Within sports, for example, not accepting doping makes sense, while in medical care, chemicals are accepted as a means to enhance or rehabilitate performance. A neighbor is someone who has an informed opinion about these types of practice-specific values. When use becomes prevalent—or even before that, when it leaves the margins and becomes a recognized part of a practice—the practice starts to change. The use of new technologies influences not only those who have an immediate interest in them, but all who are involved in the practice. A citizen has legitimate interests concerning societal development beyond the things that immediately touch upon her as beneficiary, sponsor, operator, or experiencer.
P: Taxpayers are sponsors.
S: You don’t lose your right to vote even if you don’t pay a cent of tax. The same should perhaps be the case with the use of technologies.
P: Probably. But what do you mean exactly by practice?
S: That is a discussion of its own, but I think I could refer to Alasdair MacIntyre again.
P: He helped us last time.
S: He did. He gives a definition that suits our purposes. He makes a point that virtues, which he considers the fundamental concepts in ethics, need to be positioned into particular practices for them to make sense. Wait a second, I have his definition somewhere here … Right, for him a practice is “any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved, are systematically extended” (MacIntyre 1981/2011: 218). Put simply, practices are doings and sayings with a certain level of coherence linked by understandings, procedures, and engagements.7 A practice has its standards and rules that a novice needs to learn, but those are not immutable. Competent actors within a practice are capable of adjusting the rules and re-evaluating the values of the practice. We already discussed the idea of virtue and its relationship with practice.
P: The definitions seem vague.
S: Trying to make them more focused would exclude too much.
P: I guess. But if we go back to the standpoint of a neighbor, could we call a neighbor also a non-user?
S: I wouldn’t say so. I think a good way to understand the idea of a neighbor is as an agent who belongs to a practice or has valid interests concerning the practice. A person who doesn’t interact with a system can be a neighbor, but so is one who interacts. “Neighbor” is a set including users and non-users. When I use a device, you are my neighbor; and when you use it, I’m your neighbor.
P: We are neighbors independent of our own use or non-use of the device.
S: I would say so. We are neighbors if others around us use it.
P: A neighbor’s interests must be different from the standpoints we’ve recognized this far. What can we say about them?
S: This takes us back to what you missed.
P: Ethics and justice.
S: I think so. A neighbor looks at the practice in a more general and impartial manner. Other standpoints are particular, with each defending their immediate benefits. Neighbors have knowledge and an interest in the development of the practice, but they don’t have a particular immediate interest in the practice with reference to the specific use under evaluation. Thus their interest is impartial, and they can address the fair and just development of the practice. Their position in the practice can be seen to be comparable to John Rawls’ (1971: 17–22) participants in the original position8 who decide about an institutional order behind the veil of ignorance.9 The veil blinds them to their position in the society and that is why their decisions need to ensure that the worst-off do alright, as they might belong to that group themselves.
P: Right. So the neighbors know how things work and they care about the practice, but they don’t care about their particular interests. So we could see them as experts of a sort who distance themselves from the issue and decide rationally by weighing the options.
S: I don’t think that neighbors would be experts in the traditional sense of the word. For example, in the practice of healthcare, the participants with interest and insight include the patients and family members as well as the doctors and nurses.
P: Don’t they occupy the standpoints we listed before?
S: Sorry. You’re right. A healthy citizen of the community can be concerned about her health services. She is a neighbor.
You recognize a neighbor by her knowledge, concern, responsibility, and impartiality.
P: I’m not sure if I understood that correctly. I’ll try to summarize: I would say that you recognize a neighbor by her knowledge, concern, responsibility, and impartiality.
S: There is no correct or incorrect. We merely try to elaborate.
P: True. You also said that neighbors’ interest in the use of a device is mediated by the ways its use changes the practice. This too sounds a bit abstract. Can you explain?
S: I don’t think it’s so abstract. Let me repeat the basic rationale.
P: Please.
S: Emerging use is influenced and even driven by new designs and can change the value of skills, social capital, societal positions, commitments, and possessions within a practice. Several old professions and practices have disappeared with the emergence of technologies, and several old habits have been transformed into different new forms. The opportunity space within the practice can also change, allowing people to make more or fewer choices. Human value and dignity related to the practices can change or the appreciation of the whole practice can grow or be corrupted.10 The conception of what health is changes along with the technologies, allowing us to diagnose new health risks. Neighbors are interested in these types of developments for which the use of new designs is instrumental.
P: I see, but I still believe that this standpoint is a bit elusive and that neighbors’ interests are easily overlooked.
S: That’s why the responsible designer has to consider those especially carefully. Other stakeholders have much better possibilities to look after their own benefits. As a participant, a neighbor is weaker—or at least she might be—and we should protect her interests.
P: The usability and user-experience paradigms don’t help us to do that.
S: Not much.
P: We started with usability and user experience and anticipated that, as concepts, they are not broad enough for proper evaluation of the quality of use—now that we’re discussing neighbors and practices, I’m starting to feel that we should leave usability and user experience behind. We are moving somewhere else, to different kinds of discussions. This is no longer about the quality of use.
