Interactions - January/February 2010

OPINION Ps AND Qs

scientists who address the physical and/or social constraints of settings, about the factors beyond the interface, application, device or appliance that would be the major part of why it would be adopted or abandoned. I was talking about how whatever we propose could fit into people’s social context, into how they manage their everyday doings. I was thinking about people, about relationships and friendships, and about the contexts that we inhabit and cocre-ate as we move through daily life. I was hoping to explore the options and hone in on possible social settings that would afford, support, and allow a technology to be used. I was talking about delivering value in situ without disrupting the situ—or at least giving some thought to designing ethically; to considering the positive versus negative knock-on effects—any disruptions to the social status quo we wanted to inspire and those we did not. I was talking about social norms in the places people frequent— whether or not, for example, it would be socially acceptable to whip out said devices and applications in public.

I am not saying we should have
indulged in an infinite regress
into consequences of every
design decision, but I am saying
it is worth engaging in chain-
reaction thinking. I was inviting
us to elaborate the potential
design spaces, where there would
be something useful for people,
before we start coming up with
specific solutions. It seemed to
me that we needed to under-
stand what we were designing
for before we starting design-
ing. I was trying not to be Rube
Goldberg or Heath Robinson—
whose love of the engineered
artifact gives us fantastic con-
traptions that maybe, perhaps,
get the job done but in the most
circuitous manner possible, hon-
oring the engineering over and
above utility, aesthetics or the
social/physical context of use.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Elizabeth Churchill is a principal research scientist at Yahoo! Research leading research in social media. Originally a psychologist by training, for the past 15 years she has studied and designed technologies for effective social connection. At Yahoo, her work focuses on how Internet applications and services are woven into everyday lives. Obsessed with memory and sentiment, in her spare time Elizabeth researches how people manage their digital and physical archives. Elizabeth rates herself a packrat, her greatest joy is an attic stuffed with memorabilia.