Don Norman, Bruce Sterling, The Attention Economy

Over at uiGarden.net Don Norman clarified some of his ideas regarding Activity Centered Design originally published in the summer of 2005.

I'd like to be comfortable saying that I'm with Don in spirit while disagreeing on some of the particulars, but I've read both the original essay and the clarifications twice, and the ideas and the messages are still too raw to support proper reactions or to fully digest. Maybe Don's working on a new book, and this is interim thinking?

That might explain why the contrast between Norman's two recent pieces and Bruce Sterling's Shaping Things - which also is a sort of design philosophy / manifesto - is so dramatic. Halfway throught Shaping Things, I'm left - as I usually am when reading Sterling's work - feeling envious that I wasn't gifted the same way.

Sterling is speaking at ETech, which this year focuses on The Attention Economy. No surprises with this matchup, given that Sterling's devoted a whole book - Distraction - to some of the same ideas proponents of the Attention Economy advocate we use as references when designing the future.

local tags: attention_economy design futurism manifesto sterling theory

Mental Models, Resilience, and Lotus Notes

Several very unpleasant experiences I've had with the Lotus Notes webmail client during the past few weeks have brought up some questions about mental models; specifically how users respond to challenges to their mental models, and how resilience plays a part in how changes to mental models occur.

The IAWiki defines a mental model as, "a mental model is how the user thinks the product works." This is a simplified definition, but it's adequate for the moment. For a deeper exploration, try Martina Angela Sasse's thesis
Eliciting and Describing Users' Models of Computer Systems.

In this case, the model and the challenge are straightforward. My mental model of the Notes webmail client includes the understanding that it can send email messages. The challenge: the Lotus webmail client cannot send email messages - at least not as I experience it.

Here's what happens my mental model and my reality don't match:

1. I log in to my email client via Firefox - the only browser on the Mac that renders the Notes webmail client vaguely correctly - (I'm using webmail because the full Notes client requires VPN, meaning I'm unable to access anything on my local network, or the internet, which, incidentally, makes it difficult to seem like a credible internet consultant.) again, because it's frozen and crashed my browser in the past ten minutes.
   
2. I realize I need to respond to an email


3. I do not remember that the Notes webmail client is incapable of sending out email messages


4. I open a new message window, and compose a chunk of semi-grammatical techno-corporate non-speak to communicate a few simple points in blame-retardant consultantese


5. I attempt to send this email


6. I am confronted with a cryptic error message via javascript prompt, saying something like "We're really sorry, but Domino sucks, so you can't send out any messages using your email client."


7. Over the span of .376 seconds, I move through successive states of surprise, confusion, comprehension, frustration, anger, resentment, resignation, and malaise (actually, mailaise is more accurate.)


8. I swear: silently if clients are within earshot, out loud if not


9. I switch to gmail, create a new message, copy the text of my message from the Notes webmail window to Gmail, and send the message to some eagerly waiting recipient


10. I close the Notes webmail client, and return to business as usual.


11. I forget that the Notes webmail client cannot send email messages.

Despite following this same path three times per day, five days each week, for the past five weeks, (for a total of ~75 clear examples), I am always surprised when I can't send a message. I'm no expert on Learning theory but neither lack of attention nor stubbornness explain why seventy-five examples aren't enough to change my model of how Notes works.

Disciplines including systems theory, biology, and sociology use a concept called resilience. In any stable system, "Resilience generally means the ability to recover from some shock, insult, or disturbance." From an ecological perspective, resilience "is a measure of the amount of change or disruption that is required to transform a system." The psychological view emphasizes "the ability of people to cope with stress and catastrophe."

Apparently, the resilience of my model for email clients is high enough to withstand considerable stress, since - in addition to the initial catastrophe of using Notes itself - seventy-five consecutive examples of failure to work as expected do not equal enough shock, insult, and disturbance to my model to lead to a change my in understanding.

Notice that I'm using a work-around - switching to Gmail - to achieve my goal and send email. In
Resilience Management in Social-ecological Systems: a Working Hypothesis for a Participatory Approach , Brian Walker and several others refine the meaning of resilience to include, "The degree to which the system expresses capacity for learning and adaptation." This accounts nicely for the Gmail work-around.