S: Neighbors’ interests definitely have already been covered in many other discussions, but I’d like to understand the neighbor as one of our standpoints that should be consulted when we evaluate the quality of use. I know that the neighbors’ angle overlaps and intertwines with several other discussions, theories, and academic traditions that are capable of positioning the use of products and technologies in broader contexts of meaning, development, and values. To mention a few, these include the ecological approach to design (Kaasinen and Norros 2007), actor network theory (Latour 2007), cultural historical activity theory, and social shaping of technology (Bijker, Hughes, and Pinch 1989). There is also growing interest in applying the frameworks of distributional justice and societal development to design. Discussions within interaction design and usability have also started to deal increasingly with social responsibility (Cooper 2010; Melles, de Vere, and Misic 2011) and values of design (Friedman and Freier 2005; Friedman, Kahn, and Borning 2006; Borning and Muller 2012).
P: Are we able to say anything new?
S: We can say that neighbors’ standpoints are not yet a recognized part of the frameworks of the quality of use in a way that would be somehow compatible with usability and user experience. These are concepts that aim to directly help designers. Discussions about use and societal development tend to be descriptive rather than normative, and holistic rather than operational. Well, I’m probably generalizing too much. But the aim of our discussion is to seek out simplicity among complexity, even though occasionally we come close to doing the opposite. By linking the more generic interests of fair development of practices to usability and user experience, we might also be able to say something about the interpretation of the quantitative criteria of the quality of use. We might be able to contextualize usability and user experience.
P: It seems to me that the criteria for evaluating use from the neighbors’ point of view merge with generic criteria applicable to any societal development and any progress within a practice. I mean there might not be anything particular to evaluate in the quality of use from the neighbors’ point of view. Neighbors are just interested in good practices.
S: True. However, we should note that the criteria for usability and user experience are similar.
P: What do you mean?
S: Efficiency and effectiveness, accuracy and completeness are generic criteria for evaluating any systems with or without interaction, human agents, and technical components. A person’s perceptions and responses, which comprise the core of user experience according to the ISO standard, are also generic criteria that can be applied in assessing the impact and value of any kind of stimulus. The object of evaluation needs to be added to employ them as criteria for usability and user experience. Only adding “to be used” and “resulting from use or anticipated use” makes the usability and user-experience definitions specifically applicable to the quality of use (ISO 1998). Correspondingly, the neighbors’ interest can be expressed in generic terms. These terms become criteria for evaluating the quality of use, when we use them for that purpose.
P: I see.
S: Good.
P: The standpoint approach illuminates the changing interpretations of quantitative indicators of use. What about the neighbors’ point of view? Is it better to invest more or less resources in the use of the design? Is it better to achieve more or fewer results?
S: I was looking forward to these questions.
P: You can trust me.
S: I know. As I said, the neighbors’ interests are linked to the development of a practice. Consequently, the neighbors wish—assuming they are rational agents—that the uses of the design within the practice would be developed in a way that increases the worth of the practice. Good things should be spread to benefit more people. The practice should become more appreciated. Perhaps we could speak about internal goods, as we did last time.
P: But how can we build a connection between the use of a piece of technology within a practice and the appreciation of the practice? Isn’t money the standard measurement of appreciation?
S: It can be used in some cases. We can examine how the monetary value of entities within the practice changes with the increasing use of technology. However, money is not the only measurement of our appreciation and sometimes it may change how we appreciate things (Sandel 2009, 2012). I think the answer is quite simple, even simpler than money. If the use of a product increases the appreciation of a practice, its use should be promoted.
P: So?
S: A neighbor who is interested in the development of the practice wishes that the type of use that results in greater appreciation for the practice would become more prevalent. A neighbor wants to see the design being used more frequently in ways that improve the practice.
P: And the neighbor wishes that those uses that corrupt the practice would be discontinued. That is clear by now, but—sorry to insist—can we establish a connection between use and the quantitative indicators?
S: Resources and results.
P: Yes, though there might be others.
S: Everything that we measure can easily fall into the two categories. For the neighbor, resources or results as such are not important, but they both serve as indicators of the amount of use. The amount of use can be measured in terms of resources or results and increases in either. It may also be an indicator that the neighbor can use to identify desirable development. For a neighbor, resources and results both indicate the amount of use, which is good or bad in its own right and doesn’t depend on the mutual relationship of resources and results.
Resources and results both indicate the amount of use, which is good or bad in its own right.
P: So it doesn’t matter if we measure how much one consumes or gains. This is a bit strange.
S: Consider exercising for physical health or the learning of new skills.
P: Yes.
S: In both, the time and effort allocated to the use can be seen as resources on the one hand, but on the other hand they are also outcomes or so closely related to the outcomes that they cannot really be separated.
P: I don’t get it yet.
