Interactions - November/December 2008

being anonymous; it’s about reconstructing identity in digital spaces. What qualities do people want to include as they rebuild their digital self? What do they want to leave out?

A major challenge in developing a prototype of the Swarm was to allow the user to create a digital identity that, as in real life, was not singular or static. Instead, users can take on many different personas in accordance with the nature of the activity they are conducting or the person they are interacting with. Therefore, the Swarm supports avatars that simultaneously represent the users’ multiple identities. For example, a user can set a social avatar for friends to see while simultaneously projecting a professional avatar to colleagues. Furthermore, in order to allow greater creativity when creating digital identities, the user can embed their avatar with digital content that will be revealed when it is clicked on. This can act as an incentive for those not present to join the person or allow for those who can’t be there to “get the picture.”

abstract user needs such as “identity” and “friendship.”

If we took an engineering approach to digital systems, we would ask questions about how users or systems worked. If we took a usability approach, we would ask questions about how people would understand systems and put them to use. However, both approaches leave other questions unasked. How do pages on MySpace or Facebook reflect youth subcultures? How do digital cameras change the way that people think about images? What roles do mobile phones play in people’s lives? Reflecting the idea that digital media are not simply engineering artifacts but cultural objects, these sorts of questions are the domain of cultural theory.

team, in all likelihood, their perspectives may not seamlessly align with the vision of corporate culture. So is there a middle ground between these options and the direction to go absorb Baudrillard, Deleuze and Guattari, Derrida, and Foucault?

There is, but it lies not so much in “what we should do” and more in sensitizing one’s self to cultural theory concerns about “what we should recognize” as we go about traditional ethnographic approaches. We should recognize that digital artifacts are important not so much for how they work, but for what they mean to people and for people. What we need to address is not so much how people use technology but how they live their lives through it. If there is a take-home message for design practitioners, then, it is to be aware that usability of information technologies is often secondary to their utility, and that cultural theory offers a perspective on the uses that technologies and artifacts serve for people in everyday life.

Situating Cultural Theory in a Broader Design Spectrum Cultural theory, then, offers an alternative to traditional usability approaches by focusing on the cultural contexts in which technologies are put to work, and it offers a way to understand not just how they are deployed and used but how they are experienced and understood. These glimpses of the complex forces that drive us to engage with technologies in a particular way are useful for designers wanting to move beyond “efficiency” and “function” to incorporate more

Applying Cultural Theory Our experience with the Swarm prototype demonstrates that a cultural analysis had relevance for our project. You might ask, how could it have relevance for yours? By and large, cultural theory resists easy reduction to rules of thumb and straightforward communicable “ implications for design.” There are no simple formulas or slogans. A cultural theorist could be hired as part of a commercial design team to provide insights into the forces that drive us to adopt a particular trend. Yet these insights would be inexorably entwined with the discipline’s origins in Marxist theory, meaning they would be arrived at via a searing critique of consumer culture. For this reason, although a cultural theorist could be an immensely useful addition to a commercial design

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Christine Satchell Ph.D. is a senior research fellow with creative industries at Queensland University of

Technology and an honorary research fellow with the Interaction design group at the University of Melbourne. My research is about understanding the social and cultural nuances of everyday user behavior in order to inform the design of new technology. Currently, I am part of a team focusing on the relationship between constellations of technologies including mobile devices, social networking sites, sensors, and shared displays in urban environments.