I also noticed that I'm relying on a series of assumptions - email clients can send messages; Notes is an email client; therefore, Notes can send messages - that make it logical to use a well established model for email clients in general to anticipate the workings of Notes webmail in particular. In new contexts, it's easier to borrow an existing model than develop a new one. In short order, I expect I'll change one of the assumptions, or build a model for Notes webmail.

Here's a few questions that come to mind:

1. What factors determine the resilience of a mental model?


2. How to measure resiliency in mental models?


3. What's the threshold of recovery for a mental model?


4. Put another way, what's required to change a mental model?

Based on a quick review of the concept of resilience from several perspectives, I'm comfortable saying it's a valuable way of looking at mental models, with practical implications for information architects.

Some of those implications are:

1. Understand the relevance of existing mental models when designing new systems


2. Anticipate and plan the ways that users will form a mental model of the system


3. Use design at multiple levels to further the formation of mental models


4. Understand thresholds and resilience factors when challenging existing mental models

From a broader view, I think it's safe to say the application of systems theory to information architecture constitutes an important area for exploration, one containing challenges and opportunities for user experience practitioners in general, and information architects in particular.

Time to close this post before it gets too long.

Further reading:

Bio of Ludwig Bertalanffy, important contributor to General System Theory.

Doug Cocks Resilience Alliance

Garry Peterson's blog Resilience Science

local tags: lotusnotes mental_models resilience social_systems ux

The Tag Wars: Clay Shirky and Technological Utopianism

Looks like Dave Sifry at Technorati has drunk the Clay Shirky Koolaid on tagging and social bookmarking. Here's something from Dave's posting State of the Blogosphere, August 2005, Part 3: Tags, that shows he's clearly joined the academy of received ideas.

"Unlike rigid taxonomy schemes that many people dislike using, the ease of tagging for personal organization with social incentives leads to a rich and discoverable system, often called a folksonomy. Intelligence is provided by real people from the bottom-up to aid social discovery. And with the right tag search and navigation, folksonomy may outperform more structured approches to classification, as Clay Shirky points out..."

I'm disappointed to see this. The quality level of Shirky's thinking and writing related to tagging is generally low; too often he's so completely off the mark with much of what he's said about tagging, social bookmarking, and categorization in general that his main contribution is in lending a certain amount of attention by virtue of name recognition to a subject that used to be arcane.

There's little need to rehash the many, many individual weaknesses in Shirky's writings, just one example of which is his establishment of a false dichotomy separating structured categorization systems and social tagging practices. Broadly, his approach and rhetoric show strong influence from anarchism, and utopian social theory.

From Shirky:
"There is no fixed set of categories or officially approved choices. You can use words, acronyms, numbers, whatever makes sense to you, without regard for anyone else's needs, interests, or requirements."

Further, "...with tagging, anyone is free to use the words he or she thinks are appropriate, without having to agree with anyone else about how something "should" be tagged."

Building back on the criticique of computerization, it's clear that Shirky uses rhetorical strategies and positions from both technological utopianism and anti-utopianism.

Here's Professor Rob Kling on technological utopianism:
"Utopian images are common in many books and articles about computerization in society
written by technologists and journalists. I am particularly interested in what can be learned,
and how we can be misled, by a particular brand of utopian thought -- technological
utopianism. This line of analysis places the use of some specific technology, such as
computers, nuclear energy, or low-energy low-impact technologies, as key enabling
elements of a utopian vision. Sometimes people will casually refer to exotic technologies --
like pocket computers which understand spoken language -- as "utopian gadgets."
Technological utopianism does not refer to these technologies with amazing capabilities. It
refers to analyses in which the use of specific technologies plays a key role in shaping a
benign social vision. In contrast, technological anti- utopianism examines how certain broad
families of technology are key enablers of a harsher and more destructive social order."

That Shirky would take speak from this standpoint is not a surprise; he's identified as a "Decentralization Writer/Consultant" in the description of his session "Ontology is Overrated: Links, Tags, and Post-hoc Metadata" at etech, and it's clear that he's both technologist and a journalist, as Kilng identifies.

Regardless of Shirky's bias, there is a bigger picture worth examining. Tagging or social bookmarking is one potential way for the community of social metadata system users to confront problems of individual and group information overload, via a collective and nominally unhierarchical approach to the emergent problem of information management across common resources (URIs).

local tags: futurism hierarchy library_science metadata shirky social_informatics social_systems tagging utopianism