S: The 45 minutes I allocate to exercising when I go jogging is a resource that I could’ve used for something else, but through the activity of exercise it becomes a result and an achievement. The 45 minutes of jogging time is the result of my effort and the resource I used for the exercise. That time allocation thus becomes a 45-minute achievement that makes me feel good both physically and mentally. When I’m sweating out there with my exercise gear, the resource and the result are one thing. When I’m using a heart rate monitor during my exercise, there is a link to the quality of use of interactive technologies. If the heart rate monitor makes me exercise more, the neighbor wishing for good health for all becomes satisfied. When a child interacts with educational software, the more time he spends with it, the better.
P: Shouldn’t learning be efficient?
S: We can think that efficient learning would be the goal and thus usability the best evaluation framework. From its standpoint as a sponsor, the Ministry of Education wants learning to be efficient and incentivizes educational institutions accordingly. But this misses much of the point: learning is not only an instrumental activity to achieve goals that are independent of the activity itself. Learning is also valuable as such, and doing it is what makes humans human.
P: We don’t learn merely to achieve something but because learning itself is valuable.
S: Yes.
P: We can speculate about the idea that future technologies will enable us to download knowledge and skills into our nervous system (Nozick 1974: 44).
S: That would be a major change in our educational system and our value system. The appreciation of knowledge and skills would collapse and perhaps the whole idea of what it is to be human would change radically. Thus, the results of learning are meaningful and increase the value of use, but this is equally true of the time allocated to learning. Both the time and the results can be used as positive indicators. If I evaluate my use of the heart rate monitor and a child’s use of educational software from the sponsor’s angle, I would appreciate efficient learning and short, intensive exercise. If I look at these from the experiencers’ point of view, I would appreciate the commitment and effort fostered by rewarding interaction. As a neighbor, the amount of use is what I’m interested in and both resources and results can be used as indicators. Any indication that the use of technologies increases physical exercise and studying would be good.
P: Hmm … I’m still struggling with this.
S: The concept of using resource spending as an indicator of good development is not unique. Higher expenditure of the gross national product on education, for instance, is considered good, even though strictly speaking that doesn’t tell us anything about the quality and impact of the education, as it might actually indicate that the schooling system is inefficient. There are other examples where resource consumption is interpreted as results. In many of these cases, consumption is a substitute for the measurement of the output, which might be too difficult to measure or communicate.
P: Do you mean cases like when we habitually believe that the power rating of a vacuum cleaner in terms of kW tells us how effective it is at sucking up dirt? However, it just indicates how much energy it consumes.
S: Exactly. All clear now?
P: A bit clearer, I guess. But do you agree that a neighbor’s perspective requires a name of its own? It’s clearly a different take on the quality of use.
S: If we’d like to spread the message, we need to brand it. To this end, we also need methods so that the neighbors’ standpoint can be taken into consideration, as we discussed before. If we only want to clarify our own thoughts, branding with names and rituals wouldn’t be that necessary.
S: I’m quite happy to speak about the neighbor’s standpoint. But I also realize that our choice of terminology associates our approach with others’ thoughts and previous work.
P: Is any of the prior literature relevant?
S: I think professor Gilbert Cockton (2006, 2008a, 2012a, 2012b) has criticized narrow usability and user-experience focused conceptualizations of the targets and mission of human–computer interaction in a way that shares our concerns in many respects, or we share his. He has looked for a way to express how we could aim for the “lasting value of enduring outcomes.” His (2006) answer is to focus on what is worthwhile for users and to concentrate on developing “things that will be valued, as manifested in people’s motivation, individually or collectively, to invest one or more of time, money, energy and commitment.” He (ibid.) says that worth-centered design aims at “designing things that will motivate people to buy, learn, use or recommend an interactive product, and ideally most or all of these.”
P: I think he speaks about experiencers.
S: I’d say that even though worth-centered design addresses what we would call experiencers’ motivations, it aims also to acknowledge more comprehensively what makes products meaningful for people rather than consider designers’ work as a technical discipline to make interactions instrumentally good for the purposes of questionable utility or passing pleasure. Thus there are commonalities between worthwhile designs and the impartial neighbors’ interests. Both aim at solutions that look for value that goes beyond the immediate experience of interaction and that is not tied to particular immediate interests related to use. Instead of increasing the conceptual confusion by introducing more new terms, the neighbors’ interest could be considered as an alternative approach to understand and characterize the worth. Consequently, the quality of use that resonates with the neighbors’ interests is the worth of use.
P: Am I over-interpreting if I say that you’re proposing a model for evaluating the quality of use that includes three components, which are usability, user experience, and worth of use?
S: I think you are. I’m suggesting that we should include in our arsenal a framework that addresses the standpoint of an impartial but informed evaluator. I also want to say that none of the three frameworks we have now discussed subsume any other. Their differences can be articulated by paying attention to the different standpoints they represent. Usability aims at safeguarding the interests of sponsors, beneficiaries, and operators, being essentially a cost–benefit analysis of use. It’s a relevant angle in goal-oriented use where interaction is instrumental. User experience focuses attention on the private interpretation of quality and addresses operators’ and experiencers’ points of views. It’s especially relevant when use is internally motivated and the subjective angle matters the most. Worth of use is the evaluative angle of an impartial neighbor. She is interested in the development of the practice. If we say that these three are the angles that create a model, we should also say that they are enough. Thus far we’ve only made the claim that they are needed and do not subsume each other. There might still be other aspects to consider.
