From differences to design
Connor Graham
This short essay considers the possibilities of three kinds of differences for studies of technology, particularly for productively engaging across disciplines and project-ing towards future technology design.1 This distinct perspective confronts the sense of common humanness that is often created through human rights discourse (Montoya 2012) and the discourse of global threats (Miller 2004), discourses that are often produced and engaged in by elites. This essay considers instead that as contemporary, globalizing technologies such as the mobile phone travel across national borders they are productive less of a sense of ‘common humanness’, than situated at the edge of confronting and negotiating cultural differences. Studying such technologies through, for example, focusing on common experience, shared being and action in-the-world (Dourish 2001), might embrace a sense of ‘common humaneness’ but can also easily become a means of reducing and generalizing differences that persist across various kinds of borders. In this essay I consider the importance of understanding differences within and between studies of technology by reflecting on and re-examining an ethnographic study of the use of photographs in South West China.
The ethnomethodological work of Hughes, King, Rodden and Andersen (1994) suggests that the critical re-examination of ethnographic studies of ICTs can connect with the design of ICTs (in their case, ‘systems’) or, in the terms of this essay project-ing.2 They characterize this approach as one of ‘the different roles for ethnography in design’ (Hughes et al. 1994: 436–437). They point out that this method is particularly valuable in the social science field where there is little sense of a ‘cumulative corpus of findings to underpin any application of their knowledge’ (ibid.: 436). The method of re-examination offers much potential value in interdisciplinary work, as long as the difficulties and hazards of deploying such studies across disciplinary boundaries are acknowledged, with regard to, for example, the particular kind of validity being appealed to, given the ‘multi-paradigmatic character of social research’ (ibid.).
I propose that taking differences in culture, in people, in places and in use is useful for interdisciplinary discussions of such studies’ validity, use and usefulness. Specifically, I show how attention to differences within and between the results of technology studies can respond to reductive and generalizing moves in three distinct ways. Differences first support discussions of versions of validity across different disciplines and expose the relationship between ‘social’ and ‘design’ disciplines.3 They can, second, reveal particular, discipline-specific analytical strategies. Differences also support the re-examining and re-informing of technology studies through drawing attention to the process of imagining design possibilities or project-ing.
My exploration of the value of differences started in 2007 when I began studying ICTs across settings where the culture, people, places (and potentially) use were ostensibly quite different, despite a common focus on use of a thing, the thing in this case being photographs, both physical and digital.4 The fieldwork I was conducting extended across China, the UK and Australia, although only the work in China has been written up and published. The work in China centred on middle-class city-dwellers in Chengdu city in Sichuan Province. As the study progressed it became clear that the limited number of people I was learning about were not only different from descriptions of other people in other studies but were also quite different from one another. These are two distinct types of differences: differences without and differences within. It also became abundantly clear that the status of my membership of society in China was quite different from my status in the UK and Australia, another category of differences: reflexive differences.
So differences, first, became important when establishing the focus and purpose of the studies of the then contemporary ICTs. It was important we understood the culture, people, places and use in past studies in quite a systematic way: differences without. This was powerful for contextualizing our own description, moving from comparison to analysis. In which countries did past studies take place? Who were the participants in terms of age, class, language group and ethnicity? In what spatial configuration and geographies were participants placed? What kinds of things were being used: physical or digital photographs and/or cameras? How was the description generated: through interview, observation or some other method? What disciplinary bias did the past studies have and how did this affect description? This initial framing involved tracing connections between the different contexts of past studies and the results. It also involved answering questions about how the context and methods of previous studies of ICTs were different from what we were attempting.
Focusing on the idea of values or what we termed ‘beliefs about what people should do’ (Graham and Rouncefield 2010: 81) was useful when understanding differences across study participants: differences within. Through how we defined values we allowed for the possibility of family resemblances – incorporating similarities and differences – across cultures, peoples, places as there are such resemblances for games: ‘football, chess, patience and skipping are all games . .. it would be foolish to say that all these activities are part of one supergame, if only we were clever enough to learn how to play it’ (Winch 2008: 18).5 This move acknowledged both the commonness of practices and technologies such as photography and cameras. It also acknowledged heterogeneity from within as such technologies are shaped and ‘made local’ through members of a particular society. Thus, values provoked certain questions that related to primarily differences within but also differences without. We asked: what are the similarities and differences across current observations and between previous studies of ICTs and what we have observed? How might we account for these similarities and differences, given the difference in cultures, peoples, places and use? Answering this last question involved us examining differences across the informants in China and engaging the informants themselves in discussion.
