10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17242
By recollecting memories and experiences of his 40 years career through Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), Interaction Design, Participatory Design (PD) and more in general the design of information systems, Liam Bannon outlines a history of the relation between design-related disciplines and social sciences. Based on such history, Bannon explains his long-term engagement with the cultivation of human capabilities through design and reflects, more in general, upon the meaning of human centeredness in design, taking also into consideration contributions and questions proposed by Science and Technology Studies on these issues.
application/pdf
2038-3460
17242
1
en
Alvise Mattozzi
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/
Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
interaction design
The Pilgrimage Goes On... A Conversation with Liam Bannon about Humans, Machines, and their Interactions
Text.Serial.Journal
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/
6
Conversations
2015-07-10
2023-06-17
2015-07-10
2023-07-31
133-152
TS
Alvise Mattozzi
2015/07/10
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17242
133
Free University of Bozen-Bolzano
2038-3460
1
interaction design
en
152
The Pilgrimage Goes On... A Conversation with Liam Bannon about Humans, Machines, and their Interactions
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/article/download/17242/16107
6
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          Conversation

The Pilgrimage Goes On...
A Conversation with Liam Bannon about Humans,
Machines, and their Interactions
	
  
Alvise Mattozzi
Free University of Bozen-Bolzano
	
  
                Abstract: By recollecting memories and experiences of his 40 years career
                through Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Computer Supported Coop-
                erative Work (CSCW), Interaction Design, Participatory Design (PD) and
                more in general the design of information systems, Liam Bannon outlines a
                history of the relation between design-related disciplines and social sciences.
                Based on such history, Bannon explains his long-term engagement with the
                cultivation of human capabilities through design and reflects, more in general,
                upon the meaning of human centeredness in design, taking also into consid-
                eration contributions and questions proposed by Science and Technology
                Studies on these issues.

                Keywords: Human-Computer Interaction (HCI); Computer Supported
                Cooperative Work (CSCW); Participatory Design (PD); Activity Theory; In-
                teraction Design.

                Corresponding author: Alvise Mattozzi, Faculty of Design and Art, Free
                University of Bozen-Bolzano, Piazza Università 1, 39100 Bozen-Bolzano, Italy
                – Email: amattozzi@unibz.it.




Introduction

   Liam Bannon welcomes me on the first floor of the new building
housing the Department of Information Engineering and Computer Sci-
ence (DISI) at the University of Trento1. Not even the time to greet, and

	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  
    1
      The original conversation was recorded on the 10th of June 2015 in Povo
(TN), at the DISI building of the University of Trento, where Liam Bannon is
Visiting Professor, also teaching a Doctoral Course on the design of learning
spaces for the ICT International Doctoral School. The text has kept the informal
style of the original interview, with some small revisions for clarity. Liam apolo-
gizes for any inadvertent misunderstanding of people’s positions or factual inac-
	
  
TECNOSCIENZA
Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
6 (1) pp. 133-152 - ISSN 2038-3460
www.tecnoscienza.net                                                                                                                                                                                                               2015
134                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             Tecnoscienza - 6 (1)

he right away points to the corridors: “Look! Look! How can they still
design buildings in this way? Corridors and closed doors – all the same.
This place really does not afford anything but walking through the corri-
dors into your own room. No encounters, no meetings, or other activities
besides walking straight to your room”.
    His sensibility toward spatial designs that foster human competencies
and skills become the topic of our talk, even before our conversation offi-
cially starts.
    He already knows that the conversation will also tackle the issue of
Participatory Design, about which he recently wrote an historical outline
together with Pelle Ehn (Bannon and Ehn 2013). We already had the
chance to talk about this paper one year ago, thanks to a seminar orga-
nized by RUCOLA2, entitled: “The Participation of What?”.
    Because of this previous mutual knowledge, Bannon starts the conver-
sation by trying to underplay his role in the Participatory Design move-
ment.


                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   ***

    Liam Bannon: My role has often been the one of an interpreter for dif-
ferent communities of other communities’ work. I always try to talk to a
certain community about what I find interesting within another commu-
nity. The problem with such position is that often people start to see you
as being “the expert” in whatever approach I am trying to bring in to the
community. I do not feel that this is quite appropriate, and I do not wish
that all of their thinking about the topic is mediated by my (limited)
knowledge of this other approach. I am quite happy to say, “This is what
I personally find interesting”. But, I’m not trying to claim expertise in all
of these different areas. So, for instance, Participatory Design... although
I have been connected with that community for sometime and I know
many of the people who really helped to put it on the map – within in-
formatics in the eighties and nineties – I am not the spokesperson for Par-
ticipatory Design. There are many others much more qualified than me,
with more practical experience. I do try to work in a participatory fashion
in some sense with the projects I do, but it can vary quite a lot in terms of
what happens.


