Luigina Ciolfi inaugural lecture 2019
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This document discusses the challenges of human-centered research in human-computer interaction (HCI). It notes that while humans are complicated and unpredictable, they are also interesting. It explores how HCI studies people, including through fieldwork and co-design. Challenges include sustaining participation over time and balancing stakeholder interests. While new technologies make interaction seamless, humans still matter and HCI must consider social consequences. The document calls for acknowledging pitfalls and bias, and critiquing views of AI as human-less.
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Luigina Ciolfi inaugural lecture 2019
- 1. Users, participants, co-designers…Or just pesky humans? On the challenges of human-centred research in Human-Computer Interaction Professor Luigina Ciolfi C3RI - The Cultural, Communication and Computing Research Institute Sheffield Hallam University (UK) l.ciolfi@shu.ac.uk @luiciolfi luiginaciolfi.net https://blogs.shu.ac.uk/c3riimpact/
- 2. “The two hardest problems in computer science are: (i) people, and (ii) convincing computer scientists that the hardest problem in computer science is people.” Prof Jeff Bigham, Carnegie Mellon University
- 3. They change their mind They are complicated They are part of complicated organisations and groups They are busy and might not want to talk to you They often say one thing but mean, or think, another They often want what experts know will not work Humans Are Hard Work
- 4. They change their mind They are complicated They are part of complicated organisations and groups They are busy and might not want to talk to you They often say one thing but mean, or think, another They often want what experts know will not work They are smart and adaptable They can empathise They make very complicated systems work, using very complex tools They like to be and work with other humans They can figure things out They find ingenious workarounds, solutions, or alternatives Humans Are Hard Work…But They Are Interesting!
- 5. Humans And (Interactive) Machines
- 6. Humans And (Interactive) Machines
- 7. How Do We Study Humans in HCI? The Human Processor
- 8. The twists and turns of 30+ years in the field of HCI according to Susanne Bødker (2015): ● First wave: cognitive science and human factors (model-driven) (Critique by Liam Bannon, From Human Factors to Human Actors, 1991) ● Second wave: focus on groups of people working with a collection of applications; situated action; social research methods ● Third wave: participation, sharing, holistic experiences; integration of methods from creative practices (particularly design) How Do We Study Humans People in HCI?
- 10. "To study a user 'in the field' does not mean find a user, bring them to a field and watch them get chased by cows for an afternoon (unfortunately)” (Anonymous HCI student, 2012) …From mapping behaviours to understanding practices in context Studying People (and Technology) in the Field
- 11. Working in the Hunt Museum (Limerick), for the SHAPE project (2001-2004) “Re-Tracing The Past” (2003) Studying People (and Technology) in the Field
- 12. Studying People (and Technology) in the Field
- 14. Studying People (and Technology) in the Field NomadS (2004-2006)
- 15. “Customers ring me all the time. They never ask me ‘Are you up on the scaffolding, are you measuring?’. They never say ‘Can I talk with you, can you check something for me’ But they ask me everything. So at least when I’m in the car, even when I’m driving, I’m looking through this information trying to give an answer. So I just carry everything.” (Jane, sales representative) Studying People (and Technology) in the Field
- 16. Studying People (and Technology) in the Field
- 18. Studying People (and Technology) in the Field
- 19. Established and well-tested approach to systems design (UCD iterative cycle: understand users-design-prototype-evaluate) Design decisions about a system are made by those who will not use it - We go away and then return with a system/prototype for evaluation Constraints and limits to number of iterations we can go through Changing the way people work/do things is complicated, adoption of new systems might be difficult and often disruptive. Extracting requirements from the user-centred design process to feed into the system’s development can over-simplify the real-world aspects of practices that might mean a system’s success or failure The Challenges of User-Centred Design
- 20. Involving people to design together with us (the “experts”) Recognizing both the expertise and context/organizational knowledge that people have to contribute to the design of systems, and the right to be part of decisions that can change the way they work Also, a general intent to democratise the process of (digital technology) design and to make change open and visible to those that it affects (originated in the 1970s in Scandinavia, participation in workplace decisions) Powerful yet challenging way to work with participants: balancing constraints, agendas, interests and expertise Involving People as Co-Designers
- 21. Involving People as Co-Designers – meSch (2013-2017)
