From CAD to SimCity

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From CAD to SimCity?

• Michael Twidale
• Graduate School of Library and Information
  Science
• University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
• twidale_at_illinois.edu
• www.uiuc.edu/twidale

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Who am I What do I do?

• CSCW CSCL HCI LIS Learning
• Some experience of using ethnography
• Growing interests in
• Ubicomp
• End User Software Engineering
• Fast, light research methods
• eXtreme Research?
• Interested in the point where analysis meets
  design
• Breakdowns and their multiple causes
• Confusions, irritations, lumpiness
  (non-catastrophic)
• Need to do something in new circumstances
• Learning how to use the application to get the
  job done
• Design implications for making things a bit
  better
• But the applications, the versions and the job
  all keep changing

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What I want to talk about today

• Skim through various related ideas and topics
• Helicopter View
• Some weird complicating issues and phenomena
• Metaphor use as fast light way to look at things
  in new ways and maybe get new insights
• Share not results but some provocative ways to
  look at confusing issues
• This might be mad, bad or dangerous

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Field of Dreams?

• If we build it, they will come
• A very popular claim in the early days of Digital
  Libraries
• Classic HCI/CSCW critiques
• But what do they want?
• What do they say they want?
• What do they actually currently do?
• What might they want and might they do if only
  they knew it was an option?
• What can we do for them?

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More Like The Red Queen

• They came and they are (re)building it themselves
• Or at least fiddling around with applications
• So should we stop them?
• Or help them?
• You've got to run just to stand still and if you
  want to get anywhere you have to run twice as
  fast.
• The Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland
• A sense of events whizzing past us rather than us
  creating events

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Recurrent Themes

• Social aspects to learning, adapting innovating
• Faster Lighter Provisional
• Fix as you go Plan for failure
• Dont even try to get it all right first time
• People have problems, but they cope
• Lots of unlikely people innovate with software
• Creativity by combining things together
• Use transforms the meaning of software

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Beyond Collaborative Learnability of
Applications Users dont just Use

• Learn
• Improve
• Master
• Cope
• Fix
• Adopt
• Appropriate
• Integrate
• Replace
• Create
• Fiddle
• Innovate
• Tailor
• Combine
• Share
• Discuss
• Help
• Reframe
• Well some do, but others dont so why?

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The Surprising Power of Copy-PasteOr The best
thing about Windows is the Clipboard
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Creativity By Composition Examples

• Copy Paste between applications
• Secretaries swearing they were no good at
  computers
• Its a (mental) CSCW workflow system
• Its a (manual) mashup
• Web mashup hackers OSS developers
• Programming by Google copying code
• Like trad SE code reuse but different?
• Appropriation of Web 2.0 apps in eResearch
• Blogs, wikis, calendars, filesharing, skype,
• Grey Software? (cf Grey Literature, Grey Market)

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Or From Henry Ford
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Fordist 20th Century production

• Systematisation gt massive economies of scale
• Applies to manufacturing, service industries
• software development and research
• Ex The Manhattan Project, TVA, Apollo
• Many other mega-projects, Human Genome?
• BIG Software Engineering Projects
• Infrastructures
• US Highways, The Information Superhighway The
  Internet?
• E-Science??

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To Tom Sawyer?
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Bottom-Up Methods

• Networked software lowering coordination costs
• Fast, lightweight, low cost participation
• Growing involvement as informal apprenticeship
• OSS, bulletin boards, Wikipedia, blogs, citizen
  journalism, citizen science
• Tweaking, tailoring, appropriating,
• Its already happening it could happen more
• STS design needs to consider use and context and
  change over time

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Ford v Sawyer 2 points or a line?

• When is the Ford-Sawyer continuum useful?
• Are all real STS a mixture of both?
• Is any one at different points on the continuum
  depending on where, how or what you look at?
• When should you build at what point on the line?
• Clearly cant have the OSS-Wikipedia free-for-all
  everywhere
• Are there other useful continua?
• More aspects of these metaphors?
• Other metaphors to play with?

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Metaphor Its like a lever for the mind

• Metaphors as microscopes and screwdrivers for
  analysis and interpretation
• Not necessarily just a crutch for the user
• Can reveal assumptions about envisaged use
  meaning
• Which metaphors do designers and analysts use?
• Explicit and implicit
• Powerful but dangerous tools
• Software Engineering
• Metaphors frame the way we see the picture
• Creativity generators X-Ray Specs
• Blinkers
• even when they are implicit

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Software Development is like Architecture?
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Architecture

• Patterns (Alexander)
• Layers (Duffy, Brand)
• Changing Use (Brand How buildings learn)
• Standards, Codes
• Pedagogy
• Requirements elicitation from clients
• Design processes
• Creativity and tradeoffs under constraint
• Project management, contracting
• Assembling a big complicated thing from scratch
  through sketches and models and refinements

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Software Development is like Urban Planning?
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Urban Planning

• Different kinds
• Radical, permissive, conservative, expansionist
• Green field, Brown field, Preservationist, New
  Urbanist, Green
• Permit, Deny, Enforce Standards, Verify
• Zoning
• Just build a few things
• Infrastructure
• Pump-priming initiatives
• Hands off
• Facilitate, Dont micro-manage

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Urban Planner as Strategist Different SE STS
themes?

• Coordinate the politics of different stakeholder
  interests
• Deal with interactions between elements
• Handle externalities
• Long term vision
• Addressing changing needs and uses over time
• Legacy of history
• Disaster planning
• Prevent, mitigate, cope, recover, rebuild
• Revitalisation
• Bring people inside the analysis and models Sims
• And more ?

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But the metaphor isnt perfect DIY
housebuilding???

• Most people cant program
• Many who can, cant do it well
• Of the rest, for many it is a poor use of their
  time
• So how do we design to support innovation at
  different levels of technical sophistication?
• Sounds doomed, but consider
• Spreadsheets
• Email
• HTML
• Blogs, wikis, flickr, yahoo groups, etc.

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Possible other metaphors to fiddle around with

• Cathedral
• Bazaar
• Market
• Shopping mall
• Movie production
• Theatre building
• Orchestra conductor
• Production line
• Quality circle
• Bureaucracy
• Ecosystem
• Rain Forest
• Cornfield
• Soviet Command Economy
• Onion
• Genetics
• Citations
• Paper
• Office supplies

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So is this metaphor stuff helpful?

• Can we spot the explicit and implicit metaphors
• In our designs?
• In our analyses?
• Do things change when we play with new metaphors?
• Does it help raise interesting research questions
  about
• Observation
• Analysis
• Design
• Intervention
• Is it effective and efficient in giving insights?
• Is it worth spending a few hours on?
• Is it a good creativity generator?

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Questions

• How much do we need to attend to all this
  innovating, tweaking, appropriating, combining
  and reframing of software?
• Other examples of this kind of thing?
• What about safety, security, time-criticality,
  reliability?
• Does it scale?
• Does it happen with big software projects too?
• Is Software Engineering only concerned with big
  difficult projects?
• Is this an instance of The Innovators Dilemma?
• Retreating up the quality curve
• How can we combine the best of the top-down and
  bottom-up approaches?

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Conclusion

• People learn, help, cope, innovate etc.
• The abundance of software and access supports
  greater innovation by combination
• These changes in use and meaning are part of the
  sociotechnical system particularly the extent
  to which it evolves and adapts to changing
  situations
• Thinking about this squishy mutating blob is
  tricky
• Maybe metaphors can give viewpoints with which to
  triangulate the issue