Another point of view on trust:

To me, trust is one of the invisible foundations of design. People
can only operate normally when they can trust a significant part of
the systems (world) around them to a significant degree. Trust
reduces the cognitive and security load - being constantly alert and
ready to fall back securing another trustable platform in the case of
breakdowns would wear a person off very quickly. [I am sure there is
some hard evidence of this in the field of psychology.]

We trust much more things than we can name...starting from that 'the
world will not fall from under my feet', or that 'this word means
what I think it means'. [Maybe this also relates to Giddens'
'ontological security'?]

My belief is that the 'types of trust' that Peter (quoting Zucker)
describes, that relate to trusting persons, emerge from this kind of
very basic cognitive foundation.

The trust we place on people has complicated cultural and social
backgrounds that have consequences for design, but I believe that
people have trust relationships with products and systems that are
not necessarily derived through analogy from human relationship
experiences [albeit influenced by them]. More likely, I'd guess that
the human relationship related trust is a later evolutionary
development.

The world around people is now dramatically more thoroughly designed
than ever before. Our ontological security is grounded on designed
and social, as well as 'naturally evolved', artefacts, structures,
systems.

For designers, it is crucial to understand what qualities and
features in designs engender and support their 'trustability'. I
think it should also be a responsibility of designers to avoid
misusing that understanding for creating 'trustable' appearances for
things that actually do not deliver what they promise.

Maybe it is useful not to anthropomorphize the trust discussion
completely in the case of trusting designed outcomes. While the
person-to-person trust is important for our understanding, I agree
with that part of the discussion, it is not all, and you can't assume
that the two kinds of trust work the same way. I think the persistent
scenario of the animated character agent in the computer that
supposedly helps you [obviously, I do not have high opinion of that
scenario] is an example of trying to make people stuff work in a
designed system that is not a person, with bad results.

(curiosity: Microsoft Bob: http://toastytech.com/guis/bob2.html)


kh

...
At 10:40 -0500 12.3.2004, Peter Scupelli wrote:
>Much work has been done to understand how trust runs in organizations,
>between organizations and at the personal level. It seems interesting to
>think about trust in a systematic way regarding design and design research.
>Especially with regards to the relationships that people establish with
>designed products. I intend designed products in a very broad way.
>
>Lynne Zucker describes three types of trust:
>
>         1 Process based trust- i.e. you trust someone because you have a
>history of exchanges with that person. The person you trust has established
>a reputation for being trustworthy.
>
>         2 Characteristic based trust- i.e. you trust someone because of
>their ethnicity, country or city of origin, family etc.
>
>         3 Institutional trust- some examples are professional certification,
>escrow accounts, insurance etc

...

>Breaking trust production processes into three types as Zucker seems like an
>interesting move to be able to relate trust research to design activities.
>It seems like a lens to be thinking of trust in relation to design research.