Digital Rhetoric
James P. Zappen
Design Issues 3: Collective Intelligence and Participatory Design
A. Collective Intelligence or "The Wisdom of Crowds"
1. Collective Intelligence. "Under the right circumstances, groups are
remarkably intelligent, and are often smarter than the smartest people
in them. Groups do not need to be dominated by exceptionally intelligent
people in order to be smart. Even if most of the people within a group
are not especially well-informed or rational, it can still reach a
collectively wise decision" (xiii-xiv)
2. Conditions. "Four conditions . . . characterize
wise crowds: diversity of opinion (each person should have some private
information, even if it's just an eccentric interpretation of the known
facts), independence (people's opinions are not determined by the opinions
of those around them), decentralization (people are able to specialize
and draw on local knowledge), and aggregation (some mechanism exists
for turning private judgments into a collective decision)." (10)
3. Diversity. "Diversity helps because it actually adds perspectives
that would otherwise be absent and because it takes away, or at least
weakens, some of the destructive characteristics of group decision
making. Fostering diversity is actually more important in small groups and
in formal organizations than in the kinds of larger collectives—like
markets or electorates—that we've already talked about for a simple
reason: the sheer size of most markets, coupled with the fact that anyone
with money can enter them (you don't need to be admitted or hired),
means that a certain level of diversity is almost guaranteed. Markets,
for instance, are usually prima facie diverse because they're made up of
people with different attitudes, toward risk, different time horizons,
different investing styles, and different information." (29)
4. Illustration. "In the first stage of this process, the list of
possible solutions is so long that the smart thing to do is to send
out as many scout bees as possible. You can think of Ransom Olds and
Henry Ford and the countless would-be auto makers who tried and failed,
then, as foragers. They discovered (in this case, by inventing) the
sources of nectar—the gasoline-powered car, mass production,
the moving assembly line—and then asked the crowd to render its
verdict." (27-28)
5. Groupthink. "In the case of the Bay of Pigs
invasion, . . . the Kennedy administration planned
and carried out its strategy without ever really talking to anyone who
was skeptical of the prospects of success. The people who planned the
operation were the same ones who were asked to judge whether it would
be successful or not. The few people who voiced caution were quickly
silenced. And, most remarkably, neither the intelligence branch of the CIA
nor the Cuban desk of the State Department was consulted about the plan.
The result was a bizarre neglect of some of the most elemental facts about
Cuba in 1961, including the popularity of Fidel Castro, the strength of
the Cuban army, and even the size of the island itself." (37)
6. Independence. "Independence is important to intelligent decision
making for two reasons. First, it keeps the mistakes that people
make from becoming correlated, Errors in individual judgment won't
wreck the group's collective judgment as long as those errors aren't
systematically pointing in the same direction. One of the quickest
ways to make people's judgments systematically biased is to make them
dependent on each other for information. Second, independent individuals
are more likely to have new information rather than the same old data
everyone is already familiar with. The smartest groups, then, are made
up of people with diverse perspectives who are able to stay independent
of each other. Independence doesn't imply rationality or impartiality,
though. You can be biased and irrational, but as long you're independent,
you won't make the group any dumber." (41)
7. Illustration. "In 1968, the social psychologists Stanley Milgram,
Leonard Bickman, and Lawrence Berkowitz decided to cause a little
trouble. First, they put a single person on a street corner and had
him look up at an empty sky for sixty seconds. A tiny fraction of
the passing pedestrians stopped to see what the guy was looking at,
but most just walked past. Next time around, the psychologists put five
skyward-looking men on the corner. This time, four times as many people
stopped to gaze at the empty sky. When the psychologists put fifteen men
on the corner, 45 percent of all passersby stopped, and increasing the
cohort of observers yet again made more than 80 percent of pedestrians
tilt their heads and look up." (43)
8. Decentralization. "Decentralization's great strength is that it
encourages independence and specialization on the one hand while still
allowing people to coordinate their activities and solve difficult
problems on the other. Decentralization's great weakness is that there's
no guarantee that valuable information which is uncovered in one part of
the system will find its way through the rest of the system. Sometimes
valuable information never gets disseminated, making it less useful
than it otherwise would be. What you'd like is a way for individuals
to specialize and to acquire local knowledge—which increases the
total amount of information available in the system—while also
