Think about how narrow their experience is and how little they know about the world. Then spend a minute imagining doing what you like to do, be it researching, writing, lecturing, teaching or doing analysis, or even something completely different. Then imagine all the other places in the world that kind of work happens. Yes, you can leave the university and yes, you can be happy.

I’m happy to share my experiences because I genuinely want others to recover from the trauma that academia leaves on their souls. Yes, I said trauma.

Take a look at the whole post.

My goal of the lecture is to show the students – many of whom are already working in professional capacities – that social research can and should play a significant role in the business world. More specifically, I plan to show them how ethnography is an ideal method not just to gather insight, but to “de-centre” themselves and put the customer at the centre of their enterprise.

Just using social research alone will not guarantee this epistemological shift.

Social researchers often approach product design research as an opportunity to flex their methodological muscles, not to understand or empathize with the customer. Perhaps because they wish to differentiate themselves from “mere designers,” social researchers such as sociologists, anthropologists and human computer interaction scientists, tend to employ advanced and complex methods to determine “significance” of a particular product feature. A case in point is the “time to completion” metric often employed by usability researchers. This metric is often stripped of all contextual meaning, and the focus becomes the metric itself. It offers no insight into the user’s actual interpretation of that experience, whether it is meaningful, useful or delightful. Yet, you will see “time to completion” metrics in private-sector usability studies, and countless published papers.

I avoid these kinds of decontextualizing methods in my practice, in part because I find them ineffective, but more importantly because I find them inconsistent with deep empathy with potential product users. What must one really understand to make great products? One must understand context, history, culture. In other words, one must be open to what potential product users themselves are thinking, rather than cramming a method on top of their experience and using it as the interpretive frame.  Choosing to use a more contextual research method is more skillful, empathetic, and selfless. It may not offer fancy calculations or complex interpretations, but it is absolutely more practical.

This is the orientation underneath my upcoming book Practical Ethnography, which is called “practical,” for a very good reason. It refers to Heidegger’s zen-informed, anti-modern conception of our modern world. In a sense, it is a concerted rejection of the “specialists’ world” which seeks methodological flourish over participants’ needs, desires, and mindsets.

In my lecture, I’ll talk about Heidegger’s idea of “being practical” versus “being theoretical.” (As an aside, Nassim Taleb takes up these ideas in his current book Anti-Fragile; he has little time and much disdain for “Harvard Business professors” who have never managed a business in their lives. Talk about “being theoretical”!)

Heidegger argues that “being theoretical” is to use ideas that you have purposefully chosen as being part of a specialists’ world.  You bring with you a set of beliefs as a researcher, for example, that brings you to a narrow, focused understanding of a particular phenomenon. You have chosen to measure “time to completion” because this metric has currency within your discipline. It makes sense to other researchers but very little to actual users.  For Heidegger, that narrowing is the problem. You are unable to “open worlds” and see only a tiny sliver of the phenomenon at hand.

Scholar Carole Steiner has an excellent (albeit very challenging) article on how this approach stunts innovation. Social scientists themselves are “being theoretical” in their research, she argues, because their theoretical knowledge limits their investigations. As researchers, we fail to “de-centre” ourselves and “re-centre” the participants. The result, she argues, is a stilted, overly specialized approach which ultimately fails to provide either human insight or innovation.

Instead, we should aspire to techne which refers to the original Greek work that roughly translates as “know-how.” A techne way of knowing the world does not involve disinterested knowledges or theories, but contextually defined understandings of our surroundings. As Heidegger explained, objects have “assignments,” or the historical imprints objects impress upon each other. Objects make sense together. They derive meaning from each other and their placements in relation to each other. Objects also have “involvements” or functions and uses made meaningful through human involvement.  The “assignments” shape and influence the human “involvements.” We make sense of objects through intuiting their assignments. We give objects “involvements” or possible human uses through our interactions with them.

We do not “make” assignments or involvements; they are revealed to us. We are thrown into this world which is already populated with objects and people. We do not make this world. It is revealed to us. Objects’ historical significances are revealed to us through their connections to other objects and their possible functions we infer therefrom. In this sense, Heidegger argues that we should be passive receivers of knowledge like assignments and involvements. This is what he means by “Da-sein” which could be translated as “be there.” We must simply be in the world and thereby understand its meaning.

