Dear Francois,

As with Terry, it seems to me worth distinguishing between the issues
you raise and Jaime Henriquez’s rant. Henriquez did not simply observe
the behavior of human beings in response to designed artifacts. Rather
than describe behaviors to raise issues, he attributed motives and
psychological states to the users. When Terry explained the issues that
he derived from the note, it made sense. Now you’ve explained the
issues as you see them. I agree that these issues deserve research. 

That’s different than saying that Henriquez’s comments are the
beginning of a PhD. Henriquez post represents the problems that
tone-deaf techies impose on the rest of us require research. In that
sense, the Henriquez document is the starting point of a research
program, just as disease is the start of a research program in
medicine.

Terry’s first post and yours seemed to describe Henriquez’s
comments as the beginning of a research program on superstitious users.
That’s different to a research program on user problems. I took
exception to Henriquez’s views. 

With respect to my other comments, your first note offered a sweeping
social and historical commentary that brought many debatable issues
together in too short a space to do them justice. It seemed to me to be
a determinist explanation with too many loose terms. Anchoring an
account of the scope posted here on so many details that do not come
together seemed problematic. Too many claims were open to debate.

Your comments here are quite different. I’ll agree that technology
has social dimensions. Patrice Flichy put it very nicely when he wrote
that all technologies are social technologies. This is a different kind
of claim than a determinist explanation based on the assertion of an
ever-lasting divide between ruling classes and the rest of us. While the
explanation in your earlier post may account for some instances of the
problems you describe, the explanation doesn’t hold up as an
all-and-everywhere account. That’s what I meant by asking for deeper
reflection, and that’s why I said your account contained valid details
without being comprehensive. I hope this explains my earlier notes. 

Jaime Henriquez’s viewpoint seemed narrow, prejudiced, and
unreasonable. That’s why I referred to his comments as a rant. The
issues you and Terry raise in your latest replies seem quite reasonable.
The issues in your latest comments are the beginning of a conversation
that can lead to useful research.

Yours,

Ken

Professor Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS | University Distinguished
Professor | Dean, Faculty of Design | Swinburne University of Technology
| Melbourne, Australia | [log in to unmask] | Ph: +61 3 9214 6078 |
Faculty www.swinburne.edu.au/design


—

Francois Nsenga wrote:

—snip—

You were puzzled by my supporting response to Terry’s post, so am I
following your repeated refusal to acknowledge of what you so
disdainfully call Jaime Henriquez’s “silly rant”. By the way, and
this is from my own harsh daily experience, Jaime is not the only
“techie” who believes “that everyone ought to do things as he
does – and he seems to believe that if it works for highly skilled
techies, it ought to work for the rest of us.” They all believe it
this way ... And that is the serious point that deserves serious
attention: what? why? and how to improve?!

In my email, I supported the view that the behavior so preliminarily
reported by Jaime, “condemning” (you said) it or not, is indeed the
generalized behavior of humans towards the unknown because, among many
other reasons, badly, poorly, or tendentiously explained by experts. To
laypersons, superstition is one of the many ways to relate to the world,
particularly towards the “exosomatic”* world as nowadays so
mysteriously devised and ‘boxed’ by (industrial) designers. Examples
are plenty around us. And as such, regardless of Henriquez’s “silly
rant”, I don’t understand why you would contest the fact that this a
topic that deserves research for better understanding and, for us
designers, better alleviating (frustration and fear can easily lead to
many kind of disorders and ills..). Wouldn’t Jaime’s “rant”
reminds us to study, among many other avenues of research in Design, 
“the inability of techies to understand the people who use the
tools they create”, as you so well agree yourself? Why are they unable
to? How to improve on this lacking situation for a more
‘satisficing’ one?

On the other hand, I don’t see the difference you may be attributing
to Henriquez’s “rant” from outcomes from ordinary research method
that starts with noticing and collecting facts. We all know that these
facts, never mind how trivial they may be, are usually enlightened
further either through interviews, directed and/or spontaneous, or
through participatory and/or non intrusive observations, prior to
theorizing on them. Henriquez reports “ some of the user superstitions
- he has - encountered”. I don’t think the author intended to
present a thorough case study on human behavior while using computers.
And no matter how, when, where, at which level, and in which format the
author encountered and reported those superstitions, you wouldn’t, and
you did not deny that these are the generalized behavior of many among
the human species in many life circumstances. Facts not related only to
computer use but also to many, many other artifacts we interact with in
our daily lives.

Such a preliminary report on one factual aspect of our human behavior
isn’t worth pursuing at PhD level by experts (of course for whoever
might be the commissioning ‘prince’ )? Or else, perhaps, your own
‘rant’ may be a Dean’s (both in medieval and contemporary
meanings) strategy to trigger more thoughts on this fundamental topic?
As you wrote, to incite us “to be more reflective”?

And finally, as regards the “interesting issues” that, as an
ordinarily lay person I have raised so awkwardly as you say, nonetheless
containing “valid details”, obviously this is neither the place nor
the time to “deepen the analysis” and bring those details
“together in an explanatory account”. At the outset of my post, I
had mentioned that Jame’s “rant” is, for me at least, a trigger to
a few PhDs I wish I had had the opportunity to engage in. One of these,
however, not at all being on “development of myth or superstition in a
hundred other cultures” as you extrapolated. Rather, as would a
physician or a judge (my preferred metaphor) do, I would have enjoyed
dwelling on the origins, the effects, and the ‘preferred’ outcomes
related to artifacts use, and respectively recommending more
“satisficing” conception and production  approaches and modes to
daily use artifacts. I would have conducted such a study either in one
given culture, or else it could be a comparative view among a number of
cultures, historical or actual. And this wouldn’t it have been  design
research?

—snip—