also a chain of events, of causes and consequences that may take time, in which all the active ingredients may not be obvious or clear-cut. In my life I hear discourses on impact in at least two worlds: the world of HCI education and the world of commercial technology design and development. Both worlds ask of me and of my colleagues: What impact are your creations having and, by implication, what impact are you having? The asteroid was never asked to audit and account for itself as an arbiter of change—we usually are.

 

Photohgraph by Joshua Freyenberger

At the ACM 2012 Conference on
Computer Supported Cooperative
Work (CSCW), Judy Olson from the
University of California at Irvine
gave me some food for thought. She
dedicated her speech to considering
how we, as socially oriented technol-
ogists and educators and as design-
ers, developers, and evaluators of
communication technologies, have
impact on the world [ 2]. She invited
us to consider who is affected by our
work—calling out students, devel-
opers, consultants, and users, who
may fall into specific populations
or be the general public—and on
what scale. A class that recruited one
student to a career in the field? A
technology that changed a thousand
people’s practices? A policy or stan-
dard that affected millions of peo-
ple? And in what time frame are our
insights and innovations intended to
have impact? Now? In one to three
years? In 20 to 30 years? In 40 to 50
years? Over millenia? These are all
great questions. She also asked us
to consider what is produced and
how it can have direct and indirect
effects. From her own experience as
a seasoned academic with decades
of experience, she listed:
• theories;

• assessment tools and methods;

• technologies and technological innovations;

• guidelines, templates, patterns,
toolkits, and standards; and
• policies.

There are others, of course, and the list likely depends on role and career context. For example, I often talk about various products from work done that may have an impact. In a deliberately perverse inversion of the statistical p-value, I call these the “value-p’s”: papers, presentations, prototypes, products, and patents.

While listening to Olson’s talk, I reflected that no item in this list has an impact in itself. These are things that stand in for impact. They are typically associated with activities believed to have led to impact or that will lead to impact; they are indicators of likely impact. But to

 

May + June 2012

interactions