[M4] Modern theories (part II)

These theories were much closer to each other than previous ones, like a family they had a big common conceptual backbone. they all focus on human and technology in the social context of them.
while reading the book, it was really difficult to make a clear border of definition for each one, rather I found them merging together in many cases. grounded theory was a different approach between them because it had kind of engineering point of view to collect data and drive theories out of it based on researchers background. this and activity theory seemed to me more clear and easier to apply.

A hacktivism case "Deportation class"

A hacktivism case


On June 20 2001, Lufthansa(the german airline)'s website was attacked. some 13,000 people participated in a DDOS action against the airline's homepage and more than one million hits were sent to lufthansa webpage and services went down for several minutes.
the main reason for this attack was Lufthansa's participation as carrier, in forced deportations of asylum seekers. the poor condition in which these transportations were held caused at least death of two passengers.
Lufthansa later claimed that the company was required by law to allow the use of its flights for deportations. The demonstrators also claim they never intended to totally disrupt Lufthansa and it was only an 'activist demonstration'.
After several years(more than 3) German court found that DDOS actions were a valid form of political protest!(which is cool!) one reason for that can be that while the site itself was rendered briefly inaccessible, the actual corporation, its ability to fly planes, maintain normal operations, and communicate internally and with the media remained, for practical purposed, unaffected.[2]


resources :

1. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/04/01/lufthansa_ddos_attack/

2. Molly Sauter, "Towards a New Framework for the Ethical Analysis of Activist DDOS Actions"

Socio Technical Systems Engineering Handbook

Socio Technical Systems Engineering Handbook

.....here is a summary on 3 first chapters of this book......

>CHAPTER 1. SOCIO-TECHNICAL SYSTEMS<
well this chapter is about the change of view in system development. many now agree that reductionist approach to development, which divides the system into a social system and a technical system is not a good representation.

in system development there are three aspect to consider:
-organisational-social-technical

STS methods promise to provide one way of at least ensuring that the organisational, social and technical aspects are appropriately dealt with.

0. these methods encompass socio-technical ideas :

0. 
   
   • Soft Systems Methodology.
   • ETHICS (Effective Technical and Human Implementation of Computer-based Systems) 
   • Cognitive Work Analysis.
   • Ethnographic workplace analysis.
   • Cognitive systems engineering.
   • Human centred design 

problems with existing STSD methods:

• A lack of consistent terminology
• Determining the appropriate levels of abstraction to use.
• Conflicting value systems, with humanistic values on the one hand, being regarded by some as incompatible with managerial values. 
• A lack of agreed  evaluation criteria
• focus on analysis rather than synthesis 
• A lack of multidisciplinary, with some disciplines failing to understand what other disciplines can contribute to system development. 

>CHAPTER 2. SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT AND DEPLOYMENT<

how and why software development shifts towards STS design methods:


what helped this shift in view:

• A shift in focus from programs to systems
• A shift from development to procurement, configuration, and reuse 
  
• A shift from small to large development teams 
• Changing user-provider relations 
• Development increasingly becoming a professional activity  

what shapes the development work:
Many of the problems of software development are organisational; they are the problems of coordination, scheduling, decision-making, awareness, and so on. A key difference between systems engineering and socio-technical systems engineering is that the latter takes these into account.

Managing the ordering devices in software engineering is crucial to the successful development of any non-trivial system.it is important to notice and analyse the repertoire of ordering devices used in any particular systems engineering project, the interdependencies between these, and their strengths and fallibilities.
how organisation affects the process of work: an organisation is structured can significantly impact on the way a project is practiced and, indeed, the architecture of the system itself.

The priorities of an organisation also significantly affect the ways in which systems engineering is practiced.

Systems specifications:specifications provide a framework within which, and in reference to which, design and testing, and user-designer relations, get worked out in practice.

The area of specification is one where socio-technical factors are, perhaps, most evident and so it has been a focus for research in using socio-technical analyses.Requirements engineering, particularly in user-centred design methods, often seeks to improve the quality of user-relevant information available during the design process.

work specification:-contract:contract between a supplier and customer stipulating the work that will be done over a period of years.
-card:methods produce short-term requirements written on small cards throughout a project.



>CHAPTER 3. REQUIREMENTS AND DESIGN<

how fieldwork can be used to gather date that informs the requirements engineering process.many practical problems comes not directly from tool or technology but from they way people work.
needed a better understanding of work, the actual rather than the formal business processes and the relationships between these processes and organisational factors that influenced the ways in which work was done.


where ethnography comes in:-softwares made based on theoretical business modes, but actual process is different(more appropriate requirements to be proposed.)
-People cannot articulate their requirements if you ask people they might not even know what they do, but if you observe them you will see important details.
how fieldwork inform prototype development




questions for ethnographer to have in mind while conducting field work:
-what are current unimportant characteristics-what are current important characteristics and features that should be supported in future design
-what should be replicated as before

how to direct the ethnographic field work(sanity checking for requirements):
rather than building a general picture of the work being done, the fieldworker can focus on the activities that are reflected in the requirements and can identify requirements which could cause problems in practice.


short period of fieldwork (quick and dirty field work)
-The work setting, which describes the environment where the work takes place and the interactions with this environment.
-The work flow, which describes the sequences of work activities, information flows etc.
-Social and organisational perspectives, which show how the work of individuals in the process relates to other peoples work and to broader organisational issues.

