LiMe D2.5 Case Study of User Profiling
A Case Study of User Profiling in Living Memory
Living Memory Deliverable 2.5
Authors: Eric Laurier,
Angus Whyte,
Kathy Buckner,
Tom Shearer,
Katie Bates
Introduction.
During the three years that QMUC have been working on the Living Memory project, our task has been to contribute an understanding of social and cultural practices in a suburban neighbourhood[1] to the design of prototypes intended to support interaction across that neighbourhood. Our work has combined ethnography with action research and participatory design, in common with many CSCW workplace studies. However it differs in important respects from these. We will describe three major differences in this case study report, and how we have tackled them, with examples of what we term media archetypes and agent interactivities. An outline is given of the hybrids of ethnography and action research we used to articulate aspects of current practices and relate these to the evolving design proposals for a ‘Living Memory System’. In the central section of this report we pick up on the potential of these hybrids for informing the design of user profiles for multi-site public networks.
A full description of the Living Memory (LiMe) system architecture is beyond the scope of this report, which, as noted above, focuses mainly on user profiling. Nevertheless giving an account of the LiMe project aims and design approach was just as integral to our research on user profiles as it is to our discussion of it here.
Living Memory aims to provide the members of a given community who live and work in a particular locality with a means to capture, share and explore their collective memory, with the aim to preserve and interpret the richness of local culture.[2]
Addressing this aim involved five geographically separated (Edinburgh, London, Eindhoven, Brighton, Milan and Paris)[3] research partners in these four tasks:-
1. Identifying the needs of a local community;
2. Designing interfaces to support content management and tools for intelligent memory management;
3. Demonstrating the relevance of a "living memory";
4. Drawing methodological lessons which may be applied in developing products or services in this domain.
It is worth bearing in mind that the project partners come variously from backgrounds in social informatics, ethnography, human-computer interaction, industrial design (as craft and commercial activity), and the engineering of software agent technologies. Our focus in this paper is on the first and last of the above tasks, and on displaying how we have tackled the relation between ethnography and design.
As described above, the project 'aims' beg certain questions: for example about what is meant by the terms "a given community", "collective memory", and "local culture". In this report we do not intend to present a formalised theory of these terms, but we outline below how such theoretically-informed notions helped to articulate a design agenda in collaboration with our project partners.
Concepts of memory, culture and community
LiMe’s notion of memory borrows from connectionism (e.g. Edelman, 1987, Cilliers, 1998) in that a "living memory" is envisaged as a distributed set of computer mediated activities, the threads of which may be recalled (see Fig.s 18-20), and the associated content re-presented, depending on where people are and what they indicate an interest in. This could be described as a form of social navigation (Munro et al), mediated by interfaces that are integrated into the places where people meet to pursue their interests – situated social browsing. The cultural activities we aim to augment, and the memories we are concerned with re-calling, are primarily those which are informal, make no claim to be objective, and are mainly related to user’s voluntaristic pursuits rather than to work patterns and decision making in organisations. Our emphasis is also on augmenting ‘real-life’ links in physical places, as opposed to virtual ones, though as we shall see later 'real-life' and 'virtual life' are utterly entangled in practice. Our geographical focus is on a suburban area of Edinburgh, Scotland, centred on the historical village of Corstorphine. By a "given community" we refer to this area, one that has historical and current connotations of neighbourhood for our informants.
The project’s concern with the sharing of knowledge and experience between people in this neighbourhood has obvious similarities with community networking (Schuler). The settings we have focused on; the local public library, the home, schools and a shopping mall, are those which are typically sites of public and private access via personal computers (PCs) to civic and commercial networks (i.e. CapInfo the city council's information service, the world-wide web, e-mail accounts etc). In contrast to these terminal geographies LiMe put more emphasis on the prototyping of novel forms of interaction that promote and enhance distributed and multi-artefactual links between ordinary people, rather than on, for instance, implementing current web tools on pre-existing terminals.
The design of software, networked artefacts (i.e. electronic tokens (see fig.1)) for distributed applications, to be used by socially mixed neighbourhood residents in diverse settings, requires a high degree of flexibility to be built in to the architecture that inter-relates human and software roles, procedures, social groups, and content creation. The notions of software agents and allied perspectives like component-based design are commonly seen as potential means to provide this flexibility (REF).
Fig. 1 From 'living interfaces, interacting with the LIME system' (Doc No. LIME/908020/99002/LL)
The LiMe project design agenda included the implementation of broadly characterised roles that are commonly seen (in the domain of software engineering) as appropriate for delegation to ‘autonomous’ software agents. These include matchmaking users with content that relates to a profile of their interests, and with other users with similar profiles.
QMUC's focus in the project is on articulating current practices and assessing how these fit with the design agenda, rather than on formulating design proposals or a theory of ‘connected community’ (but see LiMe Deliverables 4.2-4.5 & Rutgers 1999).
Ethnography is primarily concerned with "what is", describing current practices and technologies, rather than with "what might be" if these were redesigned. Not surprisingly the relation between ethnography and design can be problematic (Plowman et al 1995, Grudin and Grinter 1995, [Shapiro, 1994 #295]), as there is nothing inherent in ethnographic "rich description" of current practices that makes the design implications of changing community activities anything more than informed speculation. Moving beyond informed speculation commonly involves a hybrid of ethnographic description with participatory methods that involve prospective users in evaluating the relevance of design-led changes (e.g. Greenbaum and Kyng 1990). The next section describes how we have sought to inform design through just such a hybrid. Why our hybrid has taken the form it has should become clear by pointing out some key differences between workplace settings, the usual the focus of published studies, and the settings for our current research, differences that raise critical issues for the ethnography-design relationship.