P: One single standpoint, I believe, is unlikely to be enough for a proper evaluation of use. This leads to a dilemma in the interpretation of the quantitative indicators of the quality of use.
S: Correct. We need to consider several conflicting standpoints. Usability increases in step with the growth in amount of results and the decrease in resource expenditure. For user experience, a greater resource allocation is a positive indicator of quality and the results can be seen as compensating incentives and indicators of lower user experience. For the worth of use, both the increase in resource consumption and results signify higher levels of quality.
P: The difficult issue is not so much to correctly measure the results and the resources consumed, but to choose the standpoint and interpret the numbers accordingly.
S: We’re very used to efficiency thinking and also accept pleasure-oriented thinking. We consider these self-evidently dominating models.
P: Can I get back to something we dealt with only in passing?
S: Sure.
P: Proposing that the amount of use would be the criterion for evaluating the quality of solutions seems overly simplistic.
S: There is a condition. The neighbor has to believe that the use increases the appreciation of the practice or some essential aspects within the practice. It should promote the internal goods, and perhaps the external to some extent. An informed decision must be made about the significance of the indicators before their use for evaluative purposes makes sense.
P: Usability and user experience are much simpler.
S: They are not. The condition is equivalent to the assumptions we need to make when evaluating usability. When we evaluate usability with efficiency and effectiveness we assume that the resources spent on use are scarce, transferable, and valuable, but we seldom explicitly discuss these assumptions. If time is of no value, rapid interaction is meaningless. If I’m stuck on a desert island or retired, with a lot of time on my hands, I don’t need to be efficient. Unless the assumptions about the value of resources are true, saving resources would make no sense and would not be a meaningful indicator. So I don’t think that the worth of use simplifies more than usability. Actually by addressing these assumptions it simplifies less.
When we evaluate usability we assume that the resources spent on use are scarce, transferable, and valuable.
P: Maybe I’m insisting again, but how does the neighbor know that use increases the value of the practice?
S: That’s a very good question.
P: Thanks.
S: You’re welcome. We need to trust the neighbors to have relevant and appropriate criteria.
P: We should be able to say more.
S: Well, the likely candidates for the neighbor to look at include protection from harm, the autonomy of agents, the freedom and capability of individuals to achieve what they consider worthwhile whether that is their wellbeing and happiness or goals meaningful for other reasons, human worth and dignity, everybody’s equal right to be dealt with as an end and not only as a means, and the more instrumental interpretations of these terminal values of fair and just life and development.
P: Big issues.
S: Indeed.
P: People tend to disagree on how to interpret them.
S: There are different opinions. This doesn’t mean that the value of practices cannot be assessed, but it means that an absolute answer everybody can agree on might be beyond the opportunity horizon.
P: Fortunately when we evaluate the quality of use we have a tradition of ignoring the requirement for unanimous agreements. Usability is defined as something that depends on the user, context, and goals of use. User experience is fundamentally subjective.
S: That’s true and that’s why we can cut ourselves some slack and accept that if we are to expand the evaluation space of use to cover the impacts of use on a practice, we don’t need to combine this with major, or any, developments in our ability to generalize evaluation results. We can accept that what is good for a practice depends on the particular practice we deal with and that there are conflicting opinions. Thus, we could stop here and just say that the way to evaluate the worth of use is to ask neighbors to choose between “like” and “dislike.”
P: That is something people know how to do these days. But perhaps we should still try to make this more understandable. Can we take an example to illustrate what the impartial neighbors’ angle might look like?
S: I don’t have a good one in mind. Do you?
P: The other day I had a discussion with a few architects and spatial designers about virtual reality systems and how great they would be in design. They weren’t very enthusiastic. We didn’t agree on much. I think they were more bothered about design practice and its values than usability or experience. Would that be a suitable case? 11
S: Sounds like a good example. However, there is one issue—your discussion addressed design as a practice of use. We obviously need to address design as a practice that proposes solutions for use. So we might get confused about the double role of design.
P: I hope we manage to deal with the issue. We might also learn something about the internal good of design. We spoke about that last time, but not in any great depth.
S: You’re right.
P: So how would an architect or a spatial designer answer if we were to ask the following questions: Virtual reality systems have become increasingly usable and feasible. If they become more commonplace, how would that change architectural practice? Do you consider the changes welcome?
S: That’s as good a formulation as any.
S: So what kinds of answers could we get?
P: Shall I just give you an example of something that they said?
S: Please.
P: Well, someone said that state-of-the art systems, virtual reality caves and all those, are expensive. Details matter, so mediocre visualizations do more harm than good.
S: Right. I think that what he or she would actually be worried about is not related so much to the technology itself, but the way bigger investments might change the profession. Do you agree?