-Documentation : designers notepad


-problems: An accepted problem with fieldwork is that it tells you about work as it is done and doesn't really give you any clues about ways of doing things differently.

authors conclude : "we now think that fieldwork is not an activity that should precede the development of system requirements but should not be started until an outline set of requirements is available."

Distributed Cognition

Modern Theories in HCI:

Distributed Cognition(DC)

Development of distributed cognition method is continuation of involving cognitive science into HCI, and a result of popularisation of internet and computers in workplaces and social processes. 

This method tries to step out of individual user approach and move towards the networks of people and artefacts that they use.
Since it does not try to model process happening inside of human brain and focuses on external events, DC is expected to give a better detailed view on properties of the system itself.
Although distributed cognition promises a more accurate results, it has its drawbacks as well. one big difficulty on applying this method is that it needs conduction of ethnographic field study. ethnographic studies are time and resource consuming and there is no easy and predefined way of extracting design tips out of collected data.

My concept map of distributed cognition part of the book:

the hacker ethic found in today's world

hacker ethic, yesterday...today


I see all the free knowledge spreading communities around the web, as part of hacker ethics.
wikipedia, stackowerflow and all the open source tools and drivers that are made everyday. and there are people working on them actively, developing tools and answering questions and solving problems.
in this sense the hacker ethics is alive and moving forward. it may has changed a lot during recent years, but it is still natural as hackers are front line technology users and developers they should adopt to changes in the world. I also feel some new waves of hacker activity coming along with copy right and intellectual property issues. too much restriction on data sharing, monopolies on publishing and data privacy issues seem growing.

Jargon File

my digging in Jargon File


I was mostly fascinated with the different language use rather than a single word. perhaps because I used to work in language processing and had some experience on web data collection.

it was interesting to see how much original hacker language has impacted current web and youth language. actually about youth, I am not sure if youth language entered hacker language or other way around. because it is always youth speciality to play with language and make up new words and expressions. impact of programming logic on the way hackers communicate is a big one too.
this is my(!) impression in Jargon file:
foo bar
or

foobar: n.
[very common] Another widely used metasyntactic variable; see foo for etymology. Probably originally propagated through DECsystem manuals by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in 1960s and early 1970s; confirmed sightings there go back to 1972. Hackers do not generally use this to mean FUBAR in either the slang or jargon sense. See also Fred Foobar. In RFC1639, “FOOBAR” was made an abbreviation for “FTP Operation Over Big Address Records”, but this was an obvious backronym. It has been plausibly suggested that “foobar” spread among early computer engineers partly because of FUBAR and partly because “foo bar” parses in electronics techspeak as an inverted foo signal; if a digital signal is active low (so a negative or zero-voltage condition represents a "1") then a horizontal bar is commonly placed over the signal label.

when I was younger and I was doing my master in computational linguistics, I used to look for all sorts of regular expressions in web. very often I would find my answer with an example using "foobar"! I always wondered why foobar appears everywhere! and what does it mean. I even imagined that maybe there is a real place called "foo bar" ...

Women as "different people"

Yes internet made it easier to spread feminist ideas, to publish abuses and challenges ...
but internet did this for almost anything. what ever you want to say, now with internet it is easier to share it with others. but what was greatest effect of internet in women's lives that actually changed something? I am not sure!...
what I know is that computers and internet made it easier for women to work and earn money, which then boosted their confidence and satisfied their need for doing something different than household work. the same opportunity that it brought for people with physical disabilities.
housewives had a chance to be financially independent, an important step to step up against abusive and aggressive environment.

some times ago, I read an article about a mobile app that was kind of map that user could tag it. the idea was that women tag their experience of sexual (mis)behaviour on that location. for example you could see on the map that one particular district was crowded with tags of verbal abuse or so on..
it was very interesting app not only because it informed women to avoid places or be careful and ready to defend themselves but also it made everyone aware of such behaviours and even local citizens and police were more careful.

having that app in mind I did some google search on similar apps, and I was very amused by the results!:
http://www.tomsguide.com/us/domestic-abuse-apps,news-19477.html

ethnography and system design

I found these two quotes from Ian Sommerville a very good summary of what I also think about importance of ethnography in design:

“Software systems do not exist in isolation. They are used in a social and organisational context” and “how the social and organisational context affects the practical operation of the system.”

this point to the “sensitising” role of ethnography:

“sensitising you to the nature of work and its organisation ”(Tom Rodden)

and

“You get information about the social interactions in the setting, which other design and analysis methods simply don’t capture.” (Ian Sommerville)

and

“I think the most important thing in ethnography is simply getting designers sensitive to the issues that the people who use systems confront. ” (Dave Randall)

The second point which is also interesting was what Richard Bentley said about looking for new ideas, new developments and new solutions. It may even happen that when we look closer to the context and actual setting and workflow we may find out that our original questions and problem definition that we are designing for, is wrong or need a serious revise.