	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  
curacies that may have crept into this text – it is just a set of personal, anecdotal
reflections, captured at a moment in time. For more extended published articles
on many of the topics raised here, please contact Liam Bannon at
liam.bannon@ul.ie. Comments also welcome.
    2
      Research Unit on Communication, Organizational Learning and Aesthetics,
Department of Sociology and Social Research, University of Trento
(www.unitn.it/rucola).
Mattozzi                                                                135
    Alvise Mattozzi: Yours seems to be a sort of research journey through
different communities and frameworks, a journey through which you do
not only carry out your enquiry, but also connect different sites you hap-
pen to explore. You already framed your research in this way early on, in
1989, in a paper vividly titled: “A Pilgrim’s Progress. From cognitive sci-
ence to cooperative design” (Bannon 1989).

    LB: Yes, with that paper I have tried to describe a bit what was driv-
ing me at that time.

    AM: However, it can also be considered a sort of far-sighted program
for the years to come.

     LB: In a way yes, but I could not know that at the time...
     I studied psychology and computer science separately, in the early
seventies, and I became interested in the relation between the two. There
were two levels, as I saw it: one was conceptual, like thinking of the com-
puter, and computation, as a model for the mind, and that was the infor-
mation processing approach, which was very dominant in cognitive psy-
chology at that time. So I became interested in that, and in fact I worked
within artificial intelligence, which was thinking of intelligence as a gen-
eral mechanism which could be simulated in the computer. So that if we
were able to build something in the computer, then we could assume that
it simulated how we humans think, assuming that we are also information
processors. That was one level of the interest of the relation between
mind and computers. The other level was a more practical one, which is
related to people having difficulty using computers. This was in the early
days, there were people using punched cards for their computer pro-
grams, not really interactive systems, but I was just trying to understand
some of the difficulties these people had in debugging programs... and I
worked in a computer help centre, dealing with people and their difficul-
ties in getting their programs to run, trying to understand how they saw
the world. And so then I went to do my PhD in Canada, and that was
with somebody – Zenon Pylyshyn – who was interesting to me as he had a
joint appointment in Pschology and in Computer Science, and worked in
artificial intelligence. He also had strong links with people in philosophy.
So, I went to work with him. And, during the time I was in Canada, I
started to shift, in terms of my approach, questioning this idea of thinking
of the human as a computer, about the computational approach. Because
like any model, I mean, it has strengths and weaknesses. But, I just felt
that the weaknesses – to my mind – were fairly fundamental in terms of
understanding of how people act in the world. You had, at that time this
idea in artificial intelligence that the mind was a kind of brain with some
inputs and outputs, like a brain in a barrel: there was no sense of what it
meant to be a body, there was no sense of the social, and it didn’t relate
also to where meaning comes from, how do these symbols get meaning,
136                                                         Tecnoscienza - 6 (1)

or value; so I began to have a lot of questions about this approach.
    So I became interested in alternative frameworks, like thinking about
machines in terms of being artefacts or media and from there to computer
mediated activity. Activity theory was one framework that seemed to give
me some handle on things that were different from the computational
approach.

      AM: And, then, you went in San Diego to work with Don Norman.

    LB: Yes, I was there as a post-doc with Don Norman’s group. We de-
veloped a loose framework for talking about what we called “user cen-
tered system design”, and that was trying to put attention on the human
capabilities of people, and on their psychological capacities, and also try-
ing to get designers to pay more attention to who they are designing for.
But, we still tended to think of the people using the system like users of
the computer, not competent workers in their own right, and we also
viewed them as our objects of study, like subjects in psychology experime
that we instructed to perform tasks that we devised for them, and then
measured their performance. We would ask them to do something that
we would observe, often in lab conditions, and notice how they manage
the task. But, we didn’t really engage with them in terms of their everyday
working life. So, it was a kind of user centered design, rather than a sys-
tem technical centered design, yes, but, we were still psychologists talking
about ‘people using systems’. Thus, we tended to focus on some of their
general psychological capabilities, not understanding really much about
the task or the detail, even though we did look at tasks of course, in terms
of task analysis. But, we didn’t really understand their world. We were
bringing them in, creating a task and getting them to do it – to our de-
sign. What we started to realize is that, although there are certain things
that you can learn from this type of study – in terms of basic capabilities,
human performance characteristics, they really didn’t address a lot of the
issues about what people found helpful or not in in the systems in their
workplace. Also, we were not addressing people who were using systems
in terms of discretionary use, those who weren’t operators of machines,
those who were doing tasks or using only certain applications through the
system.
    So, there was something that inspired me: I felt we needed to go out
into the field, in other words to understand people in their actual context
of work, and to pay more attention to the conditions under which people
work.
    I wrote an extended report, when I was in San Diego, still in the early
days, it was called: “Extending the Design Boundaries of Human-
Computer Interaction” (Bannon 1985) and I pointed to few different
things there. One was this general notion that the design boundaries of
HCI coincided, at the time, with what I called: “The Human-Computer
Dyad”, namely the individual person operating on a computer. That was
Mattozzi                                                                  137
the focus when we looked at interaction, very much just the interface.
But, actually, in the workplace what you discovered very often is that
people are accomplishing work not only with and through a computer,
but also with other people and other machines. So, the computer medi-
ates... So rather than thinking of human-computer interaction, we might
better talk about computer-mediated activity. And then the question was
what’s a good framework for studying this? The early HCI paradigm was
very much focused on the human as an information processor. So, the
mind was like a computer, and so you have the idea of input-processing-
output, etc. So, the idea was that mind and machine were very similar,
and we can talk about them in the same way. Whereas when you switch
to talk about computer-mediated activity, people are accomplishing
things but maybe a tool or a medium perspective becomes more appro-
priate. So, people are accomplishing things with artefacts in the world,
and it’s through various media, and they affect the way we communicate.
So that suddenly changed significantly the theoretical frames one might
be interested in.
    So, for instance, Vygotsky in psychology, in Soviet psychology, talked
about language as also mediating human thought, as a tool for thought,
but also he talked about tools, artefacts in the world coming from a
Marxist kind of thinking-dialectics. An understanding of the world where
humans are active subjects. Vygotsky’s and then Leontiev’s work, you
have this development of Soviet school of thinking called “cultural histor-
ical activity theory”...

