New Now Know How

The promise of computing technology dissolving into behavior, invisibly permeating the natural world around us cannot be reached. Technology is, of course, that which by definition is separate from the natural; it is explicitly designed that way. Technology only becomes truly invisible when, like the myriad of pens sold in Japan’s department stores, it’s no longer seen as technology at all. Deliberately creating something ‘invisible’ is self-defeating. I can think of few recent technologies as visible to the public as RFID, no matter how physically ‘invisible’ it might be.

The point being, that you can’t design something to be invisible. It becomes invisible as people make it part of their lives, as it becomes part of the “fabric of society” or just something that people take for granted.

Design for appropriation is where it’s at. Being aware of the seams between things rather than making the seams invisble. Seams are useful. Edges make things clear. Inside. Outside. Here is the street. Here is the footpath.

Occaisionally these emails come around the uni email lists:

We will be running a workshop exploring how to use Word efficiently with long documents. The workshop will look at the various functions you might want to us when writing a thesis, mainly related to formatting the document to avoid having a document that seems to have its own life.

I love LaTeX.

I moderate a discussion forum. It is a continual (inner) struggle to let the forum be what the members want and to reign them in when they go too far.

Often there are crisis that arise because members can represent themselves to be other than they are or because people do not believe that people are who they say they are. Other problems come from people not acting on (through?) the forum as they would in real life. Being a car forum full of young guys, this often takes the shape of posturing and insults that would probably never be said aloud in a pub, or, if they were said, would end up in one or more bloody noses.

The participants of these electronically mediated virtual communities acquire skills that are useful for the virtual social environments developing in late-twentieth-century technologised nations. The participants learn to delegate their agencies to body representatives that exist in imaginal spaces contiguously with representatives of other individuals. The become accustomed to what might be called lucid dreaming in an awake state — to a constellation of activities much like reading, but an active and interactive reading, a participatory social practice in which the actions of the reader have consequences in the world of the dream or of the book. The older metaphor of reading undergoes a transformation in a textual space that is consensual, interactive, haptic, and that is constituted through inscription practices — the production of microprocessor code. The boundaries between the social and the “natural” and between biology and technology take on the generous permeability that characterises communal space in the most recent virtual systems.

From Allucquère Rosanne Stone The war of deire and technology at the close of the mechanical age, 1995, MIT Press, pg121

NPR (National Public Radio) has a cute story on speech recognition that, surprisingly, acknowledges the flaws as well as benefits.

I wonder if NZ’s new biometric passports have been (or will be) tested with real people in the real world? Apparently there will be a beta-level test:

The computerised entry checks will be offered first to “registered passengers” who volunteer to use biometric kiosks to avoid queues at manned Customs booths.

Though rolling out something for a beta-level test means that you’ll be running it in production pretty soon.

In other biometric news, Siemens have “successfully tested” a finger-print based check-in system.

After a passenger’s finger is rolled over an optical reader unit, the system converts the fingerprints’ characteristics into a 2D code which the reader prints on the boarding pass. Just before boarding, the fingerprints are again scanned by a reader and compared with the barcode. The data is erased after the passenger checks in.

I’m guessing that you still have to pass some sort of human-based ID check and the biometrics only comes in to verify that the person getting on the plane is the person who checked in. Is that really a problem?

In any case, I’m not sure where I read it, but I’m sure I’ve been told that people don’t like finger-print based ID checking because of the criminal associations of being fingerprinted.

([via}(http://www.we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/007128.php))

Wow.

It’s a very basic thing at the moment but it’s got a title page, table of contents, chapters and a bibliography.

It’s so dodgy at the moment I’m not even willing to consider it a 1st draft but it’ll do for sending to my supervisors and seeing if it hangs together at all. It doesn’t even have a full introduction yet, and probably all of the chapters could be 25% to 50% longer than they are. I hope it’s more like 25%.

I’ve realised:

• that I’ve been really lazy when it comes to putting references in, given the stringy nature of my bibliography;
• I might need at least one “interlude” chapter to explain various jumps;
• I obviously didn’t understand LaTeX when I started writing because there are times when I’ve skipped entire heading levels;
• I might need a whole big section in my penultimate chapter to account for a great new idea I’ve had recently.

Yay.

Here’s my thesis abstract. Comments appreciated even (especially) if you have no idea what I’m on about.

Speech recognition software is often thought of as a easy to use interface that allows a person to talk to a computer instead of controlling it using their hands. Using speech recognition software is often presented in terms of “talk instead of typing”. Presenting speech recognition software as a simple matter of talking instead of typing ignores the difficulties involved in actually using large vocabulary speech recognition software in a productive work environment. This thesis began with the question: what would a speech recognition application for use live in the courtroom of the ACT Magistrates Court look like? To answer this question, a second question had to be asked and a thesis that I originally though would be a software design and implementation project became an ethnographically inspired one: What does productive use of speech recognition look currently like? Investigating the use of speech recognition software and discovering what made it usable became the focus of this project. This investigation led me to another shift in my thinking. When I started this project I thought that the usability of any technology was contained within the technology itself - that usability was inherent. Having investigated a particularly difficult-to-use technology I now believe that the usability or usefulness of any software product resides in the complex interaction of many factors both internal and external to a particular software product.

The basis of this research is two ethnographically inspired studies. In the first study, I observed and interviewed speech recognition users about their use of commercial off-the-shelf speech recognition software in various public service departments. Of the eight interviewees, six had some form of occupational over use injury and one was no-longer working. The major conclusion of that study is that the productive use of speech recognition software is dependant on many factors external to the software mainly contained within the work that is being performed and the environment in which the work is taking place. The second study concerned observing and describing part of the work process of the ACT Magistrates Court involved in sentencing. In this study I interviewed and observed many workers at the Court including Magistrates, Associates, Clerks and other people involved in the sentencing process. The outcome of the study of the Court was to recognise the sentencing process as one distributed in space and time between a large number of people rather than one that is performed by a single Magistrate sitting on the bench.

This thesis presents:

• A descriptive analysis of the use of speech recognition in two public service departments
• A descriptive analysis of the work of sentencing in the ACT Magistrates Court
• A novel design specification for a speech recognition system for the Court
• An approach to using various sociological approaches to study software and its use. In doing so I have shown that it is possible to use established theories from sociology to work with technology rather than inventing new approaches.
• A re-consideration of usability as contingent upon context.