I read an interview with the perennially cutting-edge designer Philippe Starck. What allowed him to remain so consistently ahead of the curve? “I never read any magazines or watch TV,” he said, perhaps a little hyperbolically. “Nor do I go to cocktail parties, dinners or anything like that.” He lived outside conventional ideas, he implied, because “I live alone mostly, in the middle of nowhere.”

This desire for quietness has crept into my own work (perhaps evidenced by the long pause in adding posts to this site). When faced with seemingly ever expanding modes and speeds of connecting, doing, and so on how should we react? Should we move faster? Do more? What does this do to our experience of time?

I myself would like to be still, to simplify, to be quiet.

Following a model used in architecture and also software development, “Liberating Voices” provides patterns related to communications – that is, short descriptions of common issues and best practices for tackling them, or best practice models or methods and why they’re important. That is, the patterns give big picture overviews of ways to think about problems. Read more about the concept of pattern languages, here.

I particularly appreciated the book’s description of the concept of wicked problems (read it, here), and also have been finding this concept quite useful in terms of framing a book Dharma and I are working on.

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In short, a wicked problem is a problem that is very challenging or not possible to solve because of the contradictory, incomplete, or shifting requirements that are many times difficult to distinguish. Due to complex inter-dependencies, attempting to solve one facet of a wicked problem can expose or create other problems (Rittel and Webber 1973). So, while the “official” problem may appear simple, there are many additional issues – often less visible, or sometimes less solvable, that contribute to our inability to overcome the problem.

…

As an exercise to explore the concept of wicked problems I made a series of sketches related to policy issues I’m familiar with beginning with the “big” problem (the one that’s usually talked about) and moving deeper to map sub-issues. For example, doing this exercise in terms of the issue of hunger in the US, it became clear that:

1. The ‘solutions’ to this problem (food banks, food stamps, cheap processed food, etc.) create some problems of their own. This is characteristic of wicked problems.
2. This single issue has elements that relate to many types of policy – e.g. not just food & agriculture policy, but also financial policy, educational policy, health policy, and social welfare policy.

A rough sketch of the wicked problem of hunger in the US:

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Similarly, we can think of the digital divide as a wicked problem. For example, sub-problems that contribute to the wicked problem of the digital divide include:

• Jobs, social services, government documents, etc. are being (or have been) moved online despite the fact that not everyone can get easy access to them there – making the consequences of the divide more costly;
• Consumers of all types report being overcharged on communications bills, this drives some who were online to go offline;
• Government assistance programs, such as Lifeline – for reduced phone rates, can be out of date and confusing to use (though are being reformed).

And, perhaps even more challenging:

• It’s not always clear to decision makers how to best understand the problem of the digital divide;
• Decision makers must often wade through a complex series of steps to address the problem;
• It’s many times not clear to the digitally excluded how to communicate with decision makers or affect social change via the policy process;
• Assumptions are often made about the digitally excluded from statistics, which tell part of, but not the whole, story – and can, therefore, lead to policies and interventions that aren’t especially useful;
• The digitally excluded themselves aren’t often consulted about their view of the issue;
• And, as much as we may avoid talking about it, the digital divide is a reflection of larger social divides – and in that way the digital divide itself is one aspect of an even larger wicked problem (inequality).

This week I attended “Living in a de-material world: The design and maintenance of sustainable social networks,” a talk by Tom Finholt of the University of Michigan School of Information.   Refreshingly, Finholt employs the broader, old-school definition of social networks which considers people’s relationships both online and offline.  For Finholt, a sustainable social network might exhibit itself as academics walking to campus meetings instead of driving.

According to Finholt, when cradle-to-cradle energy consumption of ICTs is taken into consideration they are not always as green as their analog alternatives.  When the embodied energy- the energy involved in mining of source materials, manufacture, and transport- is counted as part of the overall energy footprint of an MP3 player, it casts a bigger energy shadow than ye olde vinyl record.