Following and based on this, in a reflexive move, it was important for me to recognize not only our disciplinary context but also our understanding of our own membership: the culture, people, places and use of our ‘photographic technologies’, or, more simply ‘where we were coming from’: reflexive differences. This was complex enough without Mark and me being quite different, even if both of us were informed by ethnomethodology. Carrying out fieldwork in the UK helped with this somewhat, informing me about the familiar as I investigated the less familiar and independently learned about Chinese culture, history and religion as I have, in the past, learned about Irish culture, history and religion. One of the challenges in this process was not to exoticize, simplify or simply misread the unfamiliar and to disentangle perceived tradition-informed practices from contemporary practices when accounting for, for example, use. How were these observations similar and different from what is familiar? How could we account for these similarities and differences through values? This examination tuned us to factors concerning the people, places and other relevant uses under study that could account for differences and similarities.
Studies of technology are converged upon by, among other disciplines, different varieties of anthropologists, computer scientists, psychologists and sociologists, all with different commitments concerning what might be studied, why and how it might be studied, what such study might result in and how these results might be used.6 Different disciplines privilege different views on what validity is or, in different terms, what they regard as valuable outcomes.7 All these forms of validity approach the breadth and complexity of human differences in contrasting ways. Crabtree, Tolmie and Rouncefield (2013) point to some of the consequences of these differences in views. For example, time and extent of immersion or ecological validity can be regarded as the key measure of a study’s worth. As with the study described here, seeing these engagements with different kinds of validity as established values in a discipline succeeds in both making these views visible and exposing certain techniques and uses. This ‘cultural’ way of seeing disciplinary differences is useful for inter-disciplinary discussions of (as opposed to feuds over) such studies’ validity, use and usefulness. As illustrated above, questions about the status of the corpus become particularly important when studying technology in a society in which one is not a member, when reflexive differences are in play.
As Crabtree et al. (2013) argue, another, more ambitious kind of quite impossible validity is a common aspiration for studies of contemporary ICTs that extend beyond description: the tangible quest of reaching towards the initiation of new or different (that word again) ICTs of the future; to project beyond the possible general and the particular real towards new, as yet unconceived, unrealized situations; to infer what we have not understood, provide insights into an unrealized project or the consequences of an unrealized project or, more specifically to guide technology design.8 I will term this kind of validity project validity9 and the process as project-ing. Why disciplines might use the impossible as a norm is an important question. Some answers can surely be found in the study of the history of mass production and the contexts of technology design. The past, a place where future projects have already happened, is surely under-acknowledged in understanding such project-ing. To frame this observation as a question: what are the circumstances – culture, people, places, use – in which past project-ing has been done and what logics and rationale were deployed?
Returning to the study presented at the beginning of this essay, with all the care taken to acknowledge differences, and given the aim of project-ing, how did this diverse set of findings, this multi-faceted cognizance of differences help? After these studies we became more aware of not only the different contexts in which new ICTs might operate but also how these related to the contexts of other studies of photographic technology: differences within and without. Admittedly, we were less tuned to reflexive differences and valuing practices and different versions of validity than we might have been. What did concern us was considering how newly introduced ICTs operate in diverse contexts: past, present and future. These operations presented a spectrum of possibilities that supported ongoing discussion about future design. We also learned that ICTs, rather than being embedded in contexts where values lurked, were really permeated with values and allow, through their use, certain values to be made visible: Sacks’ maxim that technology is ‘made at home in the world that has whatever organization it already has’ (Sacks 1992: 549) was borne out. Thus, the whole process of project-ing incorporated a view on past studies, present work and future possibilities.