Workplace Studies in Public Settings
Three important distinctions can be made between workplace studies and the "user community" we are concerned with; the scope and range of settings, the focus on informal communication practices, and an explicit ‘creative direction’ role in developing concepts that are a radical departure from current user practices. Below we summarise the issues these differences have given rise to.
The range of user settings
Our research setting is a residential suburb with a population of around 20,000 people, not including those who work in it or pass through it. The need to select from the range of public settings that we could investigate was apparent very early in our work. Our selection of a library, school, pub and shopping mall could be made on the grounds of their local significance and the potential for translating our findings to other neighbourhoods and also as a response to the conceptual initiatives of WP3 (see LiMe Deliverable 2.1, Section 2). Selecting specific practices to study was far more problematic. By comparison, workplace studies predominately feature relatively clearly bounded locations, prospective users, and practices.
Informal practices
The focus of our ethnographic studies is on "informal communication" practices, rather than formalised work procedures (though not to the exclusion of them[4]). In comparison workplace studies normally have the opposite emphasis, even if they commonly treat the relationship between documented procedures and the socially-constructed reality of work as an open question (e.g. Suchman, 1987). From our perspective, what is "informal" and what is "formal" is also an open question. Notions of practice normally entail some concept of ‘rules of engagement’ that can be found in particular interactions. The point here is that in public settings like libraries, bars or shopping malls the rules of engagement are rarely codified, except for those that work there. With the exception of local structures of public administration (not a focus of our studies), in an open community there is no equivalent to the institutional texts that, even if they are only ‘useful fictions’, serve to characterise work and the terms of organisational discourse as at least a starting point for the redesign of workplace information systems.
This has presented significant problems of access, in two senses. Firstly, although workplace studies can be negotiated through the managerial structures of the participating organisation, providing access to observe what people do, and record what they say about what they do, this is inherently more difficult to negotiate when many sites and organisations are involved. Secondly, the nature and content of interactions in public settings is (paradoxically) more difficult to access, because these interactions are often fleeting, many may not be repeated on a regular basis and their content is private.
A radical design agenda
Thirdly, our research has to integrate an understanding of current practices with attempts to change them in ways that are relevant to potential users. This is what participatory design studies usually seek to do, and it is not unusual for design research to focus on radical departures from users’ current practice. It is less usual to attempt both and, in practice, we have found that mediating between a "top-down" design agenda and "bottom-up" enquiry into user practices is a significant challenge. The rationale for having a top-down design agenda is that radical departures from current practice are rarely requested by users, and they also rarely emerge from ethnographic studies which are often seen as conservative in their design implications [Shapiro, 1994 #295]. The "ethnographers dilemma" is that the more fine-grained the understanding of current practices, the more that ethnographers are likely to see any technological intervention as disruptive (Grudin). With a "radical remit", one that aims for technology that is both relevant to our prospective users and a step-change from what they currently use, design concepts have to be envisioned (ref – campiello). The challenge has been to make this top-down design agenda textually explicit, let alone manifest in artefacts that connect with life as it is lived in the neighbourhood of Corstorphine.
An Overview Of Our Research Approach
Our general approach is informed mainly by Suchman and Trigg (1991), which in turn acknowledges the complementary roles of action research and ethnographic enquiry developed in "Scandinavian" approaches to participatory design. Its general form is illustrated in Figure 2 below.
Figure 2. User studies from three perspectives (adapted from Suchman and Trigg 1991)
The figure depicts the perspectives of ethnographic description, intervention and evaluation between which some of our multiple roles in the LiMe project can be placed. Most of our work involves some element of each with varying degrees of tension to fulfil the requirements of all. We outline below what this has meant in terms of each perspective.
Stereotypes and ethnographic description
In the previous section ethnography has been talked of as if it were one unified perspective, when we should point out the particular forms that we have adopted. Early in the project our concern was to draw broad-brush profiles of each setting (bar, library, shopping mall and school) and of the neighbourhood’s general demographic and physical characteristics. When our conceptual design partners produced scenarios, envisioning how a near ubiquitous intranet-like system might be used in the future in our selected settings, we embarked on "mini-ethnographies" of each setting in six-week cycles. Using semi-structured interviews we identified narrative themes from our informants' reflections on their everyday concerns, their orientation to other residents in the area, to community groups, and to shared places, events and media (see Appendix 1).
This form of qualitative research, involving the ‘coding’ or categorisation of themes in interview transcripts, is commonly associated with a grounded theory approach (Glaser and Strauss, 1967). This would be appropriate if our aim were to generate a substantive theory of interaction in this neighbourhood. Our aims however were more modest; to provide an outline understanding prior to design work, a ‘reality check’ on the plausibility of our partners design concepts. These roles are consistent with what Hughes et al (1994, 1995) term "quick and dirty ethnography" and "evaluative studies" respectively. Our over-riding objective was an empirically-based and theoretically-informed evaluation of how (and whether) a prototype "Living Memory System" fits within its intended settings.
The drawback of our early mini-ethnographies was that they were, in effect, stereotypical profiles of the settings and the people who used and produced them (though we will re-examine place-based profiles later). As such they were not detailed enough for our own purposes of ‘thick description’ [Geertz, 1983 #406]. They did provide broad portraits, composed from interview data, of our informants demographic characteristics, of what they said they did, who with, and where (see Appendix 1), though as we shall see later these portraits were still overly narrow to be of practical value for user profiling!
Stereotypical though our views of the settings were, they allowed us and our design partners to concentrate on more specific settings, prospective users and practices:-
1 Publishing activities of children (aged 9 to 12) in and from primary schools;
2 Pubs and cafes as settings for informal interactions in public space;