The organizing principle of Finholt’s talk- dematerialization- is bandied about by economists who seek ways to replace more material-intensive consumption with less material-intensive consumption without tanking the economy.  For example, extracting and producing a new copper wire for a communication network is more energy and material intensive than extracting and producing the material for a new fiber-optic cable though it can do the same job (and then some).  But, according to Finholt, evaluating the environmental impact of information and communication technologies is still a tricky business. While other important domains such as durable goods and transportation have well accepted and well-understood ways to model energy consumption in their domains, there are many obstacles to creating valid models to spell out ICT’s impact.  Just-in-time procurement of parts- a common practice in ICT manufacturing- means that two seemingly identical devices can have identical-looking components which in fact come from different factories with different energy footprints. The way that communication is routed over the internet makes it hard to know whether a message passed through server farms that were energy hogs or energy misers.  Was a message sent through a server farm cooled by a 1970s-era cooling system running full tilt? And we can imagine that companies would balk at an academic’s attempt to determine whether Facebook runs a greener set of servers than Google or Flickr.

While the energy footprint models for ICTs need work, some things are strikingly clear. Finholt and his NSF funded collaborators hope to supplant academic conferences and meetings with remote teleconferencing because they are confident that the carbon savings derived would be significant. But wide adoption of remote technologies over in-person conferences is nothing less than a sea change in the way that academics carry out their professional lives. The fact that the talk I attended was in Seattle while Finholt is based in Michigan just underscores how uphill this mass behavior change will be. (Even researchers working on remote collaboration in a race to save the planet still jet around.) The solution that Finholt’s team has been experimenting with gets scholars to gather in smaller clusters closer to home.

Here is a video of a talk that Finholt gave recently at Microsoft: Living in a de-material world: The design and maintenance of sustainable social networks.

The book builds off of our work for the FCC in 2009/2010 to inform the National Broadband Plan by investigating the reasons why more than a third of people in the U.S. don’t have the internet at home. In part, the book is about the digital divide and social equity around media.

It’s also a book about how we think through really complex issues. Specifically, it’s about how we believe community-based, user-focused research can be used to help work through social equity and policy tangles (e.g. “wicked” problems).

Though focused on communications issues, we hypothesize that the methods / tools / ways of thinking we’re writing about can also be applied to other sectors and social justice issues that include a similar set of actors, e.g.: polices and policymakers, researchers, communities, industry, a technology or a good (ex: food). For example, food policy, trade policy, or health policy.

For some time restroom users paid about 80 cents (5 kr) by sliding a coin into a small machine to gain entrance. This is a simple and relatively and common practice for public toilets in Stockholm.  But, the coin machine had now been removed and by the door stood a small sign letting users know that they now needed to pay by (mobile phone) text to get access to the restroom.

Although mobile phone penetration in Sweden is quite high, this new “efficient” design feature stopped me – and a small group of other people gathered around the door – in our tracks. Since I had a relatively simple pay-as-you-go phone with no data plan I was unsure of whether my phone would work. Would I need to go on the internet? If I texted the number what exactly would happen? Would money be deducted from my phone card? Would it only be the 80 cents, or would the phone company charge me a fee? It might have explained some of this in the fine print, but it was difficult to decipher in Swedish, which I speak, but which is not my first language.  An older man next to me, perhaps in his seventies, also looked perplexed and commented, “now I really have to learn how to text”.  A woman in her forties with an iPhone huffed off saying, “this just isn’t democratic!”

A man in his twenties attempted texting, and received a code to punch into the keypad at the entrance to unlock it. But, when he tried to do so the code didn’t work.  So, while this change surely looked efficient and easy from the perceptive of its designers (which would be very interesting to investigate), not even one of four people was able to use that particular restroom that day.

***I returned to the same location a few weeks later and noticed that a paper sign had been put up by the door informing users that they could get a code to the restroom by paying 5kr at a nearby desk as an alterative to texing: an analogue accessibility fix.