- 22. “At the time of the co-design workshop we had in [City] in the summer of 2013, due to what happened in my own group, I had the feeling that we had betrayed the museums. Tech took over the show. As a designer, I felt we lost control. (...) But looking back, nothing was lost, we learnt from experience and this episode proved useful” (anonymous co-designer A) “From speaking with some of the museum professionals (...) I get the impression that they are delighted to have all of these co-design activities, but the same time I have the feeling that they are somehow frustrated at how the actual prototypes are finally being implemented, somehow they are cut out off [from] the equation.” (anonymous co-designer B) “It is also important for those [designers and curators] to trust the process, and to believe what comes out will have value and be useful” (anonymous co-designer C) Involving People as Co-Designers
- 23. A lot of work needed, a lot of negotiations, but hard to sustain before the final results are evident to everyone Often the decisions are not the ones that the “experts” (or one kind of experts) would take: this can cause tensions Also, we demand a lot of our co-designers, but when funding runs out at the end of a project, we leave (often we have little choice on the matter) “Historical” Participatory Design is morphing into something else, often putting its legacy behind: “Do design teams ‘compromise’ PD by loosening its egalitarian politics? Or do they impose their own values onto these participants, as methodological and ideological colonialists?” (Bannon, Bardzell and Bødker 2019) The Challenges of Co-Design
- 24. There is no universal, one-size-fits-all, way of going about human-centred research in HCI Importance of partnership, of dialogue, with stakeholders Never assume that because you have approached a similar group/person before that their priorities and goals are the same Because something is fashionable in research circles it does not mean is the right fit, or will work anytime Leave a legacy (even small) of the work you do with people. It might just be a relationship legacy, but it matters (Some) Things I Learned
- 25. What’s Next?
- 26. The rise of platform computing …leveraging established interaction models (.e. the like and share model) that make new systems easier to learn… …leading to usage and user-generated data on a massive scale… …but is this making individuals, bodies, and their micro, local and localised practices disappear? Resurgent “promise” of AI and algorithmic knowledge (machine learning) …but where is the focus on people, communities, and groups, which still very much exist? Where is the human? What’s Next?
- 27. Where Are The Pesky Humans?
- 28. Where Are The Pesky Humans?
- 29. A concern for human beings is more important than ever - Not only from the point of view of how people use and customise systems, but also of how they enable them to work “Visible” and “Invisible” Work (Star and Strauss 1998) “We are dealing with work that can not be seen, because it is purposely made invisible by the creators of the platforms (…) It is work that is not recognized as such, because workers are considered consumers. In addition, there are workers who do tasks so small that they are not considered work, but microwork. These false consumers and microtaskers perform a very important task, which is to train artificial intelligences.” (Antonio Casilli) Humans Still Matter
- 30. Interaction might be more seamless, less demanding on the surface, but it can still be a bad fit for those who engage in it, or lead to ways of working and doing that ignore other important things that human beings value Humans Still Matter
- 32. Joy Buolamwini and The Algorithmic Justice League (MIT Media Lab) Humans Still Matter
- 33. ● Thinking about the social consequences of pervasive digital systems ● Questioning the rhetoric of ever-growing progress and of innovation as sole driver (acknowledge pitfalls, failures, and (political) crises – Hakken, Teli and Andrews 2016) ● Not letting the human in current technological discourse become a bodiless, genderless construct (Bardzell (2010) arguing for a feminist HCI… “The interaction design process takes place independent of gender considerations, and even today the central concept of the whole field—the user—remains genderless”) ● Develop HCI knowledge and expertise with awareness of the importance of social action, and of our own bias and ideologies (also in HCI reporting and publication, see Light 2018) ● Critiquing and proposing alternatives to a resurgent view of AI as human- less (algorithms are made by people and are about people) ● Bridging research and practice, and industry and academia The Challenges Ahead
- 34. With thanks also to:
Notas do Editor
- Thanks to all of you for being here this evening. I am really honoured to see so many of you, and particularly to see so many family and friends. Thanks for making an effort and coming on such a cold day, even from foreign, faraway places: Italy, Ireland, and even Liverpool (Brighton). My talk tonight is about what I believe makes my work as a human-computer interaction academic exciting, and at the same time constantly challenging – human beings. I started in this field because I was enthusiastic about computers, and the potential of digital technologies, but the more I work and think about it, the more I realise that what I am passionate about the most is understanding what role technologies play in people’s lives. Pre-emptively, I want to mention that all the past projects I will discuss in the rest of the talk are the result of the work of many people. In the past 22 years of work in HCI, I have been very lucky to work with some wonderful people, many of them are here tonight. I am just borrowing our joint work to make points about my own thinking.