P: You might be over-interpreting, but basically I think I agree. We value the ideal of a free independent profession. However, the necessity of making greater investments in modeling technology or the like might curtail our freedom, or in fact already has. We’re forced to accept any commission that comes our way to cover our expenses.
S: So what would the neighbor say?
P: The neighbor might be worried about the threat the technology poses to the quality of design in general, the freedom of her lifestyle as a designer.
S: She might also have the ideological conviction that liberty is the most fundamental principle in ensuring that knowledge in society is used in the most appropriate way for development and everybody’s good (Hayek 1969/2011). If technology or anything else for that matter coerces us to deviate from a path of our own choosing, that would in the long run be harmful for the practice and society. In addition, the answer deals or can be seen as dealing with the changing motivation to work—the necessity of investing in tools makes the practice more externally driven, as earning more money becomes a must.
P: Motivations are key concepts in user experience.
S: Yes, but motivations are normally used to explain why people use certain artifacts. This answer deals with the motivation to design at a more general level and the foreseeable changes in motivations as a result of the adoption of technologies. Internal motivation might be replaced by an external motivation. If the emerging uses of technology change the reasons why we engage in a practice, that is a foundational change and the neighbor would definitely react to that.
P: Yes.
P: I don’t remember, but how about I share my own thoughts on the matter? Is that okay?
S: Yes.
P: I’m not too excited about the new digital systems, but when we design with them the results are more useful for our customers. The systems keep us on schedule, my colleagues are happy that they have secure jobs, and the city is happy that we can provide them with exact documentation for use in their decision-making on building permits. All these have more weight than my personal preferences. I know everybody in the business does the same, so in this respect the systems provide us with no competitive advantage. All in all, I think that adopting new technology represents a natural way forward for any design practice.
S: You mentioned your own attitude as an evaluation criterion, but mostly you spoke about the utility of applying technologies.
P: Sounds like usability?
S: There’s a difference between what you said and usability. Usability focuses on the efficiency and effectiveness of the use of products, but you spoke about the outcomes and utility of design practice that is influenced by the use of the new technology. Your rationale is utilitarian, as you compared the happiness of the many against the unhappiness of the few, namely yourself, and came to the conclusion that greater accumulated happiness justifies the adoption of these artifacts. Unlike the previous answer, which addressed the internal good of architecture in MacIntyre’s terms, you spoke about external goods and changes that might make the practice more profitable to all.
P: Your turn.
S: Fine, I’ll try. What about a designer who says that she’s worried about systems that make design look very easy, allowing uneducated amateurs to enter the business.
P: And why is she worried about that?
S: The quality of design is one concern.
P: That’s a noble worry.
S: But I think that her worries about the internal good of the practice overlaps with concerns about the external good as well … maybe I’m a bit shallow. But another worry might be that the new entrepreneurs have to compete with price, which eventually puts pressure on experienced and established professionals to sell their work cheap. Or at least they are concerned about this.
P: They are still protected by the architects’ union and construction law. But I see the rationale.
S: Unions guarantee their members benefits and to protect them they have control mechanisms that screen entry into the practice. New technologies can break through the old defences of practices, open and democratize innovations, and consequently redistribute the good within the expanded practice. Our respondent might have only been speaking for herself, but her opinion might be at least distantly connected to discussions about distributional justice. Perhaps she believes in the process of entitlement (Nozick 1974), which allocates goods to those who have acquired them, like established professionals have acquired a monopoly of their domain in a way they consider just. The new technologies might redistribute and democratize the opportunities to design and allow anybody who wants designs and needs designs to make their own.
Any other angles we can come up with?
P: I know a senior architect who is really old-school. His studio is an amazing piece of architecture in itself. I believe he would say that he enjoys the low-tech atmosphere of his architecture studio. I feel that his drawing boards and paper link him to the tradition of architecture. His architects use computers in his studio, of course, but he doesn’t think it would be appropriate for him to install more gadgets. They even try to keep all their current digital tools out of sight.
S: That is a good angle. A practice is also about the premises, ambiance, and the ways people organize their material environment. It’s about where and how they want to be. Your senior architect feels that new technology is alien in the environment, which is essential in the way it defines the practice. The studio is where architecture is created and where the architect feels at home. Maybe having his own studio was the driving motivation for him to become an architect and architecture is just a necessary activity that enables him to afford the studio and perhaps the lifestyle that comes with it.12 The activity can be secondary to the ambiance of the studio and to his identity. The studio is essential to his understanding and love of architecture. The values of the practice are subjective and he defines them in an existentialist manner. This being the case, all the things that enter the sacred space of the practice need to share the spirit of the studio.
P: It sounds strange that he would practice architecture to have a studio, and not the other way round.
S: We need to challenge our assumptions of causality.
P: These discussions make me realize that. And thanks for that. Do we still have something to add to the neighbor’s list of concerns?
