Ed Mitchell: Platform neutral

Methods to engage people with technology

If you are in London on February 13th, and are interested in how to do the right sort of thinking in advance of ‘I want a community’, go to this event (Thank you Petef for pointing me to it):

Digital networks and computer systems remain obscure to most people until something goes wrong. What if everyone had a role in designing them and deciding how society used its digital technologies? This one-day workshop shares methods taken from performance and drama developed to engage people in thinking about technology and what they want from the designers of the systems that will surround us in The Not Quite Yet.
Link to event page

… And please tell me all about it.

This ties in with a long held passion of mine which is that we still don’t understand enough about what we mean when we start designing systems, and we aren’t involving the right people in the design process, or dropping them into unsuitable spaces and expecting them to behave. And when we wave the word ‘engagement’ around, it’s getting serious. And when we try to facilitate people in unsuitable spaces, of course it leads to issues…

We have inherited ’social’ software from a history of people who tell us it is ’social’ so there (at least it’s not big centralised enterprise systems, or heavily monitored communities we are told), but is it really that ’social’? What does it mean? For whom? For what purpose?
Aren’t we now just throwing all the new widgets at a social requirement and hoping some of them stick? Shouldn’t we be understanding the requirements much more fully?

Are we sure that we aren’t still stuffing humans into communication technology frameworks from the top down that don’t give them what they need or want? Even if we adopt agile, get busy with UCD, drum up many use cases, throw personas around like billy-ho, watch punters through one way mirrors, and whatever new process is going, isn’t that still a bit abstract and top down?

It still doesn’t sound democratic and co-design to me. Still sounds like people being given stuff and told to use it - not necessarily for their benefit.
Where are the people in this process?

How can we connect with them in order to explain to them the implications of their decisions?

The gap remains and I think this workshop is part of the facilitation meets strategy puzzle.

Other people thinking about this include David Wilcox who has an excellent series of workshops designed to flatten the power laws of supplier-punter by cascading the right questions at the right times, and Nancy White with the Technology Steward idea, which takes online facilitation into this realm, and I’m sure others (hello!).

I’m working with Dan Dixon on a workshop applying Pattern Design principles to a new system before we even use the ‘community’ word, which we will be writing about in due course…

Umm. Yes, well. Err. There you go. Soap box moment over. Go to the workshop, and let me know.