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An Ecological Approach to Design: netWORK and

ContactMap

- Using Ethnography to Design Software Systems and Services

[ Based on Slides of Bonnie A. Nardi AT&T Labs-West

nardi@research.att.com www.nardi/best.com/default.html]

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Some “E” Definitions

• Ecology: The science of relationship between organism and their environment.

• Ecological: – of or relating to ecology

– Tending or intended to benefit or protect the environment

• Ecosystem: An ecological community together with its environment, functioning as a unit.

• Ethnography: The branch of anthropology that deals with the scientific description of specific human cultures.

(source: http://www.thefreedictionary.com)

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Connecting with Users/Customers

• Lots of ways:

– surveys

– focus groups

– logging phone, internet use

– lab-based experiments

• Useful for many purposes, but don’t impart a sense of users’ everyday experience and context

• Ecological design

– users in their native habitats

– what problems and opportunities might we find out about?

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This Lecture

• Discussion of ecological design, esp. ethnographic methods

• Specific application of ecological design:

– the netWORK study

– the ContactMap prototype

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Ecological Design: Leveraging the Local and the Global

Local: Consider as a single analytical unit, local systems of:peoplepracticestechnologiesvalues

· e.g., lifelong learning, efficiency, profit, patient care, customer care, privacy, open access to information,.....

· local “ecosystems,” e.g., offices, homes, schools, hospitals...

Global: Consider, as a backdrop, larger socioeconomic context in which people work and play · trends in global economy and society as they impinge

on customers or users

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MIT Press, 1999

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Nuts and Bolts:Six Step Process of Ecological Design

1a. Ethnographic studies of user activity· rich, nuanced, subtle descriptions of activity in local

settings

1b. Clues about larger socioeconomic context

2. Analyze data to identify gaps and problems in practice

3. Dream up ideas for technologies/services to meet real human needs

4. Prototype technologies· diverse ecology of designers

computer scientists, social scientists, artists...

5. Get very early feedback on prototypes

6. Iterate design

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What is ethnography?

• Most closely associated with anthropology, but also sociology

• Ethnography is an approach for developing understandings of the everyday activities of people in local settings

• Ethnography’s Project: enable conversations across social and cultural boundaries between people quite different from one another

– Software developer trying to understand users (customers)

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Principles of ethnography

• Holism

– focus on relations among activities and not on single tasks or single isolated individuals

– everything connected to everything else

• Natives’ point(s) of view

– how people see their own worlds

– opportunity to engage with customers

• Study people in their native habitats

– e.g., home, office, school, library, hospital, community...

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Ethnographic Methods

• In-depth interviews in context

• Observation

• Participant-observation

Intensive interactions

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But there’s no time!

• Feed results back to developers as work progresses

• Become part of the cycle of iteration

• Get 4-6 weeks up front to do some initial in-depth work

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Advantages

• Deeper, more nuanced understandings

• More ecological validity– Represent what’s really going on in some everyday

setting– What’s meaningful to people

• (disconnect between e.g., survey questions... and how people think about things)

• Respect for complexity of human activity

• Design for human needs; reflect users’ own issues and everyday problems

• Cheaper to do it right the first time– considering the cost of launching a new product

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Disadvantages

• Seeing the world in a single grain of sand

– comparative work needed

– build from multiple cases

• Ethnography in a mobile, distributed world

– it’s easier when the natives sit still, but we have to modify our methods and perspectives...

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The NetWORK Study and ContactMap:

• Work undertaken jointly with

– Steve Whittaker - AT&T Labs-Research - Florham Park, NJ

– Ellen Isaacs - AT&T Labs-Research - Menlo Park, CA

– Rebecca Nagel, AT&T Labs, Menlo Park, CA

– Heinrich Schwarz - Science, Society and Technology, MIT

– Erin Bradner - University of California, Irvine

– John Hainsworth, Princeton University

– Mike Creech, Jeff Johnson (independent consultants)

• Perspectives: psychology, anthropology, computer science, art

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Step 1a.. Ethnographic Study of Communication Activity Across Organizational Boundaries

• Beyond teams

– Customer-vendor relationships

– Partnering, alliances across companies

– Facilitators between and within organizations

– High level managers

– Experts, e.g., patent attorneys, reference librarians, HR

– Contractors, consultants

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Methods

• Lengthy open-ended audiotaped interviews– 1000 pages transcript

• Questions:– What do you do?