S: Yes, I think so. Based on what my students do, my next answer would be something along the lines of I like seeing how the younger guys play with the technology. The results aren’t always that convincing, but I like their excitement. And if the systems inspire them to stay longer in the studio to try out the technology, regardless of what they’re working on, I believe that’s time well spent.
P: It’s fun.
S: It is. And I agree that spending time with a system that engages students in a playful activity is time well spent. The use as such is not meaningful, but their playful spirit and extended presence in the studio are. Young designers and architects have alert minds. They’re always working on serious projects for which they need to find solutions and they all dream about creating a breakthrough design with which they’ll win their first big competition and gain recognition. This search combined with coincidental play that is enabled and stimulated by the new technology—whose use has not yet been established as a routine practice—might make it possible for them to find something they weren’t looking for and recognize its value once discovered.
P: You’re speaking about serendipity.
S: Yes.
P: Do you have more answers in mind?
S: I seem to be warming up to the subject. I started to think about my ex-colleague. He thought that practitioners have more in common now that they are playing with new digital toys. It might be that designers and architects work on commissions that are so confidential, or something, that they can’t talk much about their own work. They tend to get kind of isolated. But he said that he now gets calls from colleagues every day because they know he’s ahead in using state-of-the-art technology. He’s not a guru or anything like that but he’s happy to share what he knows. The new technology became a shared novel interest within the community and it created a new role for him as a local expert.
P: Technology changed their social roles.
S: It created a shared topic of interest and new roles. Actually my colleague is in a wheelchair and therefore faces challenges in his social life, as he isn’t able to participate in many of the activities his colleagues engage in. This new interest created a layer of expertise, which equalized the practice for him and made him socially more included. Thanks to the new technology, he can be what he wants to be and do what he wants to do.
P: Nice story.
S: Let’s squeeze out a couple more. I have a hunch that we’re still missing something.
P: Are you sure?
S: Quite.
P: Fine. What about this: Quite a few of us working in design, media, and architecture are artistic in our attitudes and interests, but our profession also has a technical and practical side. The technical things need to be done properly and correctly too. I believe that little by little the use of computers helps people to understand that. The use of the technology requires exactness or new skills of some sort. In a way this takes us somewhat closer to engineering, but the new tools enable us to take this step in a natural and good way, I think. Slightly different kinds of people are now becoming interested in our practice than in the past. Perhaps students will take minors in computing and so on. The new tech will attract the kind of people we haven’t had many of in the past and who we need.
S: That is again a new angle. It deals with professional competence and the identity challenge of design being technical and artistic, creative and systematic, surprising and trustworthy. Without the ambivalence and oscillation between these, design wouldn’t be design and the balance is a result of an ongoing negotiation. The ideals of design tell us in each situation what is enough and what would be too much. That said, all the components of the practice redefine our ideals. Our new tools inevitably have an influence on the nature of the practice. This can attract new kinds of people into the design field and inform the choices they make in becoming what they think is a good practitioner.
P: Scary!
S: Natural.
P: I have one more.
S: Good.
P: Especially with private customers, architects sometimes encounter the problem that the clients cannot really read the plans or even renderings and become annoyingly nervous about the project. In these cases virtual modeling would probably be useful in really helping them see what the designers mean, even at the beginning of the project when they propose a concept for further elaboration. What I see as a challenge here is that I wouldn’t like to be so firmly committed to the first visualizations I share with my clients.
S: Why?
P: Sketchy visualizations give us more leeway and it’s also obvious to the clients that the pictures are not final.
S: I understand the clients’ concerns.
P: But I simply don’t like the idea that the rest of the project would only involve realizing the image that was shared in the beginning. That’s not design. The clients should trust designers. I have another example that might be similar to the previous one.
S: Yes …
P: Technologies make it too easy to create photorealistic visualizations of your design, and complete those with decorative elements—however, in spite of how realistic these images look, they aren’t really real. I’ve heard someone suggest that they should actually be forbidden in competitions. Plans and elevations don’t lie, and reading them is what an architect needs to master.
S: Great. I don’t agree with those opinions, but that doesn’t matter. They are good examples of worries related to the changing of the profession, and they represent different aspects from the ones we’ve already recognized. The first is a fundamental one. It assumes that the new technology will change the way designers are used to working. Technology that enables early realistic visualizations might end up dominating the process, especially if such visualizations are submitted to clients for their approval. Design would lose something that is characteristic to it and which we also consider very important: namely the reflective process, where options are kept open and the elaboration of solutions creates new challenges and opportunities throughout the process. Also, many designers feel that overly precise early visualizations are dishonest. Then the opposite angle …
P: The clients’ angle?
S: Yes. The clients need to feel secure when they’ve commissioned a house building project—which, for private clients, is typically the most expensive project of their lives. The new technology has an impact on how architecture can respond to their needs. If these needs are considered fundamental, they set norms for architectural practice. What is a fundamental need is not an absolute, but always depends on what is possible and reasonable. Thus, the level of need satisfaction depends on the available means. The weaker stakeholder in architectural dialogue, the layman client, should perhaps be given a maximum sense of security about the project outcome as soon as technology enables that.