We cannot “know” attachments and involvements without interacting with objects. We cannot “make” these by forcibly creating an object to have particular functions or uses. All objects have assignments and involvements that have little to do with purposive human activity, and more to do with historical human experience.

In short, no object emerges without assignments or involvements, pure and unencumbered. No object is an island. All objects are inextricably linked to other objects and to us.

We would do well, Steiner argues, if we approach research with this idea held firmly in our minds. We must approach the topic of our research with the logic of techne. This means that we see objects in our social world as necessarily embedded within their contexts. We must pay attention to its holistic and historical position. It is not sufficient for social scientists to occupy the world of the specialist; that would be “being theoretical” because it does not appreciate the world in its historical nature.

As Steiner writes:

[Social researchers]….cannot…be described as being practical just because they use equipment, have professional practices or do practical things: to Heidegger, they can only be practical, when they involve themselves with the complex relatedness of the historical, public world that is open to non-scientists, non researchers (Steiner, 1999, p. 592)

It is this appreciation of the public world that allows us to design and build great products. We must be engaged with assignments and involvements, and we cannot do this if we do not reflect on our participants’ worlds, rather than our own specialist ideas such as time to completion. To focus so narrowly means poorly conceived products. But worse, it can even trigger existential crises.

In fact, once we enter the specialists’ world, we risk total meaninglessness. As Wrathall has argued, this is Heidegger’s interpretation of what Nietzsche meant when he said “God is dead.” This is how God has died; we no longer have a fixed point of reference for meaning but are instead set adrift in a sea of disconnected objects, severed from their meaningful places in the world. Researchers could be complicit in such existential violence if they fail to re-contextualize their research. Product designers too would be mindlessly creating objects that pile up metaphorically and literally because they have no meaningful place in the world. One could argue this is the true root cause of over-consumption.

The Heideggerian approach is not new to product design research. Dotov and Chemero have used this approach in a usability-influenced study of computer users. They found that technology that “broke” suddenly became apparent to users. Johnson takes up in his article on user-centred design (UCD). He argues that UCD, ironically, has a deeply impoverished conception of use. He suggests we recover the word techne from its original Greek, which would include not just the technology itself, but also the know-how of putting it to use and the context in which we use it. In other words, to be better user-centred designers, we must know the attachments and involvements of potential objects that we bring into being. We must know their context.

This is the heart of my theoretical justification for ethnography in general and Practical Ethnography in particular. In the rest of the lecture, I’ll provide examples of how impoverished other methods are when attempting to understand attachments and involvements. I’ll also offer case studies from my own practice.

If you’re over 20, chances are you’ve never even heard of Snapchat, yet it’s one of the fastest growing social media apps we have. I argue that Snapchat is growing so quickly because it offers us something we desperately need but do not have: a way to deal with the routine embarrassments our socially enhanced Web spits back at us everyday. We lack the “intellectual technology” that would provide us socially adroit online interaction. Instead we have technology that ignores decades of sociological work on identity.  For this reason, Snapchat and other ephemeral content tools, such as the new Detour App will fill the gap.

Creating “Intellectual Technologies”

We could never have moved from producing goods to producing services without what sociologist Daniel Bell called “intellectual technologies.” In The Coming of The Postindustrial Society, Bell argued that the intellectual technologies of probability theory and statistical analysis allowed us to understand and manage new kinds of production that did not involve widgets. We could not offer marketing services without first having a way to think about and analyze the “average consumer.” We needed a set of tools to help us conceive of the symbolic world, and particularly the nature of social life

The Intellectual Technology of “normal”

The intellectual technologies of probability theory paved the way for digital technologies, such as the now ubiquitous spreadsheet, which uses statistical algorithms. But tools like Excel would not be possible were it not for intellectual technologies such as demographic variables, conceived through the lens of analysis of variance, confidence intervals, and regression analysis. Were it not for these intellectual technologies, insight into the aggregate social world still be unknown, and services such as policy analysis, marketing, and public relations would not have been possible. We are in need of a similar set of intellectual technologies for this century’s current conundrum: how to manage multiple social spheres at the same time.

