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So this is the story of how I have spent 14 years trying to involve people in the process of making technology. I say “try” because this has turned out to be a tricky thing, one that I of course don’t fully understand yet.
Before I started my PhD in 2017, I spent 10 years working on the software industry as what’s called an interaction designer or design researcher or user experience designer. In fact, I have also spent my PhD years in the software industry, since I really never stopped working, and my doctoral research was all done in collaboration with industry partners.
The software industry involves people in the design of technology in ways that may appear basic and kind of naive to academics. We did a lot of interviewing, usability studies, small surveys and analysis of usage data. As limited as these activities may be in terms of meaningful engagement in the design process, they were nonetheless very useful and, well: illuminating.
If you are lucky, you may get a chance to take part in something a bit more involved. For instance, I once worked as a field researcher in an international study for a software product used by sales reps in supermarkets. I accompanied a few of them as they did their job around stores in Barcelona. Sure, product placement analysis in supermarket shelves is not the most interesting thing in the world, but I still got to observe some curious phenomena. This software relied on sales reps taking photographs of shelves, which were then uploaded to a server and analysed by an image recognition algorithm. But it turns out that supermarket chains in Spain do not allow people to take photographs in store. Many of the people I accompanied told me stories about being removed from supermarkets by security guards. So we spent a good deal of time time hiding from store managers as we went around.
After about 3 years of doing these things, I had come to the conclusion that they were good value. You learnt a lot through them, and they were relatively quick, cheap and straightforward to do. That’s why I was surprised about they being done so little. Companies talked a lot about the importance of user experience and being “user-centred”, but when push came to shove, they had pretty much no direct contact with those they called “users”; and I have seen little change in the past 10 years, to be honest.
When trying to work out why this may be, a lot of people told me that companies and institutions just didn’t care enough. But I also encountered many organisations that really wanted to do this stuff, but were somehow overwhelmed by it. They believed this type of simple design research activities were complex and difficult, and that they took a lot of money and a lot of time. They were also baffled by the little details, silly things like how to capture data during research sessions. All together, these issues became paralysing, and resulted in no contact with outside people at all.
Around 2010, me and a partner decided that perhaps we could prove to industry professionals that these activities were not only worthwhile, but also easy. We picked the hardest thing we could think of at the time: doing a think-aloud usability-testing type of session on a mobile device. With the iPhone out only 3 years before, doing sessions on mobile still felt cumbersome to many. We came up with this phone rig made with Meccano, a webcam, a jubilee clip and some blu-tack. We went to design conferences with a session we called “DIY mobile usability testing”, during which we built the rig in front of people, set up video recording infrastructure with a laptop and some software, picked someone at random from the audience, and ran a think-aloud session with them. This is a video from one of these sessions at a conference called ParisWeb.
We ended up doing this thing in a whole bunch of places. People loved it! At the IA Summit they liked it so much that they gave us a second slot so that we could do it twice! Someone called us “The MacGyvers of mobile usability testing”. It was hilarious.
For many people, this session was the very first experience of direct engagement with those who use technology. It was the first time the tried to purposefully and attentively observe someone using a technology system. They were mind blown.
While all this was going on, I took a job at Intel, in a very special department I don’t think exists any more. It was called the “Open Source Technology Centre”, and it was a department that made and contributed to free and open source software. It was a steep learning curve. I did know what Linux was and I had used it before, but I knew effectively nothing about free software, and about the communities that make it.
One of the first things I realised was that the ways I had become accustomed to use to involve people in design (the interviews, the usability studies, the usage data collection) were completely absent from free software. These things were simply not done here. So together with a few interested people we created Open Source Design, a voluntary group that advocates the need to involve others in the process of making free software. We mainly do presentations about design and training on basic methods, at some of the main community conferences like the Mozilla Festival and FOSDEM.
But I also realised many other things that challenged the ways I had understood design involvement and the role of “technology users” in it. Free software is a place where boundaries between those make technology and those who use technology are very fluid. Users often become makers, and take up a dual role that is uncommon in other domains.
During that time I was designing tools for software engineers. This is a very peculiar group of people. They are neither meek nor helpless when it comes to technology. They are not the kind of person who will appear to simply take the tools you push at them. They very obviously take an active role in appraising and adapting the technologies they use. A kind of “in your face” form of appropriation. They also happen to know way more about technology than you do. They disliked the design research activities I was used to deploy because they felt childish and patronising to them. They wanted to be engaged in the design process not as research subjects, validators or testers, but as experts and partners, and they were very outspoken about it.
This forced me to change my ways. On the outside, the activities I was running with people looked pretty much the same, but they were fundamentally different. They moved from directed and rule-bound exercises, to rather free and loose conversations supported by technology artefacts.
And this was the mindset I was in when I started my PhD. I thought of people who use technology as active, powerful and independent actors in use, who have not only the right to engage in the process of making technology, but who demand to be engaged in that process.
When I started my PhD I was supposed to involve older adults in the design of financial technologies. And being in that mindset of “user power”, I found the HCI discourse that often positions older people as fragile and helpless deeply unsatisfactory. I wanted to engage with them as powerful technology actors, but from the literature I was reading it was not clear how that could be done.
The participatory design papers I was reading were all about workshops. But my experience with workshop had been mixed. While I had enjoyed them enormously, those who took part in them looked somehow underwhelmed. They went through the activities and built things, but by the time they were finished they looked exhausted, drained, and often was not clear to them what was the purpose of all the stuff they’d done. I suspected that perhaps these participatory design workshops built on our strengths as designers, but did not necessarily built on the strengths of those who took part in them.
I wanted to engage older adults in design in their own terms, in ways that built on their strengths, and that they found satisfactory and meaningful. When thinking about what were the strengths of older adults with regards to technology, I came across this quote. That was it! These people had lots of experience in technology adoption and change! That’s what I had to leverage.
I started to look for a method that allowed me to do that and that I found to be within my means as a PhD student; and I came across the life story interview. The main characteristic of the life story interview is that it puts participants firmly in control of the research activity and the narrative. That sounded exactly what I needed. So I decided that I would ask older adults to tell me their technology stories.
To reflect the technological expertise of my participants, I broadened the scope of technology to include much more than just computers and phones. I included things like house appliances, entertainment systems, and office equipment. To communicate that scope, I collected a set of advertisements from the Internet like these ones, and printed them on cardboard, so that they looked like old postcards. The interview started by laying these images in front of people, and giving them a few minutes to look through them and select a few that were meaningful. After that, we went through the main life stages (childhood, education, work, marriage, retirement) discussing the technological artefacts they had encountered throughout their lives.
What happened was quite amazing. From warning me that they knew nothing about technology, participants quickly moved onto telling me the things that were missing from the collection of images I had given them. And after the initial awkwardness, they soon became animated and looked as if they were truly enjoying themselves. They told me the images and the conversation reminded them of things they had forgotten, and uncovered aspects of their own lives they had never thought about. So it looked like they got something out of it, and I surely did. The paper that came out of this study is by far my favourite between my publications so far. It advocates older adults’ as attentive, introspective and critical adopters of technology, and all the things designers can learn from their attitude.
I was left with the impression that there was something powerful in this idea of collecting technology stories. And so I tried it again during MozFest 2018. I set up a table at the venue and recorded passerby’s technology stories, which once again turned out to be remarkable. I haven’t had a chance to transcribe and publish those yet, but I am hoping to do that soon, and encourage others to submit their own.