P: This explanation goes close to looking at beneficiary’s and sponsor’s interests.
S: If you think that the client should expect predictability, the practice would have to change.
P: What about my second answer?
S: Right. The new artifacts might deskill architects, so that they are unable to read and create two-dimensional representations and then, based on them, mentally construct clear images that might in some essential respects be truer than the virtual reality representations.
P: Digital systems don’t deskill designers, but allow and stimulate us to develop skills that are more relevant than the older skillset.
S: You think that competence builds competence and that there are no trade-offs, which actually reminds me of a colleague (Heikkinen 2013) who wrote a dissertation about developing his own design approach through building interactive design tools. We could say that the use of technology can be a fundamental way to generate new insight into design. The use and development of technology became a vehicle for reflection and change.
P: Not all of us turn new technologies into vehicles of personal learning.
S: No. Only some do.
P: Do you remember what we managed to gather?
S: No.
P: Let me try to recap. I think we mentioned the following:
•Practitioners’ freedoms and motivations to work and be engaged;
•Money and fame created by and distributed within the practice;
•Democracy and opportunity to enter and influence the practice;
•Ambiance and aesthetics of the premises and conventions of the practice;
•Engagement, creativity, and serendipity in collaboration;
•Inclusivity, affiliation, and social capital that the practice provides and enables;
•Competence development opportunities;
•Honesty of values and behavior in the practice;
•Safety, security, and trust inherent in the practice;
•Self-esteem and self-reflection opportunities.
S: Good summary.
P: Thanks. The answers seem to cover almost anything.
S: We need to remember that those are only the points we remember. Memory tends to be fallible, mine more than yours, and it’s also swayed by imagination. However, I think that these points demonstrate that the impact of use on a practice is, as you say, very versatile and comprehensive. In our short analyses, or starting points of analyses, we found several links to theories that can be used to understand the changes. These include theories about ethics and morals, about development and social change, theories of distributive justice and fair institutional order, theories about the particular practice and its values and conventions, and also those theories that usability, user experience, and worth of use have in common, but which can be used to position, for instance, the idea of motivation and competence somewhat differently than is done within usability and user-experience frameworks.
P: Including the neighbors’ standpoint is really demanding.
S: Yes it is. It broadens not only the topics of discussion, but also the choices of theories and alternatives for conceptualizing good use.
P: May I still return to your definition of “neighbor.”
S: Sure.
P: You said that the neighbors are impartial, but in our answers they had clear interests and strong opinions.
S: The neighbors are not impartial when it comes to the practice. They have their standpoints, which make their insights justified and meaningful, but the way they reflect on the changes in the practice doesn’t depend on their immediate role with respect to the use of an object. Or perhaps it would be more correct to say that their reflections go beyond immediate experience and utility. In our examples, the architects and designers also sponsor the use of the design and benefit from its use, and experience it, but are capable of reframing what they see from those positions into a more generic perspective, that of the change of the practice.
P: Basically a neighbor is someone for whom the practice is meaningful.
S: That is a good approximation. And if we follow that interpretation, we could define the criterion of good design as a neighbor’s answer to the question: would the design improve something that is meaningful and worthwhile for you? This assumes interest and relevance, projects a liberal interpretation of who qualifies as a neighbor in a practice, leaves all the imaginable dimensions in which things can be improved open, and doesn’t fix things to instrumental goods or first-hand experience. Furthermore, this is subjective in the respect that it’s the recipient’s opinion that matters, but not necessarily her subjective experience only, and it’s not about responding to predefined briefs but about discussing what is good on the basis of the terms set by the neighbors, the practice, and the design.
P: That is very open-ended.
S: Yes.
P: Do you think we could build a questionnaire for measuring the worth of use and its impact on a practice in the same vein as there are formalized and validated questionnaires for measuring usability and user experience?
S: No.
P: But based on our fictive examples, such a questionnaire would probably have scales such as economic impacts, impacts on ambiance and environment, impacts on social structures, impacts on ideological stands and identity, impacts on the capability of the practice to recreate itself, safety and trust, and probably also a number of other scales that could be derived from additional fictive and eventually factual samples of value statements and their correlations.
S: The value of building such an inquiry would lie in the process of forcing us to clarify and explicate the dimensions typically having a role in neighbors’ decisions with respect to the development or corruption of practices. As a practical and operational instrument, the questionnaire might have a marginal role. Because each practice is valuable on its own terms and not on the terms of another practice, a generic questionnaire would most likely fail to be a useful tool for designers. My verdict might be biased by my belief that design is also creative in the use and configuration of tools and processes. But as I said already and as we have discussed, a method would allow us to act out the principle of including an impartial neighbor’s angle. That would be the real benefit of having a questionnaire.
P: I worry that if we don’t suggest tools and means for evaluation, the evaluation from the neighbor’s perspective will remain a very interpretative process. It’s very different from usability, which is well-framed, clearly defined, and operationalized. Even user experience seems to be easy to evaluate.
S: I don’t think they are so clear either.