The New Intellectual Technologies of Privacy and Identity

We are in dire need of intellectual technologies relating to privacy and identity.

There has been no shortage of digital technologies relating to privacy and identity, but they have no intellectual foundation relating to the nature of social interaction itself. It is as if we are all vainly trying to use Excel, without the benefit of even the simplest formulae with which to program it. We are currently using social networks that are designed without any conception of the nature of social interaction itself. This is why the Web routinely produces humiliating social slips out of even the most pedestrian of social interactions.

The digital technologies we now have are failing miserably in helping us manage privacy and identity. OpenID, for example, attempted to be a single sign-on tool that allowed the user to control his or her credentials by encouraging a standardization across the anarchic system of the Web. Ultimately OpenID failed to achieve this status because there was no accompanying intellectual technology in the form of a robust consensus on what privacy and identity really means.

A user’s OpenID is now simply a signon tool, and not a tool of controlling one’s representation in social life. Technology companies with multiple sign-on experiences, such as Google, have actually made the problem worse, not better, as they consolidate their various ID experiences. Users have become accustomed to having their credentials carry across disparate online experiences, which desensitizes them to the privacy implications of credentials consolidation.

Google Buzz illustrated the problem with this single sign-on experience; users were upset to find that their “google identity” and all its accompanying details, were broadcasted to all their Google contacts. But they had been trained, through single sign-on, not to see that they were passing through different social “spaces” as they moved from site to site.

Facebook, of course, regularly abuses its users and their claims to privacy. They continually introduce technological fixes to privacy without any of the intellectual support for users to own their own identity and present it appropriately in different social contexts. Worse, Facebook has affordances that actually invite social breaches. Its very design sets the stage for embarrassment, humiliation and shame.

Facebook’s various iterations of the “status update” encourages users to share increasingly intimate and emotional experiences. Today, Facebook asked me, “How are you feeling, Sam?” in its best impression of HAL 9000. In the offline social world, astute social actors discern, for themselves, the correct tone and character of shared information.

What would you tell him?

If a work colleague asks “How are you feeling?” I am astute enough to know I should answer “Much better, thank you. That flu was terrible!” I do not answer “Desolate. I lost my car keys and my cat is at the vet and will probably die.” Yet these are the very kinds of status updates that Facebook is attempting to solicit from me. The idea of “TMI” or “too much information” is something most social actors practice particularly well in face-to-face situations. By inviting users to share emotional experiences to a wide and unsorted grouping of “friends,” Facebook is setting the stage for tone deaf social interactions.

Facebook’s lack of intellectual technologies of privacy and identity make it downright autistic.

Socially enhanced productivity tools

The lack of intellectual technologies for privacy and identity has particular implications for productivity. As work has become more geographically distributed and technologically mediated, we are even more in need of these intellectual technologies to manage workers’ experiences, legal rights, and productivity.

Researchers have argued that unlike work in fixed offices, mobile work entails moving through mental, physical, virtual and social spaces (Mark et al, 2005). Productivity tools must allow users to occupy and manipulate these spaces appropriately, not just to be socially apt and but also to be treated fairly and to achieve material results.

Workers in an Ottawa grocery store felt this distinct lack of intellectual technologies when they were fired for talking about their employer on Facebook. OpenID did not help them, nor did Facebook’s privacy settings. Facebook had no intellectual foundation on which it could build a digital technology that would have protected these workers.

These workers themselves had not coherent intellectual concept to glom onto to help them understand and interpret the implications of their postings. Instead, Facebook’s socially autistic privacy settings and overly familiar affordances invited these workers to put themselves in harm’s way. This kind of interaction is happening more and more as people and companies increasingly move more of their working lives onto socially enabled platforms.

