archive.Joe Lamantia.com

Designers, product managers, and anyone who aims to create relevant and beautiful experiences would be wise to check out Indi Young’s upcoming webinar, Using Mental Models for Tactics and Strategy, on December 11th. Indi literally wrote the book on mental models for user experience – read it, if you haven’t yet – and this webinar is part of the Future Practice series produced by Smart Experience and Rosenfeld Media, so expect good things for your modest investment.

Even better, our friends at Smart Experience and Rosenfeld Media are offering a 25% discount on registrations, which is good for these tough times.

Use this discount code when registering: LAMANTIAWBNR

Enjoy!

User Research can be so relentlessly earnest and purposeful that it gets to be a bit stifling. After a few dozen well-crafted personas work their way purposefully through a set of mildly challenging but inevitably successful scenarios for the tenth time in one week, a diligent user researcher is likely to be hungering for something a bit more satisfying; something akin to the persona, but more fully-rounded; something that conveys the ambiguous complexity of human character with honesty; something not only insightful, but consistently forthright across a multiplicity of aspects. Perhaps even something that is genuinely malapert.
Food Court Druids, Cherohonkees, And Other Creatures Unique to the Republic is that something. Written by Robert Lanham, it’s a hilarious collection of idiotypes – stereotypes outside the design world, personas within – couched as the outcome of serious scientific inquiry whose method is called idiosyncrology.
I advise reading with humility close at hand, since it’s likely you’ll find yourself inside, and it’s only fair to laugh at everyone if you’re included…

Here’s the description:
Lanham, author of The Hipster Handbook and creator and editor of the Web site www.freewilliamsburg.com, extends his anthropological examination of Americans beyond trendy Brooklyn neighborhoods to the entire country, where Yanknecks (“rebel-flag-waving rednecks who live outside the South”), Sigmund Fruits (“people who insist on telling you about their dreams”) and others have existed thus far without being formally studied by “idiosyncrologists” like Lanham and his team. Presented with the authoritative tone of a serious anthropological study, complete with an Idio Rank Scale that assesses the weirdness of each type, many of Lanham’s profiles are hilariously accurate descriptions of co-workers, family members, friends and other acquaintances that almost every American has encountered at some point in their lives. There are the Cornered Rabid Office Workers (CROWs), who “claim to be poets or playwrights” when discussing their work with strangers, “even if they just spent the last nine hours doing data entry on the McFlannery acquisition,” and Hexpatriates, Americans who decry everything about America yet never actually leave the country (and who “refer to the Loews multiplex at the mall as ‘the cinema’ and the Motel Six by Hardees as ‘the pensione”). Illustrations by Jeff Bechtel, depicting the fashion sense of Holidorks (people who wear holiday-themed clothing) and Skants (women with shapely butts who always wear spandex pants), enhance Lanham’s characterizations.