- Human-computer interaction is a discipline that focuses on the complex relationship between people and digital interactive systems. We study this relationship, we study the domains that digital technologies affect, and how, and we design and implement novel systems. A human-centred approach is key. Human beings are the main focus, and as HCI researcher we are often becoming advocates for end-user needs and requirements as part of development teams. Working with people is as interesting as it is challenging. There is a common perception of people as something that can be factored into the design of a system, the messy variable to consider, the unpredictable one…or simply the one that can be left for last, once all the really difficult technical problems have been solved. The reality is more complicated.
- From the point of view of systems developers, you can see why. Humans are hard work! READ OUT SLIDE
- But each of these aspects has another side, one of opportunity. When the idea of “interactivity” emerged, together with personal computing, all these problems/opportunities also emerged: how do we deal with them and build on them to make interactions with digital systems usable and effective?
- Early work in HCI was about bridging human users and complex machines that required specialised knowledge, The assumption was that most people would need a lot of help as personal computers were new devices, and interaction with them an unknown quantity. In time, digital devices and interfaces have evolved, and so have people as users, becoming more and more savvy and also relying on standards that have become commonplace, think for example about the organisation of software graphical user interfaces. These days we are used to having a few magical devices in our pockets that we can control with simple gestures and that intuitively perform many functions for us
- Like this one. Oh and smartphones of course! If systems and their users have changed, so has the way we study people and involve them in the HCI process
- At the beginning, it was all about models of how human cognition operated, and the idea that it operates as a “human processing system”: memory, perception, motor processor, etc. This in relation to an overall system of interaction understood as one person operating one device. I am sure if all of you think of a simple interaction with an interactive system that you have in your daily life, you can point out many more things that matter in terms of how that interaction takes place. Think about taking money out at the ATM machine: yes, it’s about putting the card inside the correct slot, pressing the buttons in the right sequence and reading clearly what is on the screen. But other things matter too: for example, when it’s very sunny and the screen cannot be read, or whether you are aware or not that perhaps you are in a sketchy part of town, or whether there is someone standing too close behind you, or a friend instead keeping an eye out just beside you. All these things shape your interactive experience, even if it lasts less than one minute, as taking cash out does. You are acutely aware of all those things while the interaction is progressing, only to forget pretty much everything as soon as it is completed. It’s a fairly simple interaction, that only takes up a tiny bit of time in our day and it’s not even that important (unless it fails of course), and yet so much surrounds it. When it goes smoothly, it becomes pretty much invisible, So, now think of much more complex systems that we use as part of much bigger parts of our lives: our job, for example, our medical record, our education. How complex it is to make them work in such a way to disappear in the background of our practices. It’s quite clear that we need to study human beings in ways that are much broader than this model, even if some of these things do not necessarily lead to a component in the system, or a behaviour, we do need to consider them all to know how the system will be used in practice
- Professor Susanne Bodker identified three “waves” in the history of the discipline, with important expansions of what was considered the scope and approach of HCI research. READ OUT When I started my career in HCI as a student researcher in 1997, we were working very much with cognitive models and doing studies in the lab. Opportunity to work on a European project changed that for me. The project was about designing an electronic adaptive guide for museums.