Yammer’s enterprise-only service mimics Twitter, but does not allow for users to interact with those outside the company, thereby defeating many of the potential productivity gains that could be achieved. They do this because it is simply the easiest solution — in the absence of intellectual technologies of privacy and identity. While Facebook may make social interaction awkward, it makes work-based social interaction positively treacherous. Building the intellectual technology of social media The digital realm in general needs more of these intellectual technologies for privacy and identity, which unlike the tools like probability theory and statistical analyses of variances, require deep theoretical clarity on the social nature of interaction.

These socially clumsy technologies are committing the sin of “crossing the streams,” or what social scientists call context collapse. Context collapse emerged out of the identity theory of Erving Goffman, who argued in the 1960s that social actors project different “selves” in different social contexts. We engage in “impression management” in face-to-face interactions without even thinking.

Our “work selves” and our “domestic selves” are usually kept apart but when these contexts are collapsed, there is a sense of awkwardness and discomfort, as anyone who has run into a work colleague unexpectedly while shopping with a spouse at the grocery store. Context collapse forces us to grapple with multiple selves at the same time.

This insight is fundamentally sociological in nature, but the sociological has rarely, if ever, been brought to bear in technology design.

How Snapchat closes the gap

Technology forecasters point out that it’s rare to find a technology that completely replaces another. That sort of breakthrough comes once a generation. Instead, you are more likely to see innovations that fill a particular gap between two systems. For example, the computing power of the average desktop computer greatly outpaced the Web’s bandwidth in its early days. This mismatch enabled all sorts of workarounds to take off and be highly adopted. One could argue that text-based email, which takes very little bandwidth, became the killer app because of the bandwidth problem. Right now, we have a privacy and identity problem.

Snapchat fills that gap.

Communication technologies offer extremely sophisticated and instantaneous data transfer. But the intellectual technologies of privacy have not kept pace in terms of sophistication. While you can immediately send a large video file to Kuala Lampur, and have it watched rather effortlessly on many different computers, you cannot ensure that it will not be shared with people you do not wish to see it. We have a rather blunt system of privacy, compared to an incredibly sophisticated system of data exchange. This gap could be closed by Snapchat, which allows for the instantaneous and cross-platform of sharing imagery, but also solves the very real need to control the privacy.

Snapchat is an enabling technology in the sense that it enables better data exchange between people because it offers two key features: better privacy controls and a reduction in information glut. For this reason, I argue that Snapchat, or more accurately, ephemeral content in general, will be the next emergent technology. There is a price to be paid if this does happen.

The archival nature of digital technologies is a wonderful way to save our cognitive burden. We don’t have to remember phone numbers, email addresses, or even complete bodies of knowledge because it is now at our fingertips. Yet, ephemeral content, with its promise of better privacy and identity management, could become the “normal” way to communicate online. What would happen if we come to expect all of our email to disappear? What would happen if our images start to delete themselves regularly, simply because we are scared of identity breaches?

Building the intellectual technology of privacy and identity

Some social scientists have attempted to bring context collapse to the attention of technology designers and provide the intellectual technology to catch up with the digital technology. danah boyd, for example, has argued forcefully that “real name” policies in single signons have the downstream effect of “outing” protestors whose very lives may be in danger from such a policy. This kind of analysis provides the foundation of a sociological tool that may inform the currently socially ignorant and blunt single signons offered by Google and Facebook.

We need a set of principles, based on sociological research, that becomes baked into any digital technology that enables social interaction. We need to create nuanced, elegant and useful algorithms that can provide at least a modicum of protection against social slips. We must do this for social sites like Facebook but also for workplace tools like Microsoft Outlook.

Contrary to what many technology designers believe, there is a robust set of research that already allows us to build prototype algorithms that prevent context collapse. They may be blunt, and they may be imperfect, but they would be a whole lot better than what we currently have.

Is this picture really worth saving?

There are several reasons why someone would choose an ephemeral tool like Snapchat. First, the most obvious: the content is not persistent. This is the primary problem with the Web in general, and Facebook in particular. To share now means to share in perpetuity. Certainly, there are privacy settings, but the digital landscape is littered with the corpses of those who took such settings at face value. And why should we be surprised?

We aren’t actually surprised. We know the “real” social world bears witness to any number of low-tech embarrassing slips. Take, for example, a “hot mic” incident recorded for others to hear. Observe the right holy chaos that technology wrought on the lives of politicians telling the truth without actually knowing it.

