In a week or two I’m heading up to the Trondheim area to do a field study at a industrial facility, to investigate how the shift team go about their work. It is often said that an control room operator’s job is 99% boredom, 1% sheer terror. In this return visit, I hope to be a little closer to the 1% end of spectrum, because this time the whole plant is in a shutdown. During a planned shutdown, a huge backlog of maintenance, upgrades and repairs are carried out that cannot be done while the plant is running. Thus the whole place is a hive of activity and will be a lot more hectic than normal operating conditions.

It’s also in a very pretty area of Norway.

Some statistics on my mobile social system, rhub

• 41 groups created
• 137 locations defined
• 167 people signed up
• 950 photos uploaded
• 1,942 tags applied
• 1,962 group messages sent
  • 5 said the ‘c’ word
  • 8 said the ‘s’ word
  • 16 said the ‘f’ word
  • 89 mentioned ‘beer’, ‘pub’ or ‘drinks’
• 45,768 messages dispatched (that’s a lot of SMSes!)
• 101,235 lines of PHP (not including the C# message dispatcher), which SLOCCount estimates to be 25.51 person-years of work

All in all, not bad for a research prototype and one group of users!

I realised that I’ve never really blaaghed about my PhD research project, rhub. So to amend this, I will write a series of posts to tell the rhub story. This is post #2, “Why MoSoSo”. The previous post was Getting to rhub.

Wearables trend

As true wearables become more practically useful and wearable, consumer mobile technologies are becoming more sophisticated meaning that in a few short years the fields will merge. A mobile phone will be a wearable computer for all intents and purposes. Thus it seems that the future is wearable technology: we will all be carrying around the ability to compute, capture, store and communicate as part of everyday life.

Social things

Wearables reside with people, and people are social animals, so it follows that to design wearables well we need to consider the world in which the wearable is used, not merely the design of the artefact itself. This consideration – that systems are used within a larger context – has only relatively recently caught on in computer science. It is designing for the Real World – where people don’t read manuals, people don’t follow workplace protocol, people circumvent controls for expediency, networks crash, things are dropped, devices are passed around and so on. We don’t exist or work in isolation, and our technology design needs to respect that. This consideration is not simply a matter of connecting systems with smatterings of web service or peer-to-peer technologies. It’s deeper than that, and the way we understand what is required is part of the design process.

Social technology research

I wanted to understand the social side of wearable design. How wearables can be made to be pro-social: not interfering when they are not useful, yet making it easier for people to communicate and share. Exploring the social can be tricky for both technologies designed exclusively for socialisation and those where the social aspects are periphery. In typical interaction design if we want to investigate the design of a new widget, we might invent a task which makes use of the widget and get a subject to carry it out. For social technologies this is more difficult. Testing in a lab is vastly different from where social interaction really takes place. Additionally, social interaction is often ad-hoc, unorganised, opportunistic and spans a variety of locations. It’s hard to nail down.

For these reasons, it seemed the best way to proceed was to conduct the research in the Real World as opposed to a lab environment. By doing this, I could expose the research to real scenarios, real usage and real people. Through this, a robust, useful and usable design can be uncovered. The downside of making it work in the Real World is that it has to be relatively low-tech. I don’t have a wearable, nor does anyone I know. There are not large communities of social wearable users.

Making it work in the real world

While ~99.9% of my friends have mobile phones and use the Internet, they use only basic phones (only a few have ‘smart’ handsets) and common Internet technology (email, the web and IM, mostly). So to do the research I needed to pick a lowest common denominator, and that turned out to be mobile phones (using SMS), instant messaging systems, email and the web.

There two main benefits to this approach. Firstly, the technology is already deployed – I wouldn’t need a whopping grant to deploy hardware around. Secondly, people are already accustomed to the technology and there are established usage norms – people know how to send SMSs and generally have their phone on and carry it around with them. Of course it has its drawbacks. The prototype will not be a leap forward in technology if its used on old devices, and existing usage norms may interfere with the creation of new norms around the prototype. But as Bill Buxton said:

”[Let’s] learn to do smart things with stupid technology today, rather than wait and do stupid things with smart technology tomorrow”

So while I dreamt of tackling social wearable design issues, I’ve had to come at it a slightly different tack. Mobile social software (trendily abbreviated as MoSoSo) is the approach I have taken with my exploratory research. While I acknowledge the many differences between MoSoSo and wearables, I think generalisations made from the findings can be applied to wearables.

I realised that I’ve never really blaaghed about my PhD research project, rhub. So to amend this, I will write a series of posts to tell the rhub story. This is post #1, “Getting to rhub”.

Wearables

Originally I was interested in wearable computing and in particular how wearables can be designed so that they are sociable devices. I define a “sociable device” as one that supports and respects people’s social context. It acts in a way that is prosocial: for example bringing people together and not getting in the way of social interaction or activities.

“Wearables” are mobile computer systems that are supposed to be always on, always connected, always available and ideally have some level of awareness. You could think of a high-tech smartphone as a basic form of wearable. I believe however the real vision of wearables is that you never have to reach into your pocket to pull out the device to check it or use it: a wearable should provide a localised, ambient cloud of computing capability about your person.

Perceptions

Wearables have often had a stigma attached to them. Current technology is bulky and obvious, and because they often mediate one or more senses for the user – for example a eye-glass mounted display – observers often think the user is handicapped.

Such perceptions change with time as norms evolve. A few short years ago if you walked down the street talking to no-one and didn’t obviously have a phone pressed to your ear people might be forgiven for thinking you were insane. Nowadays if we observe such behaviour in a person, we scope them out for a Bluetooth headset perched on the ear. If they’ve got one, they’re (presumably) OK, if not then we might revisit our insanity hypothesis.

Outsider’s observations are of course highly important to us as social actors. Humans act in purposeful, strategic ways to shape how others perceive them. Goffman calls this “face work”. If we think that others will discount us as a loony if we use something, we will of course think twice about adopting a technology, or do so only if it adds significant benefit.

Umwelt

Having omnipresent technology in social environments can raise other issues. If you have a wearable and you’re talking to someone, how do they know that you aren’t recording them? How do they know that the outward-facing camera is only for location awareness, and their image is not being broadcast on Internet? How do they know you’re paying attention to them when you have a eyeglass-embedded display?

Goffman suggests people maintain a fuzzy sphere of awareness around them – their Umwelt. The Umwelt changes dimensions and size depending on your social connections and current context. Within your Umwelt you are aware of other people, their observation of you, and what meaning they could possibly be making of you. For reasons of face-preservation, we seek to understand and control our Umwelt as best we can. Technology such as wearables can distort others’s Umwelt in unknown and or unpredictable ways, which naturally makes them suspicious. Witness how television personalities occasionally let their face slip when they think a camera is off, but instead still broadcasting. In the presence of a transmitting camera the TV anchorperson has a very particular face that must be presented and maintained. Off camera, a different Umwelt and face may be in effect. When these two Umwelten clash, the result can be humiliation.

So to summarise, wearables present some interesting challenges for design. Because the research field is relatively new much of the focus has been on “making it work”: designing low-power, compact devices or sensing systems to detect location, for example. Looking at how wearables will actually be used in practise, and how they should be designed from a usability stand point is a fairly uncharted field.

p.s. Sorry sociologists/social psychologists for not doing Goffman justice in this short entry.

Read the second post in this series, ‘Why MoSoSo’.