being able to aggregate that local knowledge and private information
into a collective whole." (71-72)
9. Aggregation. "A decentralized system can only produce genuinely
intelligent results if there's a means of aggregating the information
of everyone in the system. Without such a means, there's no reason to
think that decentralization will produce a smart result." (74)
10 Illustration. "The problem [of the U.S. intelligence community
before 9/11] was not decentralization. The problem was the kind of
decentralization that the intelligence community was practicing. On the
face of it, the division of labor between the different agencies makes
a good deal of sense. Specialization allows for a more fine-grained
appreciation of information and greater expertise in analysis. And
everything we know about decision making suggests that the more diverse
the available perspectives on a problem, the more likely it is that the
final decision will be smart . . . . What was
missing in the intelligence community, though, was any real means of
aggregating not just information but also judgments. In other words,
there was no mechanism to tap into the collective wisdom of National
Security Agency nerds, CIA spooks, and FBI agents. There was
decentralization but no aggregation, and therefore no organization."
(77-78)
James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds (New York: Random House,
Anchor Books, 2004), xiii-xiv, 10, 27-29, 37, 41, 43, 71-72, 74 77-78.
B. Participatory Design/Functional Design
1. "Computer applications that are created for the workplace need to be
designed with full participation from the users—both from a
democratic point-of-view and to insure that competencies central to the
design are represented in the design group. Full participation, of
course, requires training and active cooperation, not just token
representation in meetings or on committees. We use the term
cooperative design to designate such cooperation between users
and designers. However, to users, designing a new computer application
is a secondary activity whereas for designers it is their primary
work. This means that the designers should know how to set up the
process and need to make sure that everyone gets something out of the
interaction." (158-59)
2. "The design process highlights the issue of how computers are used
in the context of work organization. We see this question of focusing
on how computers are used, which we call the use situation, as a
fundamental focus for the design process. We put our attention on how
people work, and take the practice of the users as the starting point
for the design process." (159)
3. "Encouraging user participation and designing for skill means paying
attention to things that are often left out of the formal
specifications, like tacit knowledge or shared knowledge and
communication. Computer applications are a lot more than the simple
flow of information represented in the flowcharts that systems analysts
present to their clients. When users participate in actual design
activities it is necessary to use tools that are familiar to them.
Traditional tools such as flowcharts, dataflow diagrams, and
programming languages are insufficient (or even useless) as means for
cooperating with users." (159)
4. Future Workshops. "The Future Workshop
technique . . . is meant to shed light on a common
problematic situation, to generate visions about the future, and to
discuss how these visions can be realized . . . .
A Future Workshop is divided into three phases: the Critique, the
Fantasy, and the Implementation phase." (164-65)
5. Organizational Games. "The Organizational Game
technique . . . supports . . . alternative
work organizations by playing them out and confronting the different
problems they create . . . . The organizational
games share with future workshops the idea that the overall structure
of the game moves from the present situation, via an imagined future,
back to reality." (166-67)
6. Mock-Up Design. "Mock-ups . . . actually help
users and designers transcend the borders of reality and imagine what
is currently impossible, such as a screen of 100" with 1000 pixels per
inch. As opposed to descriptions, mock-ups remind the users of familiar
work situations . . . . Mock-ups are built with
inexpensive materials . . . . The characteristics
of these simple tools and materials are familiar to everybody in our
culture . . . . Such mock-ups lend themselves to
cooperative modifications." (168-69)
7. Cooperative Prototyping. "Cooperative
Prototyping . . . is an exploratory approach where
prototyping is viewed as a cooperative activity between users and
designers, rather than an activity of designers utilizing users' more
or less articulated requirements . . . . The
cooperative prototyping approach establishes a design process where
both users and designers are participating actively and creatively with
their different qualifications. A key point in facilitating such a
process is to let the users experience prototypes in a fluent work-like
situation." (170-71)
Susanne Bødker, Kaj Grønbæk, and Morten King,
"Cooperative Design: Techniques and Experiences from the Scandinavian
Scene," in Participatory Design: Principles and Practices,
ed. Douglas Schuler and Aki Namioka, 157-75 (Hillsdale, New Jersey:
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1993), 158-59, 164-71.
