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

[Charles Ess]

Hi Radhika, Jeremy, et al

Jeremy 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."

Um, yes - at least in more community-oriented cultures (including
subcultures in the U.S.): for a helpful initial list, see

Hermeking, Marc. (2005).  Culture and Internet Consumption: Contributions
from Cross-Cultural Marketing and Advertising Research. Journal of
Computer-Mediated Communication 11(1), October, 2005.
<http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol11/issue1/hermeking.html>

And Radhika wrote:

> Perhaps instead of thinking of "user centred" and individual centric
> - we need to conceptualize a community and context based
> understanding of "userS"?

As Radhika knows I would say - that would also be yes, in my view.

But all of this has left me wondering how far this - perhaps burgeoning? -
awareness of social context of use recognizes the further need to take
culture more broadly into account?

Background:
I've done a number of lectures over the past few years, based almost
entirely on work presented at the CATaC conferences, on the need to consider
cultural dimensions in HCI.  It seems to me that there is now a
well-established body of literature on these matters - i.e., well beyond the
CATaC Proceedings and certainly not restricted to the work of those who
participate in CATaC.
(As an example: beyond Marc Hermeking's article, see more broadly the
Special Theme issue on Culture and Computer-Mediated Communication - Journal
of Computer-Mediated Communication 11 (1), October 2005.
<http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol11/issue1/>)

Even better, beyond CATaC-related publications, I can now point to some
recent publications that focus very nicely indeed on cultural issues and
HCI, e.g.

Dyson, Laurel E., Max Hendriks & Stephen Grant (eds.). (2007) _Information
Technology and Indigenous People_. Hershey, PA: Information Science
Publishing

P. Zaphiris and S. Kurniawan (eds.). (2006). _Advances in Universal Web
Design and Evaluation: Research, Trends and Opportunities_. Hershey, PA:
Idea Publishing, 2006

Emma Rooksby and John Weckert (eds.). (2006). _Information Technology and
Social Justice_. Hershey, PA: Idea Publishing.

Kirk St. Amant (ed). 2007. _Linguistic and Cultural Online Communication
Issues in the Global Age. Hershey, PA: IGI Global.

Along these lines I'd also recommend a number of chapters from a recent
anthology co-edited with Soraj Hongladarom, including -

Paterson, Barbara. (2007). "We Cannot Eat Data: The Need for Computer Ethics
to Address the Cultural and Ecological Impacts of Computing." In S.
Hongladarom and C. Ess (eds.), Information Technology Ethics: Cultural
Perspectives, 153-168. Hershey, PA: Idea Group Reference.

van der Velden, Maja. (2007).  Invisibility and the Ethics of
Digitalization: Designing so as not to Hurt Others. In S. Hongladarom & C.
Ess (eds.), Information Technology Ethics: Cultural Perspectives, 81-93.
Hershey, PA: Idea Group Reference

And, beyond the CATaC mailing list, there is now a mailing list devoted
especially to these issues: <SOCIOTECH-INTERACTIONDESIGN at JISCMAIL.AC.UK>,
founded and moderated by Jose Abdelnour-Nocera
<Jose.Abdelnour-Nocera at TVU.AC.UK>.

Impression (leading to a question):
I recognize the dangers of making generalizations from limited data points -
but based on the data points I have, it seems to me that colleagues in the
U.S. who are exposed to this sort of information - i.e., demonstrating very
clearly the _failures_ of ICT design and implementations that ignore even
the most basic cultural dimensions, vis-à-vis the (at least somewhat more
frequent) success of those designs and implementations that work from the
outset with cultural dimensions in mind - tend to react in one of two ways:
a) very interesting, and we should take it into account when building our
interface for ____.
b) that's nice, but the rest of the world will just have to get used to the
way we do things.
Perhaps I'm just a poor lecturer, but my experience - admittedly, quite
limited, which is why I'm asking - so far suggests that the "b" camp usually
overrides the "a" camp. (Of course, there are important and interesting
exceptions - not surprisingly, the Church of the Latter-Day Saints, for
example.)
By contrast, my European, Asian, and African colleagues are already well
aware of "a" and generally quite interested in pursuing "a" on a variety of
levels.  (Of course, there are exceptions here as well.)

Question: does it seem to you - and/or, anyone else with interest and
experience in these domains on list - that "a" may be growing among HCI folk
(both within and beyond the boundaries of the U.S.)?
and/or declining (e.g., insofar as globalization _does_ lead to
homogenization, usually based on Western, if not indeed U.S.-centric models)
and/or holding about even?

Just curious.

back to grading ...

- c.