- I was sent to the Museo Civico in Siena to do Observations of people visiting the space, creating “maps” of where they were stopping, for how long, etc. As you can see from the photograph, In the middle ages, they weren’t that concerned with making it easier for researchers of the future to build an adaptive museum guide! This is a very beautiful hall, covered in dozens of frescoes, with people spending a lot of time there to see them all. I was filling up my observation grid, but noticing many other things, for example how things changed when people came to visit with other people, and even depending on what the weather was like outside, for example when the rain made people who were not interested in it come to the museum. Then some visitors would notice that I was not a visitor myself, I had a staff pass and they thought I worked for the museum and started asking me questions. We would talk and I would ask them questions: what made them come visit on that day, what did they like the most. Of course, this would have broken any ethical research protocol, and there was never a way for me to take what people said as data, but I was interested in it. As naïve as I was as a beginner researcher, I thought it was important. When a couple of years later I began working as a researcher at the University of Limerick in Professor Liam Bannon’s group, I became interested in CSCW - Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, and in approaching the study of people in the field, with all that it brings, and realising that many other researchers in HCI worked with people in that way, and that working in that way was not breaking any rules of HCI. This was what I was interested in doing, understanding people using technology in the context of their activities, in the field
- In the immortal words of a former HCI student who shall remain anonymous, this is not what studying people in the field means. It’s not about putting people in situations we have orchestrated and documenting how they deal with them, which is also a valid approach that can be very useful for systems design. It’s about being where they are, and understanding what they do, why and how – in relation to the physical and social context of their practices. Fieldwork in HCI draws heavily from the ethnographic tradition, which in the words of Dave Randall, Richard Harper and Mark Rouncefield, “seeks to present a portrait of life as seen and understood by those who live and work within the domain concerned” I will talk about some examples of studying and working with people from my professional history that pushed me and challenged me as a researcher. It wasn’t easy to just pick a few, but thinking back across many projects these stood out as important milestones for my own learning. After presenting these examples, I will move on to discuss some current and future research themes
- A first example is the work I did on the European project SHAPE at the Hunt Museum in Limerick. SHAPE was about building interactive exhibitions embedded into the spaces of museums and galleries. At the Hunt we built an interactive exhibition where visitors could explore mysterious objects from the museum collection that were never fully interpreted, and then share their own theories about them. In the Study Room (on the right of the panorama), they could find out known facts, in the Room of Opinion (on the left) they could record their theory. The recording then appeared on the Study Room interactive radio, on the channel for each object, where other visitors could listen to it. The design of “Re-Tracing the Past” was based on over a year of field work in the museum.
- I studied how people explored the galleries, and which objects caught their attention and why, but also the role of staff and volunteers in guiding them and facilitating many activities, such as handling sessions, where people could manipulate authentic objects. We learned things that we did not expect. For example that to design something that would work and fit into the museum it was not enough to design it for visitors. We had an unexpected additional category of people involved: the museum docents, volunteers who gave their time to the museum and who were driven by their own interests and passions. The docents make the museum unique, and we could not design anything that did what they did, nor exclude them from any way in which we wanted to augment the museum through technology. Understanding them was the key to understanding the character of the museum, and to developing design ideas that would fit: if the docents are the ones who tell people their knowledge and stories, we needed for the interactive experience to do something else. So we decided that we would support people (both visitors and volunteers) to tell US their views and ideas, and this is how the Re-Tracing the Past exhibition came to be.
- People weren’t just using what we designed, they contributed and made it different every day. Also the installation was something that the Docents appreciated as it was not doing their job but actually enabling them to be represented and heard. This data vignette shows an example: Paddy is a docent who has done some research on one of the mysterious objects, a Bronze age artefact known as a Y-shaped object. He used to come to the exhibition to listen to what theories people came up with about these objects. In this instance, he came with paper and pencil to take notes, and you see him hear talking to one of the researchers, Mark (who is here tonight, incidentally). Paddy was one of the first Docents to come to the exhibition to record his own views about the objects. It meant something important to him that he’d play a part.