C. Participatory Design/Experience Design
1. "If participatory design is to remain relevant to novel and emerging
technologies then answers to basic questions about participation must
be sought within the context in which those technologies are designed,
built and used. These include, for example: what participation can mean
in practice; what kinds of design practices can be participated in,
and in what ways; who should, can and will participate, and when; and
who determines the conditions for involvement and decision making." (31)
2. "The objective of this project [Bystander] was to develop an
interactive, immersive interface for this collection of images and texts.
The longer-term, ongoing aim of the project is to develop a generic,
tailorable environment that can be used to display other collections in
museum and gallery environments. Bystander is a prototype for how
such an exhibition environment might be used and is intended to function
as a test-bed that supports a number of future investigations into how
different aspects of such spaces are experienced." (32)
3. "Bystander is an immersive (in the sense that the
audience is surrounded by screens and speakers), multimedia (in
the sense that image, visual text, music and aural effects are combined),
interactive (in the sense some kinds of movement made by audience
members have an effect on the visual and aural display), multi-user
(in the sense that multiple actors can interact simultaneously to exert
an aggregate effect) artwork designed for display in a gallery or museum
space." (32)
4. "The recognition that any user experience of Bystander must,
by definition, be social, 'constitutively interactive and irremediably
situated' underlies its development. Emergent cooperation among visitors
has always been desired by the project team, even if not always explicitly
addressed; it depends on common embodiment inside a space that is made
aware of a kind of summation of the presence and activity of all
those within it." (33)
5. "The default within the [Bystander production] model appears
to be a largely unquestioned assumption that user behaviour is asocial,
unsituated, disembodied and designed as much as any other aspect of the
production. There appeared to be little understanding, and initially
little interest, within the project team, that other, well-established
design traditions with well-known and well-tested design methods,
processes and expertise existed, and that these might be more appropriate
for, or at least be able to contribute to, the design of interactive
technology such as Bystander." (34)
6. "No one in the project team was interested in attempting to 'design
the user experience' of Bystander. Instead our efforts went into
designing the potentials for visitors to design their own experiences of a
heritage collection; the difference is an important one. Bystander
is emphatically not a didactic work and every effort was made by all those
involved to ensure its meanings were kept open, that those visiting the
room could decide for themselves how they participated in it, and that
the room could offer its visitors engagement in some kind of shared
experience of ongoing disclosure and reflection." (35)
7. "The limits [to the possible number of visitor actions] were not
imposed by the available technology options to sense and respond to
different visitor behaviours; instead they were defined by the power
of the images, texts and sounds to fully engage the attention of those
experiencing them, leaving little capacity for anything else to be
noticed. It was clear that explicit and/or additional interaction with
the technology could easily take over as distracting noisy chatter within
the total immersive experience that Bystander offered." (36)
8. "A series of personas was developed from the user studies to represent
the range of visitors to the spaces considered. These were compared
to, eventually combined with, those developed early in the project
from interviews with the artists. We were encouraged by the remarkable
similarities in the two sets of personas despite those people developing
the personas from user research not being aware that the original set
existed . . . . We [also] needed to develop multiple
examples of basic personas to populate the Bystander prototype over
time so that different combinations and effects could be investigated. A
range of individual characters was created for each persona. Note
that these characters were not a return to individual users but were
designed to carry the characteristics of the personas through time and
multiple instances within the testing environment." (37)
9. "The influence of other people's presence and activity in the room
on an individual audience member's experience and perception of the work
was made evident. It was clear that the presence of several other people
would be necessary for any individual to experience all aspects of the
work. This meant that the project team needed to think in terms of a
range of satisfying potential experiences for various configurations of
people in the room." (38)
10. "Clearly the political perspective of participatory design
has moved beyond the workplace along with the technology we build
and the design and disciplinary traditions we work from. For all of
us who contributed to the design and development of Bystander,
irrespective of our particular disciplinary commitments and backgrounds,
technology was always seen as being of service to the agency of the
extraordinary collection of images and texts, those whose lives are
represented to us in the photographs, and the activities and meanings that
could emerge from people's engagement with them and with each other." (39)
Toni Robertson, Tim Mansfield, and Lian Loke, "Designing an Immersive
Environment for Public Use," in Proceedings of the Ninth Conference
on Participatory Design: Expanding Boundaries in Design, Vol. 1
(2006), 31-40 (Trento, Italy, August 1-5, 2006), 31-39. Accessible via
the RenSearch ACM Digital Library.
