A taste of my academic writing
My PhD update / writing-interlude continues...
Happy Saturday!
Full disclosure: My stockpile of scheduled substack posts has admittedly run dry. I’ve had less downtime for personal writing this past couple of weeks.
While I playing catch up with my writing, I’d like to share the writing that’s been distracting me from my writing.
The below is a “reading reflection” I wrote this week for my class this semester called “Introduction to Human Centered Computing” (syllabus). I have lecture for this class on Mondays and Wednesdays at 9:30am (oof :D). Before each class, we are expected to complete two readings (usually about 40-60 pages each), and know one of them well enough to lead a class discussion. To aid this prep, we write a reflection on the reading we chose, tying in other concepts we’ve learned so far in the course.
Reading this reflection again (but through your (i.e. you-reading-this’) eyes is fascinating. What’s come up for me is that…
The concepts you’ll read about below did not exist to me three weeks ago. So I don’t think I would have understood 50-60% of this essay. You shouldn’t either. I just want to give an idea of how academics in this space are talking to each other.
I’m now able to critically engage with these texts, which feels really cool. And by “critically engage” I mean that I’m able to take a reading by a super famous scholar in the field (i.e. ~the Dr. Michael Jordans of the field of basketballology~) and make a new insight or critique about their work that they probably would find interesting.
Unfortunately, the language and concepts in the field of Human Centered Computing are pretty esoteric and sometimes unclear, which has warranted a lot of internal and external criticism from scholars because what’s the point of doing research on the human experience if humans don’t understand it?
With that preamble, I present one of my very first short essays / reflections as a new member of the HCI community of practice:
Title: Narrative Inquiry is a Methodology that Makes “Seams” Visible
Course: Introduction to Human Centered Computing
Prompt: Share a summary and reflection of the chapter “Tools and Techniques” in the 2013 Handbook on Participatory Design. Tie in other readings we have covered so far and share your own reflections.
Reflection: In this essay, I first summarize “Tools and Techniques: ways to engage telling, making and enacting” by Eva Brandt, Thomas Binder and Elizabeth B.-N. Sanders in Simonsen & Robertson’s 2013 Handbook on Participatory Design (Simonsen & Robertson, 2012). Second, I look specifically at “telling” and, within it, fictional narratives. Finally, I reflect on how fictional narratives relates to the idea of seamfulness. I propose that fictional inquiry prompts participants to notice seams – or the spaces of incongruence or difficulty in their collaborative environments (Vertesi, 2014). I wonder if – when telling fictional narratives – the seams of their current reality become more visible to participants because it is mentally compared to an idealized, seamless reality.
Tools and Techniques of Participatory Design
In “Tools and Techniques”, Brandt, Binder, and Sanders offer the tell-make-enact framework to guide participatory designers in creating and implementing tools and techniques when supporting their participants. Examples of participatory design techniques include ethnography, acting out scenarios, or participants physically building their own tools (e.g. an amputee using paper dolls to imagine their ideal prosthetic). The authors contrast approaches that integrate telling, making, and enacting to more prescriptive and potentially constricting tools and approaches that already exist. The primary advantage of this framework is that it encourages a “participatory design mindset” which inspires the proliferation of novel tools and techniques in the context of new design problems and never-before-seen community needs and characteristics.
Fictional Narratives as a Participatory Design Technique
In the first section of the chapter, on “telling”, the authors discuss a tool calling “fictional narratives” or “fictional inquiry”. One example they use is asking librarians to imagine their work environment as a factory or a storage facility. By doing so, the librarians can reflect on their day-to-day practices in new ways and notice how their current context is unique to other work environments. This method also gives the librarians a common language to discuss their day-to-day, lubricating their discussion to enable co-building ideas of a shared future. Their assumptions about what is “normal” are challenged, allowing “new normals” or imagined futures. In engaging with these metaphors, the librarians can now see some of the previously “invisible” aspects of their work that might be redesigned.
Librarians’ Metaphors & the Lens of Seamfulness
Vertesi (2014) has given researchers the analytical vocabulary of “seams” to describe the “invisible” collisions, overlaps, and interdependencies of day-to-day work. For example, a “seam” is revealed when a work colleague must use an adapter for their Apple-built computer so that it functions with the Microsoft-built hardware in the office. Typically, the seam is not apparent until someone encounters a challenge in which a process does not work as expected.
I propose that we look at the fictional inquiry that the librarians engaged in using Vertesi’s vocabulary. In the same way that we understand Mac, Microsoft, and the workplace better when there is a mismatch, the librarians understand the library, the factory, and their workplace experience better by noticing mismatches between the two contexts.
I will take us through an example: In the fictional inquiry exercise, the librarians are comparing their workspace to that of a factory. The librarians might notice that the library is analogous to a factory in that they – like factory workers - follow a standard procedure for importing, organizing, and exporting materials. They may also notice that the library is different from a factory in that their customer is inside of the building instead of outside of the building; making it important that the space is not only usable to the workers (i.e. the librarians) but also to the customers (i.e. the library patrons).
Does fictional inquiry reveal seams?
In summary, I add to Brandt, Binder, and Sanders’ analysis by suggesting that the effectiveness of the narrative inquiry approach is not only due to its ability to prompt the imagination of participants but also in the way that it juxtaposes two contexts, reveals the “seams” between them, and therefore makes the invisible aspects of participants’ environments visible.