- A second example is from a project called “NomadS”. My team and I studied a company’s transition from a paper-based system for collecting, detailing and processing orders of joinery products to a digitally-supported one. The company developing the digital system was also involved in the project. A group of 8 sales representatives volunteered to be the early adopters of the system, and to be studied by us in order to document their practices and inform the design of the new system. The reps had a home office, worked at customers’ sites to take measurements of parts and to file orders, and at the company headquarters to talk to managers and to production. Soon, it transpired that it was not enough to meet them every now and then for interviews and observations, and that it was important to also “move” with them and see how they managed. The “in between” places in their working lives mattered a lot
- My project researchers started going to work with them for several days a week. They became also company, help and support to them. They collected data that was interesting and important well beyond extracting some design requirements. Work in the car was extremely important, in fact as important as the time they spent at the office and with customers. It was their workplace for “relationship management”, making phone calls, answering queries, planning the rest of the day/week.
- When the software company that we were working with released the new PDA-based software, we continued studying how the reps’ practices were affected by it. It turned out that they kept using paper although that meant walking onto a building site with a cumbersome paper form, filling it in, then copying everything into the PDA back in the car for processing the order. The system worked perfectly and everybody liked it. However, when we asked why they were not taking it with them on site to fill in the orders directly on it, they told us that it was “too expensive”, “too fine”, “too fragile”. Interestingly, they would bring to the building sites a digital measuring device (called a DigiRod) that was about 5 times more expensive than the PDA. They would use it as a walking stick to better climb onto scaffolding and to scrape off bits of plaster off the frames of doors and windows to take better measurements, but they had no concerns about doing these things with it. It turned out to be an issue of physical design and choice of materials. They didn’t think the PDA was a device fit for a building site, but only for the car and office. So we built a second prototype that was installed onto the DigiRod, stored electronic measurements and communicated them with the PDA once the DigiRod was back in the car. No lab evaluation, or even a standalone evaluation, of the mobile system could have told us that. Things might have been very different now, with people being used to carry smart phones or tablets to all places, but it was certainly an issue all those years ago.
- The next examples takes me to a completely different context, Bunratty Folk Park, an open air museum displaying entire authentic buildings (32 of them), their contents, the activities in them and the landscape surrounding them. We conducted field studies to understand how people visited the park so to design a mobile interactive installation to complement the visit. It was clear that there wasn’t very much information on the buildings and their objects available to people, so a reasonable approach would have been that of providing them what was missing. However, following people around for many weeks and listening to their conversations during the visit told us that what people enjoyed the most were the sounds, smells and even tastes of the place (for example the cakes freshly baked by the animators in some of the cottages), and imagining the lives of the people of the past inside those buildings.
- What we designed for them was a mobile experience that mixed digital audio of historical characters narrating their lives, and physical interactive objects, each connected to a building, to control it and to respond to it. Visitors could record their own impressions and memories. The objects were chosen on the basis of what people remembered and appreciated about the park to do with its sensory qualities. We could not have captured that without spending time to visit the park with people, making note of their physical appreciation of objects, smells and sounds. I never thought that in my career one morning I would be chopping up fresh turf in the prototyping lab, but there you go. Visitors’ feedback was very positive, and it was considered a memorable experience. However, this was not what the management of the park had expected back then: they wanted a classic “smart guide” like other tourist attractions had, digitizing the written information on their physical map and enabling people to book a table for lunch in the museum restaurant. They were also surprised that we ha not just taken their brief, but spent time studying visitors and talking to the staff animating the buildings. They never expected that we would go collect primary data and use it to come up with a completely different idea. While it was a successful project research-wise, it did not lead to future collaborations with the Park, and it was an important lesson in relationship management, in terms of expectations, goals and priorities. End users were happy, the partner institution’s management not so much.