11. "There is a growing tension . . . between a
traditional view of the media environment, including new media and
information technologies, as sites for the production, distribution,
and consumption of media products, and an alternative view that sees
the environment primarily as a venue for participation, speech,
interaction, and creativity. The first perspective understands media
technologies and content in terms of property and gatekeeping. The
alternative view considers reputation, credibility, reciprocity, trust,
and voice to be as valuable as property, and media and information
technology as opportunities to create and communicate, as well as
consume.
The tension between these two views is explicit in
the growth of oppositional and activist new media, people's uses
of media and information technologies to intervene in and respond to
mainstream, mass culture." (115)
12. "Although media and information technologies and forms tend to be
moving targets, constantly changing in response to dynamic cultural and
technological contexts, four main genres of oppositional new media have
become common recently: culture jamming, alternative
computing, mediated mobilization, and indymedia."
(117)
13. "Culture jamming . . . [is] 'media
hacking, information warfare, terror-art, and guerrilla semiotics,
all in one,' . . . 'a strategy that turns corporate
power against itself by coopting, hacking, mocking and re-contextualizing
meanings." (117)
14. "Alternative computing . . . is the province of
computer professionals who object to political or commercial restraints
on access to information and information technology, a position that
has influenced groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and
Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility. It includes critical,
but constructive, activities, such as the creation and distribution of
'free' or 'open source' software that competes with proprietary products
(e.g., Free Software Foundation); planting hidden 'Easter egg' codes
in software programs that acknowledge the contributions of otherwise
uncredited programmers; demonstrating the built-in and usually invisible
cultural and political biases of search engines, or publicly demonstrating
the susceptibility of popular software programs to viruses or security
breaches, sometimes over vendors' objections." (118)
15. "[Mediated mobilization] uses new media technologies as sites for
sociality, participation, and coordinated action. Blogs, chatrooms,
and acquaintance-based 'social software' sites like Friendster.com,
Facebook.com, and MySpace.com support networked interpersonal
interaction and the arrangement of informal 'live' meetings (for example,
participation in smart mobs or meetups for political or cultural events)."
(119)
16. "Indymedia sites, and related forms like news and opinion
blogs, and wikis, provide local news reporting, commentary, alternative
information resources, and critique of mainstream news, but are
established and run mainly by amateur or volunteer contributors rather
than professional reporters and editors." (119)
17. "Participatory design of new media and information systems
increasingly is based on reconfiguration, that is, the modification and
adaptation of technologies as needed to suit particular purposes. As
recent history demonstrates, new media and information technologies tend
to resist fixation, stabilization, and centralization. In many ways,
the ongoing process of innovation, adaptation and reinvention of new
media and information technologies distinguishes them from older mass
media systems, which are heavily capitalized, infrastructurally embedded,
more likely to have a stake in the existing technological base, and thus
less likely to innovate." (122)
18. "The lesson of oppositional and activist new media projects for
participatory design, then, is that they are indeed 'laboratories' where
users resist the fixity of traditional systems, and negotiate and shift
the boundaries of old and new media, in an ongoing process of co-optation
and reinvention. Participatory design in this environment is necessarily
recursive, in the sense that participation is both the means of designing
usable and meaningful systems and content, and because participation is
also the goal or outcome of well-designed technologies." (122)
Leah A. Lievrouw, "Oppositional and Activist New Media: Remediation,
Reconfiguration, Participation," in Proceedings of the Ninth Conference
on Participatory Design: Expanding Boundaries in Design, Vol. 1
(2006), 115-24 (Trento, Italy, August 1-5, 2006), 115, 117-19, 122.
