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.
