[Air-l] Can User Centred Design be Harmful?

[Beth Kolko]

Jeremy,

There is indeed an ongoing critique of the instrumentality of the user which I think is extremely important. I actually attended that CHI workshop, and it was interesting to see the CHI community have one of its first larger-scale conversations on this issue of international development; the ICT for international development work has been interdisicplinary for several years (c.f. the MIT journal _ITID_), and I know you and I talked briefly at one or other of the WSIS' about this generally. 

There's an interesting short of shift going on in people's terminology in the CS and UCD world. At the workshop some people actually started kicking around terms like Deployment-Centered Design (making stuff that you know will actually work given the infrastructure of a given context), and, well...others I forget. There is also a shift among funding organizations and some larger computer science programs (esp those with strong interdisc connections) to talk about Human Centered Computing. 

I for one often/inevitably manage to get into a somewhat heated debate on this issue ("I am not a consumer!" which UCD often seems to assume), but I'd argue that the vocabulary debate really is largely a reflection of different theoretical perspectives coming into contact. 

We've been doing some really fun research looking at UCD as an approach or thereoretical perspective and its relationship to Participatory Design, Value-Sensitive Design, Learner-Centered Design and, believe it or not, the Appropriate Technology literature. 

The people who have been trying to design technology for developing world contexts (actually, what my research group calls resource-constrained environments -- self-serving plug: depts.washington.edu/ddi) have run exactly into some of the issues you mention below -- that the people who pick up the stuff and integrate it into their lives are not monolithic, nor are their communities identical. On the other hand, introducing, say, cultural studies, feminist theory, and ethnographic method into the technology design process is, er...complex. But that's a whole other story/post/career.

Best,
Beth





Jeremy Hunsinger <jhuns at vt.edu> wrote: Well there are many issues of understanding here.  Fundamentally, I  
think we have real issues with the difference between the commercial  
constructions of subjectivity and the family and community, political  
constructions of subjectivity.  Those constructions are what yield  
the tensions between the collectivity and individuality and are  
arguments usually constructed in terms of the relationship between  
the nature of humanity (homo ludens, homo economicus, homo politicus,  
etc. etc.) and the culture of humanity  (homo ludens, homo  
economicus, homo politicus, etc. etc.)  (heh).   There is an ideology  
of computing and computer interfaces, but I think the conception of  
instrumentality, that of 'user' is also an issue.
On May 7, 2007, at 8:32 AM, Radhika Gajjala wrote:

> Perhaps instead of thinking of "user centred" and individual centric
> - we need to conceptualize a community and context based
> understanding of "userS"?
>
>
>
> r
> On May 7, 2007, at 7:46 AM, Jeremy Hunsinger wrote:
>
>> A short report from usability news about a workshop at chi 2007.
>> http://www.usabilitynews.com/news/article3882.asp
>>
>> "A critical observation was that in these settings, the idea of a
>> single user owning and interacting with a single device, around some
>> individually oriented task, is often inappropriate. Instead, systems
>> are more often shared and used by communities, and their objectives
>> are also geared to development and growth of the community."
>>
>
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Jeremy Hunsinger
Information Ethics Fellow, Center for Information Policy Research,  
School of Information Studies, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee  
(www.cipr.uwm.edu)

Words are things; and a small drop of ink, falling like dew upon a  
thought, produces that which makes thousands, perhaps millions,  
think. --Byron


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