Accessible via the RenSearch ACM Digital Library.
D. Participatory Design/Contextual Inquiry
1. "Contextual inquiry is a technique that fosters participatory
design. It provides a way for users to participate in the design of
general purpose systems. It is a technique for working with users to
help them articulate their current work practices, system practices,
and associated experiences. The technique contributes to initial design
concepts by providing an understanding of the nature of user's [i.e.,
users'] work through inquiry with users. We represent this
understanding through models of current work practice and descriptions
of fundamental work concepts that were developed through interviews
with users. This understanding is then used to design a system model
that supports user's work." (178)
2. "Walking with people through their work place and focusing them on
their concrete experiences produces concrete information. People see
something that reminds them of what worked and what did not work, and
of stories about how things happened on the last project. The things in
the environment provide the designer with opportunities to ask how
objects are used now or how artifacts were produced. The people in the
environment become the source of conversation about teamwork and
organizational culture. The set-up of the environment,office layout,
dress and degrees of neatness, lead to conversations about structure in
the organization, interpersonal work, and expectations.
Contextual inquiry focuses people on their work and
tool experience in the context of actual, ongoing work. Being present
while the person works with a tool or with others allows the designer
to witness the person's work and system experience as it occurs.
Through the use of paper prototyping in actual work contexts users can
imagine the effect of a potential system design on their work. Through
dialogue with users in their work context, we can design a usable
system work model and user interface." (184-85)
Karen Holtzblatt and Sandra Jones, "Contextual Inquiry: Participatory
Technique for System Design," in Participatory Design: Principles
and Practices, ed. Douglas Schuler and Aki Namioka, 177-210
(Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1993)., 178,
184-85.
E. Participatory Design or the Tyranny of Participation?
1. "'Participation' in development activities has been translated into
a managerial exercise based on 'toolboxes' of procedures and
techniques. It has been turned away from its radical roots: we now talk
of problem-solving through participation rather than problematization,
critical engagement and class. This limited approach to participation
gives rise to a number of critical tensions or paradoxes. While we
emphasize the desirability of empowerment, project approaches remain
largely concerned with efficiency. While we recognize the importance of
institutions, we focus attention only on the highly visible, formal,
local organizations, overlooking the numerous communal activities that
occur through daily interactions and socially embedded arrangements. A
strong emphasis on the participation of individuals and their potential
empowerment is not supported by convincing analyses of individual
positions, of the variability of the costs and benefits of
participation, of the opportunities and constraints experienced by
potential participants. The time is ripe for a critical re-analysis of
'participatory approaches.'" (53)
2. "A more dynamic vision is needed of 'institutions' and of
'community,' one that incorporates social networks and recognizes
dispersed and contingent power relations, the exclusionary as well as
the inclusionary nature of participation. We need a much better
understanding of local norms of decision-making and representation, of
how these change and are negotiated, of how people may indirectly
affect outcomes without direct participation." (54)
Frances Cleaver, "Institutions, Agency and the Limitations of
Participatory Approaches to Development," in Participation: The New
Tyranny, ed. Bill Cooke and Uma Kothari, 36-55 (London: Zed Books,
2001), 53-54.
F. Illustrations
1. National Civil Rights Museum:
http://www.civilrightsmuseum.org/
2. Life After Wartime:
http://www.lifeafterwartime.com/
3. Report: Life After Wartime:
http://www.cjc-online.ca/index.php/journal/article/viewArticle/1729/1845
Latest Update: 2011-09-26