So how might these kinds of differences be useful for interdisciplinary work when social scientists and computer scientists with different views on validity converge on description? This essay has already suggested their role in productively resolving interdisciplinary feuds. Another answer concerns how differences might be useful for project-ing, to serve the needs of computer scientists. The nature of the project-ing or analytical strategies is crucial to consider when answering this question. The process of project-ing towards engineering industrial, safety critical systems is quite different from project-ing towards creating playful domestic social technologies. In the former project, understanding the variability of differences within the people involved in the study and the acceptability of differences without in terms of established thresholds for risk is crucial. Both these kinds of differences operate in a context of reflexive differences across analysts. In the latter project, it is reasonable to interpret differences simply as being a kind of variety within and without studies which informs deeply reflexive imagining.10 Carefully acknowledging not only these kinds of differences but also the analytical strategies deployed to confront these differences can potentially smooth over interdisciplinary conflict regarding how such studies should be used.
Yet there is also the possibility of the imagining work of project-ing re-informing description through particular disciplinary foci and supporting questions about what kinds of validity are important in the face of the ‘description informing design’ mantra. Imagining the future can inform the past and what is regarded as important about it. This operationalization of differences can support a more nuanced treatment of the results of studies of technology and a conversation about the nature and extent of knowledge, risk and creativity. It also positions past projects as first part of a corpus of studies that articulate a connection between provisional descriptions of orders in-the-world and instances of project-ing and, second, as provisional descriptions of possible, particular re-orderings of the world.
As common technologies such as ICTs circulate the globe, promoting a coarse sense of ‘common humanness’, so they are consumed and appropriated at different levels of local society and once intensely indigenous symbols and images become known. In this cycle of mass production and consumption and intense circulation, differences can be either forgotten or assumed not to exist. I hope that this short essay has shown how acknowledging differences, whether among disciplinary approaches or within and without past and present description is important (Graham and Rouncefield 2010). I also hope I have shown that understanding such differences as relational can inform project-ing, allowing project-ing to inform description.
1 I deploy a dash to emphasize the work and activity involved in ‘project-ing’ and the two possible meanings of ‘project’.
2 I acknowledge that ethnomethodology, with its focus on work and actors’ constructions of their own life worlds, has a particular perspective on human experience.
3 I present three definitions of validity below.
4 This work was conducted with Mark Rouncefield from Lancaster University and was funded by his Microsoft European Fellowship ‘Social Interaction and Mundane Technologies’.
5 This is a direct reference to Wittgensteins’s idea of ‘family resemblance’: ‘I can think of no better expression to characterize these similarities than “family resemblances”; for the various resemblances between members of a family: build, features, colour of eyes, gait, temperament, etc. etc. overlap and criss-cross in the same way. – And I shall say: “games” form a family’ (Wittgenstein 1986[1953]: 33).
6 In this essay when I refer to ‘computer science’ or ‘computer scientists’ I mean academics and practitioners who are concerned with understanding humans as a secondary concern and developing computing technology as a primary concern.
7 Three instances of validity are familiar for most disciplines. These instances are less definitive categories or descriptors than place-holders supporting the discussion of key differences. One use of validity refers to the internal workings of such studies being sound. Another is sometimes referred to as ‘external validity’ or a study’s generalizability. This use of the word validity used in relation to observational studies of ICTs assumes the possibility of the generalizability of a study’s results to other, actual and possible situations involving ICT use. The fixation on external validity becomes visible in the search for similarities, the counting of occurrences in observational data, the search for and extrapolation of themes and rules in how results are presented. Increased frequency in observations means it being more likely to be ‘the way it is’. An extension of this use of validity is ‘ecological validity’ or the ability to generalize results to the real world. This view of validity centres on correspondence to a real situation involving ICT use that has happened. The fixation on ecological validity becomes visible through results based on the accumulation of evidence over time, the detailing of the particularity of the situational aspects of the study – the culture, the people, the place and the use – and even the role and positionality of the observational instrument (including the human observer). Increased authenticity of observation means it is closer to ‘the real moment’.
8 This refers to Christine Halverson’s ideas of ‘inferential power’ and ‘application power’ (Halverson 2002: 245).
9 Here I have deliberately avoided the equivocal term ‘design’ in favour of ‘project’ to communicate the provisional and speculative nature of such ‘reaches’ towards a possible future.
10 This distinction leans on Löwgren’s (1995: 87–88) distinction between ‘engineering design’ and ‘creative design’.
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