- All these are examples of what we call “user-centred design”: we study the end users of a future system, gather data about their practices, use them to design the system, then take it back to them (ideally multiple times) for evaluation and feedback. It’s a very established approach that can be very effective. However, it can pose some challenges. READ OUT
- An alternative approach that I have used, and that has the goal to bring beneficiaries and stakeholders into the decision-making process is known as Participatory Design or Co-Design. READ OUT
- This leads me to the last example from my own work I want to talk about, done here at SHU. On the meSch European project (2013-2017), cultural professionals were co-designing with us a platform and toolkit to enable them to create tangible interactive installations for museums and heritage sites. The team had designers, developers, social scientists, heritage and museum professionals. While co-design is a well-established approach, our work on meSch was quite rare in terms of both scope and duration. 4 years is a long time to sustain working in this way as it is a demanding process requiring time and effort. The process was very successful, it produced numerous prototypes, three full-scale public exhibitions in three different museums in the Netherlands and Italy, a software and hardware toolkit, and a co-design resource booklet. As it was such a substantial co-design effort, we documented the process throughout, so we were studying how all participants worked together on the project (and this included ourselves).
- While the process was really successful and everyone felt that they had gained a lot from it and would do it again, some of the feedback we gathered showed how difficult working in this way can be, and that people had to deal with very significant obstacles and worries. MENTION QUOTES The perception of common goals can almost disappear in the busyness of the work, and not being able to perceive mid-way results is challenging and frustrating. A lot of food for thought was found in studying the process, in documenting the voice of those involved and not just of final, external beneficiaries of our work, and indeed we are still reflecting on it
- Co-Design is not exempt from challenges! READ OUT
- READ OUT Up to this point I have talked about the past. But in the final part of this talk I want to talk about the future, or rather about a fluid present
- So, what is next for doing human-centred research in HCI? Museum conference anecdote: Conference on digital technologies for museums, one presentation really stood out, a wonderful project where an entire gallery was redesigned to allow people to leave digital traces in the form of comments, thoughts, drawings. I really liked it and I was ready to make a comment about how nice it was to see a project that was not about trying out the latest gadget, as it often happens, but it was all about people, and about dialogue. Someone else got to say something first, and it was: “It’s wonderful to see a data-driven museum”. (and the person was a museum professional not a computer scientist!) My reaction was: How about the people??? After they have finally started to be asked to contribute and share, they have become just data? And there are other challenges in relation to this
- READ OUT Platform computing (and platform capitalism) is on its way to making individuals, bodies, and their micro, local and localised practices disappear, the “like and share” model Interactions are becoming more and more standardized, Is a focus on the human disappearing? Do we still need it?
- Is what we need just for humans to identify themselves from bots and the rest is taken care of? The reality is more complicated than this. How many of you have encountered something like these? What are they for? These two things are also something else: they are crowdsourcing mechanisms to train machine learning algorithms, which we help every time we fill these in. We are not just different from bots and algorithms, but we are training them to work more accurately. As machine learning and applications of AI are on the rise, we need more and more human interaction, and human work…some it’s very hard to know it’s even there
- READ OUT EXAMPLES To the point that is raising some serious ethical concerns, as well as interactional ones For every simpler, more transparent, more “magical” interaction there is other work by humans that is invisible and unrecognised, and that has a cost:
- READ OUT The work of “priming” systems to make them “understand us” The work of other humans to maintain, train, refine the system
- A second issue is about “intelligent” systems, which can track things efficiently and certainly seamlessly…but they need to be designed with human needs and human diversity on mind. READ OUT
- There are some recent and very well-publicised cases, such as Apple Health only being updated to include period tracking in 2014.
- Another example is the increasing evidence of how biased Machine Learning algorithms be. The work being done by JOY BULAMINI and the Algorithmic Justice League, among others, is tackling this We are dealing with emergent aspects of how technology impacts on humans and humans can shape technology,
- READ OUT Pesky humans we might be, but we are still unfailingly interesting and still the best at empathy. And that will have made all the difference. These are hefty challenges and we might need to tackle them in new ways, with regard to things that we have not considered before. Of course I know that I cannot face them all by myself, but I very much looking forward to playing a part.