The hot mic is an exceptional incident that garners a great deal of attention (and not just due to the high profile character of its victims). On the web, this kind of slip is a routine daily occurrence.  We have had so many embarrassing slips that we cannot possibly catalogue them all. They run the gamut from the “oops, my mom saw my dirty post,” to “I got fired for talking about my employer.” There are even web sites devoted to showing us the hilarity of these slips. Facebook Fail is guaranteed to make you LOL.

The web’s routine failure to protect us from embarrassment has made its persistence a liability.

Enter Snapchat.

Betcha he wishes he’d used Snapchat now

Snapchat allows you to turn the Web back into regular conversation, shared with only those “present,” and not recorded for anyone else to hear. It turns off the “hot mic” of the web and alleviates the anxiety of navigating the shifting sands of Facebook’s privacy settings. Persistence has now become a liability for many Web users. Snapchat allows you to confidently send content without worrying about it. The content simply disappears, making it more like conversation before we had the Web.

The second reason ephemeral content tools are attractive is less obvious, but just as important. On the one hand, the web offers persistence, which as I have argued can be a distinct liability. But on the other hand, it also offers archiving, which is generally thought to be a good thing. What was the name of that guy who sent you his resume in an email? Where is that restaurant we went to that time? How much time does it take to fly to Hawaii? All of these questions can be answered by leveraging the persistence of the Web. And this is a good thing. This is precisely what Vannevar Bush imagined when we wrote about the “memex” back in 1947 — all the world’s knowledge available on the desktop.

But all the world’s knowledge becomes total chaos without any librarians (yay! Librarians!). That is not what Vannevar Bush imagined. He did not foresee the sheer randomness of what effortless information sharing would bring. Google itself would not exist were it not for this chaos. But at least on the Web, Google does a good job of ordering at least some of the chaos. It doesn’t do such a good job of helping you find those Power Point slides you made 10 years ago, in part because there is simply too much digital content for us to wade through and in part because this detritus sadly ends up on our hard drives.

Our desktop computers, our mobile devices, our web-based email have become dumping grounds for our digital hoarding habits. Rare is it when a user asks herself, will I need to find this three-word email in the future? Should I tag it with a color, or a category? She simply whips it off and forgets about it. But that three-line email clogs up her inbox just as much as a 14-paragraph missive from her bosses’ bosses’ boss, which could affect her very job. There is no immediately apparent difference between the two emails, even if she is experimenting with Gmail’s “significance” algorithm. Her meta data is only ever as good as the effort she puts into them.

If emails were paper letters, we would need to build 15 million more houses just to hold the crap we send to each other. Those houses would be filled to the rafters. All of us are digital hoarders; we just don’t see it. Our digital hygiene habits are very bad.

They are about to get a whole lot worse.

We are taking pictures at an unprecedented rate. The best estimate we have is 3.8 trillion digital pictures are in existence, and we’re generating between 500 million and 1 billion every year. Just over a quarter of those are taken with smartphones. Very few of them are precious. How can we know which are precious? We must put in the effort to separate the significant photo from the insiginficant one. Since we cannot find our photos in our morass of digital content, and put in slices of time to tag them between ill-fated bouts of “inbox zero” campaigns, we are likely going to make things worse. Much worse.

Enter Snapchat once again.

The mere decision to use Snapchat means the user has already considered this photo to be of little archival value. Right then and there, he has succeeded in reducing his future cognitive load. But even better, he doesn’t even need to consider the photo ever again, even if it were to merely dismiss its importance. Even that tiny cognitive burden is gone. The photo is gone. Snapchat came and took out the garbage that you put in a particular pile. You don’t even have to think of that pile. It is simply gone. How liberating!

These are the main two reasons I believe ephemeral content is going to take root in our collective psyche. But as I consider this topic, I will add to this list. I will also consider the implications as we start to forget to forget. We will no longer even notice the piles of content around our digital houses. What effect will that have on our mental models? It may even signal the final shift from an analogue world masquerading as a digital one, with its transparent metaphors of desktops and file folders that scream 20th century. But what will replace this analogue playing dress-up? What is the shape of that truly digital mental model for our content? It’s hard to say.