While I don’t have an iPad to check out the e-version of the book, I did recently watch Al Gore’s documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, a precursor to this more recent endeavor (see it here).  In Gore’s presentation on climate change, which grounds the film, he makes good use of information and communication artifacts include graphs & images.

Do the film and e-book present information similarly? Differently? Could both be considered new hybrid forms of ‘presentation’? That is, going beyond Power Point and into the realm of truly mixing data + storytelling?

For some top-notch thinking on presentations, see Nancy Duarte’s work.

While the authors do not consider the environmental impacts of ICTs in the report (which is a pervasive oversight in discussion of the impacts of ICTs), they do acknowledge that they exist:

“Note that while it is not covered in this paper, the environment is also affected by ICT, with direct environmental impacts arising from events such as poor disposal of PCs and the role of ICT in modeling the impacts of climate change.”

It would be great to see an analogously detailed analysis of the environmental impacts of ICTs as the OECD provides for social and economic aspects. Download a PDF of the OECD full report, MEASURING THE IMPACTS OF ICT USING OFFICIAL STATISTICS (2007), here.

Here is a short selection of quotes:

“If there is an addiction here, it is not to a technology. It is to the habits of mind that technology allows us to practice,” (p. 288).

“Many find that, trained by the Net, they cannot find solitude even at a lake or beach or on a hike. Stillness makes them anxious,” (p. 289).

“Some would say that we have already completed a forbidden experiment, using ourselves as subjects with no controls, and the unhappy findings are in: we are connected as we’ve never been connected before, and we seem to have damaged ourselves in the process,” (p. 293).

The book documents the author’s 2+ years of participatory action research with women in upstate New York. It illustrates how today’s “technology poor” (the approximate third of Americans without reliable communications access) do in fact heavily participate in the information economy – often as low-wage data entry workers or service workers, and also in terms of navigating and being monitored by the social service system. I found that one of the most interesting narrative threads of the book was the contextualization of the story in Troy, NY: a city that has been trying to boost itself into the information age by offering major incentives and tax breaks for high tech companies to locate there. The result has been that a few high tech jobs have been created, while rising housing and real estate prices have pushed many poor and working class people out of the city – not an unfamiliar story

The book gels with themes we observed in our study Broadband Adoption in Low Income Communities, which was commissioned by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to inform the National Broadband Plan in 2010. In this study we were tasked with investigating the reasons why more than one third of Americans don’t have high speed internet at home, including the possibility that some may not find it “relevant” to their lives. In a comprehensive qualitative study – the largest in the US on this topic – we found no evidence of that.  Rather, a complex narrative emerged about the pressures we (all) face related to technology: misgivings about how heavy tech use is affecting us and our children, and the fact that, whether we like it or not, in today’s world we are increasingly required to be connected in order to complete basic life tasks – to find work or an apartment, to complete school work or communicate with the government, etc. The “relevancy” issue – do people want the internet? – has long been a part of the policy debate around the digital divide, and for anyone engaged in this “Digital Dead End” is a must-read.

Throughout the book Eubanks talks from her own experience, writes clearly about complex issues, makes her research methods transparent, and includes – directly – the voices of her co-collaborators through short transcript excerpts and longer “portraits”. Much of Eubanks’ work is informed by the tradition of popular education and the work of Paulo Freire, including the idea that the people who most directly experience a problem are the best equipped to solve it (in this case, the “technology poor”). Similar principles have been adopted by the user design research community, but often times it is only the most profitable users who are sought out to problem-solve their problems.

Finally, via the voices of the woman of Troy, NY, “Digital Dead End” offers a refreshing perspective on the digital divide. The women argue that a true bridging of this would mean that people on both sides of the divide would start talking with and listening to each other (see this article, Zones of Silence, for an expansion on this concept). The women specifically suggest that the one most useful thing that government could do vis-a-vis helping “the disconnected” with technology is to inquire about what is going on in communities – that are perhaps unlike their own – and at what life is truly like for people in the information age (p. 156). The FCC did in fact reach out in this capacity during the National Broadband Plan. It should both be highly commended for this and encouraged to continue this work.