“ethnography is a very good way of finding out some interesting things that might be worthy of further exploration or of changing your view.”(Steve Benford)

The third point that I found relevant was the use of ethnographical study to understand which parts are essential to remain and which parts are dictated with limitations of existing tool.

“what things are non-critical and the consequences of the environment they are in at the moment?”(Richard Bentley)

the forth point is the use if ethnographical studies evaluatively

“at each stage, to learn about how people experience them and feed that back into design. Ethnography is, I think, a highly appropriate and relatively quick way of doing that. ”(Steve Benford)

I also somehow disagree with Richard Harper when he says “I think if you’re doing ethnography it seems intrinsic to observation and grasping and feeling inside the worlds of those that you’re studying that you get a sense of how those worlds are assembled and thus you therefore also have a sense of how it can be reassembled.” I think when you study something you gain some information, and what you would later do with that information is up to you. It seems engineering kind of thinking that you go from “how something works” to “how it can work or be reassembled differently”.

Random Thoughts

So! I read the week 5 of ethic and law. two main questions till now:
-why hacker ethics is compared to capitalism only and not to any other ideology?
-what was the internet age's role in the whole "different people's" integration?

1. informative to others:they are not that different after all, 
2. informative to themselves:information that made their life easier,like the Estonian website that tells about accessibility facilities around the country 
3. hiding screen: it made it possible to participate without showing the difference to others
4. it opened new possibilities to work and be effective without a lot of physical activity, nowadays for many jobs we just need to have a brain!

social cohesiveness and reaching ubicomp

social cohesiveness (or caring) in reaching ubicomp

in short I think it is important. I actually I have not thought about it before reading the Pekka's paper.
I dont know what kind of role it can have in "reaching ubicomp" but it has a big role in sustaining the ubicom society.
to me it seems that the importance of cohesiveness is more in making a sustainable social plan. maybe it wont directly affect the initial performance but in a long run the health and cohesiveness of a society will have a big impact on its performance.
when people dont have the old social and emotional contact with each other the way they used to have, it  is easy to lose the whole social relatedness and it can be very helpful to have an strong cohesiveness to begin with.

Internet availability in Iran

Internet availability in Iran

It was an interesting process to dig up the data supporting this post! every resource would claim different set of numbers! it was controversial and doubtful that how each organisation came up with its report! the main problem seems to be the unclear data collection methods and difficulty to access some sources.
unfortunately the data I found is from four years ago, but it can give some rough overall idea to the reader.
in 2010 access to internet in urban areas were ~19% and in rural areas down to 4%.
out of 20.3 million families,4.3(21.4%) million had internet access from their own homes, which 94% of them were living in cities.
35.2% of all households in Iran had computers at home. which is 91.5% of urban households and 12% of rural.
comparing to the studies from 2008, within two years, the amount of home internet access and families with computer increased respectively 3.2 and 5 percent.
58.1% of internet users where men and 41.9% women. which are 16.6% of male population and 12.7% of females.
from older than 6years internet users , 59.8% had university degree of some kind.

reference: 
http://www.alef.ir/vdcepp8zejh8epi.b9bj.html?14wml

Digital divide in Iran 

in my perspective

in Iran digital divide is most visible in different age groups. younger generations have constant contact with computers and online world while their parents may not even own an e-mial account !

this is not a big practical problem for older generation, since it is totally possible to live a normal life without using internet or computers(it actually depends on the job, but still possible to live your personal life easily). 

due to strict filtering and low bandwidth, even internet users dont use online connections as a serious means of instant communication, for example friends wont use messenger or facebook chat to fix a meeting point or deciding where to go for dinner. they rather use phone calls for serious purposes.

in this aspect younger and older generations behave similar to each other. what makes the gap between them is the use of internet and computers for free time activities and connectivity to the rest of the world.

while parents watch news on tv with limited access to the different sources, their children have the opportunity to see the world trough many different lenses, have live feeds from people inside the event and read different opinions on it.

in this sense I can say that knowledge makes the biggest divide between the two generations. but kind of knowledge that changes and shapes ones ideology rather than knowledge with immediate practical usage.

getting in contact with bigger external world which is quite different from what they used to, in Iran, changes and shapes ideas, expectations and worldview of youth making an even bigger gap between them and their previous generation. 

Classical Approaches in HCI

                 Classical Approaches in HCI

For making the map I first went through the text very quickly and had a grasp on the content and structure of the text. then I started reading it in detail and after I finished each sub-section, I drew the part of map related to that. while reading the next sub-section, I would sometimes revise my map accordingly editing previous part as well as adding new branches.
My map aims to summarise the classical approaches in HCI , their application and limitations.
I had a small problem during this Cmap, in many cases I found the examples interesting and wanted to include them in my map, but it was not clear how to show them in a meaningful and readable way.