That is, until now.

I have found probably the only place on Earth where I can do rigorous, academically informed socio-cultural research into technology that will actually impact the design of that technology. That place is Microsoft. More specifically, it’s at Microsoft’s head office in Redmond, Washington.

This is where I have found myself since November 5. The day after, my friend Barack did me a solid by agreeing to continue as President for 4 more years (thanks also to the people of Washington State for voting for marriage equality and a little fun on the side).

I’m working in the Envisioning team at Microsoft Office, researching changes to the social world that involve how and in what ways we use technology. My research will lead to the future vision of Microsoft Office, a product that currently has over 500 million users worldwide. Yes, you read that right. It’s an amazing opportunity to take all my scholarly training and make a difference in the world. I’m under no illusion that working at Microsoft means that I can now fix everything that’s wrong with technology (far from it!) but I also know that I’ll have a hell of a lot more impact than I would working at a university. I’m also delighted to say that I plan to never attend a faculty meeting (suck it, haters).

Ryan and I have signed a lease on a house in the Queen Anne neighborhood, and when I say “Ryan and I,” I really mean just me. Ryan’s still home back in Toronto, closing down our life there. As I write, we have a conditional offer on house, which (fingers crossed) should close soon.Ryan and HollyCat will jump on a plane and join me here for Christmas.

My company Copernicus will continue to exist, at least on paper. It is a corporation, after all, and not a person. Or maybe I got that backwards.

The last 2 weeks have been a blur and the future has yet to become clear. But please wish us well in this adventure in the Wilds of Washington State.

I presented findings from our research study on smartphones at the Canadian Communication Association’s annual meeting last week. Here is the abstract, and below that, my slideshare presentation. If you view the presentation ON slideshare, you’ll get the attached notes, which summarize the findings.

This article investigates the temporal effects of smartphone usage among working-aged adults. In particular, we investigate how digital calendars, built into smartphones, affect their users’ sense of time. We conceive of time here as a cultural phenomenon (as opposed to a purely empirical measurement of time). Using this cultural lens, time is a collectively defined notion, which social actors understand and manage through a variety of tools, such as watches, clocks, and in this case, calendars. We first outline how digital calendars differ from analogue ones and we then investigate how digital calendaring affects these social actors’ temporal experience. We summarize findings from a qualitative study, which found that smartphone calendars reveal the world to us as a never-ending list of things to do and people to see. Interestingly, the smartphone calendar often “disappeared” as a technology and became simply part of everyday experience. In this way, the structuring force of the calendar also disappears from view. We also found that smartphone calendars require work themselves. In this sense they are an ironic technology; their primary purpose is to “manage time,” but to do so requires time. We conclude by suggesting that our findings provide insight into our popular belief of pervasive “time poverty” despite a lack of definitive time-use evidence to support that assertion.

This paper will explore how contemporary web-based technologies affect calendaring and time reckoning in general. Like many other social phenomena, time reckoning is rapidly becoming a “digital” phenomenon. Millions of people use Microsoft Outlook and Google Calendar. These very common web-based tools represent time in significantly different ways than traditional analogue calendars in that they make appointments digital. Digital artifacts can be ordered, and re-ordered at will, and easily “mashed up” with other artifacts.  In this paper, I trace three significant trends in calendaring. First, I will outline how the calendar, like the clock before it, has become increasingly a “personal” artifact. This shift has brought with it significant contestation and constructed the personal calendar into a symbol of “upward mobility.” Second, I sketch out the four ways in which the digital calendars differ from analogue ones: their apparent “bottomlessness,” their networked nature, the ease with which they are altered, and their low-fidelity, impersonal appearance. And finally, I will show how the digitization and personalization of calendaring are intersecting in the rise of personal mobile calendars on smartphones. I will then discuss the implications of these mobile, personal, digital calendars. I argue that the digital calendar is a paradoxical technology, which gives the impression of making “good use of time,” while at the same time masking its character as a labour-demanding device.