– Who do you do it with?

– What technologies do you use?

• Observations

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Sample: 22 People in 12 companies

• Public relations

• Law

• Management

• Creative media (Web design, commercials)

• High tech

• Telecommunications

Technically savvy, use lots of technology, work across organizational boundaries

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Step 1b. Context: The New Economy

• Constant change in organizations

– downsizing, merging, partnering, reorging, outsourcing….

• People’s personal social networks important under conditions of organizational change, instability due to changing nature of global economy

– anchors in people’s worklives, careers

• netWORK

– create, maintain, activate personal social networks

• Networking isn’t new (Webster’s 1940) but intensified in today’s economy

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Why netWORK?

• netWORK needed to be effective:

– to yourself for career

– to your organization for information gathering and labor recruitment

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Distributed Work:Working Across Organizational Boundaries

Home Team

Contractors

Customers and Clients

Consultants

Rest oforganization

Outsourcedservice providers

Vendors

Colleaguesin Other

OrganizationsFundingAgencies

VentureCapital

Temps

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Step 2. Gaps and Problems in Practice

• NetWORK a kind of invisible, unaccounted-for work

– not in performance evaluations, workflow diagrams, timesheets, social science theories...

• But users have to devote time and energy to it

• netWORK activities

– create personal social network

– maintain personal social network

– activate personal social network

– control own presence in personal social network• e.g., am I available, and if so, to whom?

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Publications

• A Networker’s Work is Never Done: Joint Work in Intensional Networks. B. Nardi, S. Whittaker, H. Schwarz. Forthcoming in CSCW.

• Nardi, B., Whittaker, Steve, Schwarz, Heinrich.. It's Not What You Know, It's Who You Know: Work in the Information Age. First Monday, May, 2000 (firstmonday.org)

• Know Who You Know, ComputerWorld, September 4, 2000.

– article by Mat Schwartz on ContactMap

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Specific Problems

• Remembering who’s in the social network

– who they are

– their details

– current whereabouts and activities

• Using multiple communication media easily

• Remembering which documents have been exchanged when

• Remembering task status

• Getting awareness information for non-colocated contacts

– could be next floor or building, or next continent

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Step 3. Ideas for Technologies/Services:ContactMap

• Redesign the desktop to reflect people in user’s social network rather than lists, hierarchies, folders

• Visualize the user’s personal social network

– individuals, groups

• Provide unifying interface for communication and information

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What You Do in ContactMap

• Initiate communications

– click to dial

– email

– instant messaging

– video

– fax....

• Find documents associated with a contact (to and from)

– email, graphics files, text files, web pages...

• See reminders

• See availability of others (“activity meters”)

• Initially populate ContactMap through analysis of contacts in email folders (maybe later phone logs)

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Big (ecological) picture here

• Most desktop redesigns don’t consider communication as a central fact of digital life– document-centric

• Lifestreams (product from Yale research)• Presto (Xerox PARC)

– but cell phones, pagers, pdas, electronic books, computers are all merging (above only for computers)

– ContactMap intended to integrate (somehow) with other device interfaces

• Our Step 1 research gave us the idea for a nexus where we can meaningfully bring together information and communication, i.e., personal social networks

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Step 5. Early User Feedback

• Provide easy ways to create user-defined clusters of contacts– typical clusters are family, friends, project-n, project-n+1,

old workplace, old workplace n-1....

Step 6. Iterate…

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Future ContactMap• How will people use this social desktop for everyday work to manage

communications with their contacts and organize their data?; • How might it support network growth and complexity, preserving the overall spatial

consistency and spatial workspace users want?; • How might it support task specific views of the network, along with the ability to

hide more peripheral contacts from default views?;• How far might it push the communication-centric model to include information?; • How might it accommodate information users not associated with a specific• person or group?; • How might it make it easier for people to get access to one another’s photos so they

more easily bring their contact maps to life?; • How should ContactMap evolve so that it can be used on cell phones and personal

digital assistants?;• How might it subsume information in personal information manager software?; and, • How might it enable the sharing of contact information so users readily share their

contacts (while addressing related privacy concerns)?[source: Integrating Communication and Information Through ContactMap, April

2002/Vol. 45, No. 4 COMMUNICATIONS OF THE ACM]