It’s Friday night, and I’m chilling outside the student center at Stanford pondering my talk tomorrow. For those of you who aren’t very familiar with what’s going on, I’m attending (and presenting at) the Second Annual Online Deliberation Conference, which is also the 10th DIAC (Directions and Implications in Advanced Computing) Conference. I’m here with Dr. Robert Cavalier to present findings from my work that I’ve done on PICOLA, a multimedia tool that is used to conduct a Deliberative Poll (per Jim Fishkin’s model) in an online environment.
Phew! That was a bit condensed. What you should know is that the conference contains about 100 people from a variety of disciplines (I just met a NYU Law graduate who’s waiting to take the bar exam), who are all obsessed with using technology to make a real impact on the world. Interestingly, it’s not about a bunch of “smarter than thou” political philosophy professors trying to figure out how to make people participate in their conception of a better democracy. Instead, a lot of the talks address getting people to participate somehow, and not so much what they choose to participate in.
The quintessential example of this feeling came in a panel discussion about blogging (is it weird for me to blog about a talk on blogging?). A few people (especially the anti-bloggers) made the comment that the signal to noise ratio is so very low when it comes to blogging, so why should they even bother getting involved? After all, they don’t want to read about some teenager describing his morning tooth brushing routine in detail (this was a random example of a boring blog topic that stuck throughout the talk). One panelist in particular had so many good responses, that I want to share a couple of her ideas. Please note that these are just paraphrases unless quoted.
- Say what you will about the tooth brushing blog, but I think you’d be hard pressed to say that it’s a bad thing to have a teenager writing and expressing himself or herself. In blogging (about whatever), a teenager is expressing himself or herself, practicing writing skills, and in essence, developing their discussion skills and priorities.
- “Saying you don’t read blogs is like saying you don’t read books.” What a good point! There are crap authors and good authors, and sometimes authors write about the same topics, and sometimes ideas are stale. That doesn’t mean that all books are bad. Admittedly, it is far easier to set up a blog than it is to publish a book, but the point remains – there are some people with interesting ideas, unique stories, entertaining ramblings, and to discount all blogs is to discount their voice.
In the end, this is getting down to a fundamental question that was instilled in me far before I came to CMU. How do we make an experience with (a piece of software, a website, an application) engaging for those who use it? As we would say back at VIA Design at UNO (now called OneIP), the experience matters. The reason I’m enduring this intense program at CMU is so I can learn more about designing engaging experiences that keep my user population happy.
At first I had thought that I would be out of place at this conference. But if my hypothesis above is correct – if indeed we are aiming to design more engaging environments to promote participation – then perhaps I have more to offer here than I originally thought. Tonight, at the official conference kick-off, Robert gave a talk about PICOLA, and two other people gave talks from other angles. What fascinated me is that there was little agreement about how best to represent a discussion online. Robert mentioned how much people enjoyed using their voice rather than typing. “The computer disappeared,” he said. Meanwhile, another presenter, Vincent Price, contended that typing was better than having video / audio telepresence. “Participants say things under the cover of anonymity.” The third presenter, Beth Noveck, took what I felt was a middle-of-the-road approach. She didn’t jump on either bandwagon, instead suggesting that the important thing was to have a representation of the group itself, and to utilize technology to its full potential to aide in the visualization of the group, its processes, establishment of roles within the group, etc.
As a perpetual fence straddler, I tend to gravitate more toward Prof. Noveck’s view. Now, while my talk is relatively minor, and my attendance rate will likely be low, I’m left with a fun decision of how to incorporate these talks into my presentation. In HCI at CMU, we are taught that our users know some things very well, and other things not well at all. So, when Robert’s users told him “the computer disappeared,” and similarly when Vincent’s users told him “don’t add video or audio,” their comments were fully justified in the context of the system they were working with. However, it is very difficult for people to imagine a hypothetical system that could be better than what they were using at the time.
Maybe both Robert and Vincent are wrong (not trying to discredit my professor). Or maybe one is right, or maybe they’re both right under different contexts. However, in the beauty that is the HCI discipline, I can present contextual research that describes what the user does rather than what the user says. Based on what the user does, the designer / HCI practitioner abstracts out good design practices. Is an audio / video telepresence worthwhile? I think I’m going to take a stance on that issue, and argue against points made by my superiors. It’s a little intimidating, considering these people have gone through much more education than I have. But then, this way is bound to be a lot more fun.