Changing Time: Digital calendars, smartphones and temporal transformation

Many technology studies have false ideas of how web and interaction designers actually work. We collectively tend to think of technology as a “fix” that “automagically” eliminates  “waste,” even if this is not the intent of the designers themselves (which it frequently isn’t).  But as this study points out, there are far more subtle and nuanced issues relating to technology. Specifically, technology makes it easier to do some things. Is it any surprise we end up expecting more things to be done?

Let me illustrate with EMRs.

Image licensed under Creative Commons to MC4 Army on Flickr

Researchers from Harvard Medical School found that the use of electronic medical records (EMRs) is actually correlated with a higher number of diagnostic tests, such as MRIs, which in turn implies higher — not lower — health-care costs.

The authors suggest:

These findings raise the possibility that, as currently implemented, electronic access does not decrease test ordering in the office setting and may even increase it, possibly because of system features that are enticements to ordering.

This study was a quantitative analysis of medical records so did not offer any insight into why there are more tests ordered with EMRs. The authors can only speculate that the easy availability of imaging results translates into more tests being ordered. The “enticements” to order more tests could be built into the EMR systems themselves.

Anyone who has worked in interaction design will tell you that “enticement” is precisely the kind of emotion they want their users to feel. Take, for example, Stephen Anderson’s research on on “emotional design.” Anderson argues that web and application design should be “seductive” to really be successful. Trevor van Gorp also argues that designers should be aspiring to connect “affectively” with their users, and to tap into deeply held emotional experiences.

Both Anderson and van Gorp have written and spoken extensively to the user experience designer. Their ideas are au courant in the web and application design community. It is likely that some members of that community have read van Gorp’s book or use Anderson’s psychology inspired “mental note” cards in their design practice. It is just as likely that some of these people have designed the very EMR systems that strive to, surprise surprise,  “entice” physicians to order and view diagnostic tests.

Physicians are responding to a design philosophy, which is to extract from users a deep engagement. “Good” interaction design is usable, but also engaging. Instead of boring users, contemporary web and application designers are “seducing” them. Indeed, good interaction design, according to industry leader the Nielsen Norman Group, includes the principle of “explorable interfaces.” How is it any surprise at all that physicians are “exploring the interface” by ordering more tests? Good systems are designed to entice them to do exactly that.

In their story covering the Harvard study’s findings, the New York Times reports that other researchers disagree with the conclusions. The Times reports:

Dr. David J. Brailer, who was the national coordinator for health information technology in the administration of George W. Bush, said he was unconvinced by the study’s conclusions because they were based on a correlation in the data and were not the result of a controlled test.

Dr. Brailer doubts the conclusions because he does not understand how design is currently practiced, nor does he have direct input into the design principles of EMRs. If EMRs are being designed according to current ideas, they are designed not to save money, as Dr. Brailer hopes, but to entice users to explore and be engaged. Dr. Brailer clings to his scientific method here, and rightly points out that correlation does not equal causation. However, the Harvard researchers are more in tune with current design practices.

I don’t mean to knock interaction designers. Heck, some of my best friends are interaction designers! No, really. What I’m saying here is that designers design to principles. A laudable principle is to “seduce” or emotionally affect the user. This principle creates great systems. But it results in more use of systems, not less. It should come as no surprise that imaging tests represent a “seduction” for physicians, who, like all scientists, are voracious consumers of “more data.”

This case study reminds me of how we so frequently miss the mark in understanding technology. We assume it will be “efficient,” without asking how it might actually work. Worse, we routinely ignore the normative shifts that come along with cheaper and easier labour. Take, for example, house-keeping technology. We believed that the vacuum cleaner, the washing machine and the dishwasher would lead to more leisure time. What it actually lead to was higher standards of cleanliness.

Will EMRs lead to “higher standards” of imaging desire among physicians? Perhaps they already have.

I am currently researching smartphone use as a Postdoctoral Fellow at Ryerson University, as well as running my own firm, Copernicus Consulting, which advises companies about the socio-cultural lives of their customers, employees and partners. At Copernicus, I focus on the immense technological change we are currently experiencing through mobility and the growth of online social networks.