P: Why do I think they are?
S: We are just more used to them. We discussed this already, but maybe it’s good that I repeat my point as it summarizes the main message of our discussion: Usability and user-experience based evaluations of the quality of use are conceptually clear only in those cases in which we know that a limited cost–benefit analysis or users’ subjective perception is valid or even the most valid angle of evaluation. When we know that use has a positive impact on the development of a practice, then the evaluation from the point of view of an impartial neighbor in the practice also becomes conceptually clear. We can use the resources allocated to use and the results of the use as simple, easy-to-measure quantitative indicators. Also, evaluations based on usability and user experience become questionable if we, as we should, seriously first ask whether the paradigms are valid.
P: Thanks. And how would you now answer the question I asked to start this discussion?
S: And that was …?
P: How should we evaluate the quality of use in a just manner?
S: Good. May I throw the question back to you?
P: Well, taking a user-centered approach starts to seem weird to me, because there is very little of anything that we could call centered, focused, or convergent in the idea of a user who is a team. The user is fragmented, and in internal disagreement. The ethically important incarnation of a user is the neighbor—or perhaps the neighbor is the forgotten and ignored one, but we cannot meaningfully speak about neighbor-centered design, because the neighbor is anywhere but in the center. It would be like speaking about periphery-centered design.
S: Metaphors can be contradictory.
P: Sure?
P: Well, then I think I would simply say “design for the neighbor’s peace of mind.” We covered many things, but this is where we arrived.
Design for the neighbor’s peace of mind.
1Practitioner and Scholar exclude participatory design, collaborative design, and end-user and lead-user innovation from their discussion. These branches of design have a more democratic and equalitarian agenda than usability and user experience. They solve some of the justice-related issues that will be discussed in this and the following dialogues. Practitioner and Scholar are old-school designers in that they consider designing for users to be an essential aspect of their professional identity and scope of responsibilities. They are more interested in the distributive than procedural justice of design.
2Influential early references include, e.g., K. D. Eason (1984), John Gould and Clayton Lewis (1985), Donald Norman and Stephen Draper (1986), Brian Shackel (1991), and Jacob Nielsen (1993).
3See also Bevan and Macleod 1994, Bevan and Curson 1999.
4Some authors regard usability as an aspect of acceptability, e.g., Brian Shackel (1991) and Jacob Nielsen (1993), bringing it closer to what is often referred to as technology acceptance (Davis 1993; Venkatesh and Davis 2000). The ISO 9241 definition of usability includes both the user’s ability to operate a system and the system’s and user’s joint ability to achieve goals, which makes it broader than many other definitions.
5Expressions such as affective human factors, pleasure, emotional design, and empathic design have been used to refer to similar ideas.
6For a range of different approaches to user experience, see, for instance, All about user experience (n.d.), Masaaki Kurosu and Kaori Kashimura (1995), Tractinsky (1997), Patrick Jordan (2002), Lars Hallnäs and Johan Redström (2001), Hassenzahl (2003), Koskinen, Mattelmäki, and Battarbee (2003), Battarbee (2004), Judy Forlizzi and Katja Battarbee (2004), John McCarthy and Peter Wright (2004), Battarbee and Ilpo Koskinen (2005), March Hassenzahl and Noel Tractinsky (2006), Gitte Lindgaard et al. (2006), Tractinsky and Zmiri (2006), and Satu Luojus (2010).
7Reckwitx (2002: 249–50) defines a “practice” as “a routinised type of behaviour which consists of several elements, interconnected to one another: forms of bodily activities, forms of mental activities, ‘things’ and their use, a background knowledge in the form of understanding, know-how, states of emotion and motivational knowledge … A practice is thus a routinised way in which bodies are moved, objects are handled, subjects are treated, things are described and the world is understood.” See also, e.g., Schatzki (1996: 89) and Warde (2005).
8The original position is a hypothetical situation where a social contract—the design of the institutional order of the society—is defined by a representative group of participants. The participants do not know their own future position in the society, so they cannot design with a view to gaining benefits for themselves. However, they know how society in general and people usually behave. This being the case, they have the knowledge and interest to design the society in a way that they are as well off as possible, whatever positions they happen to occupy. According to Rawls’ intuition, they would not take chances, but design for equality and ensure that the position of the worst off is as good as possible, as they might be the worst-off members of the society themselves.
9The veil of ignorance is a theoretical concept meaning that the people behind it are ignorant of their own position in the future society about whose order they are deciding. See previous footnote (Rawls 1971).
10See Michael Sandel (2009, 2012) for discussions on the corruption of practices.
11What qualifies for a practice as defined by MacIntyre is not self-evident and that is a non-trivial problem when Practitioner and Scholar want to evaluate the quality of use based on its impact on a practice. However, architecture is something MacIntyre (1981/2011: 218) explicitly presents as an example of a practice.
12A master thesis (Naves Pinheiro 2013) dealing with designers’ business management approaches in Helsinki revealed that regarding design commissions as an instrument to afford a studio is not a strange idea for designers.