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Found via via, orig­i­nat­ing in an arti­cle titled Social Infor­mat­ics: Overview, Prin­ci­ples and Oppor­tu­ni­ties from the ASIST Bul­letin spe­cial issue on Social Infor­mat­ics, which, inci­den­tally is one of those very inter­est­ing dis­ci­plines I don’t have enough time to keep up with, but that has much to offer prac­tic­ing infor­ma­tion archi­tects.
On com­put­er­i­za­tion, Sawyer says, “Com­put­er­i­za­tion, to para­phrase soci­ol­o­gist Bev­erly Bur­riss, is the imple­men­ta­tion of com­put­er­ized tech­nol­ogy and advanced infor­ma­tion sys­tems, in con­junc­tion with related socioe­co­nomic changes, lead­ing to a fun­da­men­tal restruc­tur­ing of many social orga­ni­za­tions and insti­tu­tions.“
Add in a client man­age­ment clause, and this is essen­tially my job descrip­tion as an archi­tect / designer / cre­ator of infor­ma­tion envi­ron­ments that solve busi­ness prob­lems. I don’t know Bur­riss’ work — does any­one else?
Directly address­ing the role of a con­structed prob­lem Sawyer says, “…social infor­mat­ics is problem-oriented. This work is defined by its inter­est in par­tic­u­lar issues and prob­lems with com­put­er­i­za­tion and not by its adher­ence to cer­tain the­o­ries or par­tic­u­lar meth­ods (as is oper­a­tions research).“
In what looks like a neatly phrased snap­shot of user research, Sawyer says, “The strong empir­i­cal basis of social infor­mat­ics work, how­ever, is com­bined with both method­olog­i­cal and the­o­ret­i­cal plu­ral­ity. Social infor­mat­ics work typ­i­cally includes an array of data col­lec­tion approaches, sophis­ti­cated large-scale analy­ses and com­plex con­cep­tu­al­iza­tions.“
Here’s a longer excerpt:
The Com­mon Find­ings of Social infor­mat­ics
More than 30 years of care­ful empir­i­cal research exists in the social infor­mat­ics tra­di­tion. As noted, this work is found in a range of aca­d­e­mic dis­ci­plines, reflects a mix of the­o­ries and meth­ods, and focuses on dif­fer­ent issues and prob­lems with com­put­er­i­za­tion. Here I high­light five obser­va­tions that are so often (re)discovered that they take on the notion of com­mon find­ings rel­a­tive to com­put­er­i­za­tion.
1. Uses of ICT lead to mul­ti­ple and some­times para­dox­i­cal effects. Any one ICT effect is rarely iso­lat­able to a desired task. Instead, effects of using an ICT spread out to a much larger num­ber of peo­ple through the socio-technical links that com­prise con­text. An exam­i­na­tion of this larger con­text often reveals mul­ti­ple effects, rather than one all-encompassing out­come, and unex­pected as well as planned events. For exam­ple, peer-to-peer file shar­ing may help some musi­cians and hurt oth­ers.
2. Uses of ICT shape thought and action in ways that ben­e­fit some groups more than oth­ers. Peo­ple live and work together in pow­ered rela­tion­ships. Thus, the polit­i­cal, eco­nomic and tech­ni­cal struc­tures they con­struct include large-scale social struc­tures of cap­i­tal exchange, as well as the microstruc­tures that shape human inter­ac­tion. An exam­i­na­tion of power often shows that a system’s imple­men­ta­tions can both rein­force the sta­tus quo and moti­vate resis­tance. That is, the design, devel­op­ment and uses of ICTs help reshape access in unequal and often ill-considered ways. Thus, course man­age­ment sys­tems may pro­vide added ben­e­fits to some stu­dents, put added pres­sure on some fac­ulty and allow some admin­is­tra­tors to use the sys­tem to col­lect addi­tional evi­dence regard­ing the per­for­mances of both stu­dents and fac­ulty.
3. The dif­fer­en­tial effects of the design, imple­men­ta­tion and uses of ICTs often have moral and eth­i­cal con­se­quences. This find­ing is so often (re)discovered in stud­ies across the entire spec­trum of ICTs and across var­i­ous lev­els of analy­sis that igno­rance of this point bor­ders on pro­fes­sional naïveté. Social infor­mat­ics research, in its ori­en­ta­tion towards crit­i­cal schol­ar­ship, helps to raise the vis­i­bil­ity of all par­tic­i­pants and a wider range of effects than do other approaches to study­ing com­put­er­i­za­tion. For exam­ple, char­ac­ter­iz­ing errors in diag­nos­ing ill­nesses as a human lim­i­ta­tion may lead to the belief that imple­ment­ing sophis­ti­cated computer-based diag­nos­tic sys­tems is a bet­ter path. When these sys­tems err, the ten­dency may be to refo­cus efforts to improve the com­put­er­ized sys­tem rather than on bet­ter under­stand­ing the processes of triage and diag­no­sis.
4. The design, imple­men­ta­tion and uses of ICTs have rec­i­p­ro­cal rela­tion­ships with the larger social con­text. The larger con­text shapes both the ICTs and their uses. More­over, these arti­facts and their uses shape the emer­gent con­texts. This can be seen in the micro-scale adap­ta­tions that char­ac­ter­ize how peo­ple use their per­sonal com­put­ers and in the macro-scale adap­ta­tions evi­dent in both the evolv­ing set of norms and the chang­ing designs of library automa­tion sys­tems. Library automa­tion is not sim­ply about recent devel­op­ments of appli­ca­tions with sophis­ti­cated librar­i­an­ship func­tion­al­ity; it is also about patrons’ dif­fer­en­tial abil­i­ties to use com­put­ers, library bud­get pres­sures, Inter­net access to libraries and the increas­ing vis­i­bil­ity of the Inter­net and search­ing.
5. The phe­nom­e­non of inter­est will vary by the level of analy­sis. Because net­works of influ­ence oper­ate across many dif­fer­ent lev­els of analy­sis, rel­e­vant data on com­put­er­i­za­tion typ­i­cally span for­mal and infor­mal work groups; for­mal orga­ni­za­tions; for­mal and infor­mal social units like com­mu­ni­ties or pro­fes­sional occupation/associations; groups of orga­ni­za­tions and/or indus­tries; nations, cul­tural groups and whole soci­eties. This com­mon find­ing is exem­pli­fied by the tremen­dous pos­i­tive response by younger users to peer-to-peer file shar­ing, the absolute oppo­site response by music indus­try lead­ers and the many approaches taken by orga­ni­za­tional and civic lead­ers regard­ing the legal­i­ties and responses to use.

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