    AM: Which was quite practiced in San Diego...

     LB: Well it was! And indeed I was also was exposed to it, not in the
Cognitive Science group, the group I was in with Don Norman – that was
still within the information processing framework – The Cognitive Sci-
ence Lab – but through another professor in Psychology at UCSD, Mike
Cole and his group. Cole’s group was The Laboratory for Comparitive
Human Cognition (LCHC), across in another building. I came across
Vygotsky many years before in my psychology studies, but he [Mike
Cole] was looking at the technology in this very different ways – as some-
thing mediating activity. I spent a lot of time over there, so that was influ-
ential. There was this whole idea of thinking of human activities in the
world. How can you not start looking at the context in which activities
are occurring? How can you not start looking at the fact that there is not
somebody working with a single computer, but rather that people are us-
ing systems – for sending messages to others, or sending documents, or
sharing and editing and working on them? So you would wonder: “How
come we not talk about that in terms of the design of our systems?”. In
the early days, one issue was how difficult it was to work collaboratively
on a document, for instance. You had versions and editing options, but
from the very outset it was still very much an individual working, so try-
138                                                         Tecnoscienza - 6 (1)

ing to collaborate through the system, was quite difficult.
    On encountering field studies, it is also what got me interested in
more sociological and ethnographic studies. We start saying: “Ok, we
need to prove more ecological validity for the kind of studies we do, we
need to pay attention to what is the world of work in which these systems
are used”. And so ethnographic approaches became influential in terms
of understanding the workplace, and that led me into taking a course on
ethnographic studies in the mid-eighties, and reading the work of people
like Eleanor Wynn’s on office conversation, and Lucy Suchman’s work
on human interactions around an ‘intelligent’ photocopier.

   AM: In San Diego, working on the extension of the boundaries of
cognition there was also Ed Hutchins, wasn’t he there?

    LB: Yes, there is an element of his work where he was combining eth-
nography and human activity, in terms of moving cognition out of the in-
dividual mind, but he was still using a computational perspective. It is in-
teresting... it’s expanding the information process beyond the individual,
but still maintaining the information processing view, putting it out into
the world, whereas the activity theory approach is different. The latter
doesn’t necessarily stress the computational aspect. Ed hadn’t joined
UCSD as a faculty member at that time although he had connections with
Norman’s group and with Cole’s group. He was in the Naval Research
Labs nearby. So when I was there we did meet on occasion... But there
were also many other interesting people there: Aaron Cicourel was there
and Roy D’Andrade, a cognitive anthropologist, and a linguist, Jeff
Elman. So, there was an emerging kind of cognitive science orientation
that would look more at the environment rather than in the mind, but it
had not set up a new faculty yet when I was there in the early 80’s. But
there were some very interesting discussions.
    So, personally, the time in San Diego was very influential, because I
spent a lot of time amongst these groups talking with many different peo-
ple. So, for instance, I took a course in ethnomethodology from, Bud
Mehan [Hugh Mehan], who had been a student of Garfinkel, I believe...
and, if my memory serves me right it was on his course he had as an invit-
ed speaker Lucy Suchman. So the first time I met Lucy was at that course,
when she talked about some of her work at Xerox PARC. This was her
early work on people having difficulties using the smart help on copiers.
This was the basis of her thesis on plans and situated action, which came
out in ’87 (Suchman 1987).

    AM: Well, San Diego was actually really the right place, then, in order
to question the boundaries of HCI!

   LB: Yes, sure! But that was just one element within my ‘pilgrimage’.
The idea of understanding what people are doing with technology and
Mattozzi                                                                   139
looking at the ways in which people organize their activities with and
through these technologies... and so moving from the idea of a human in-
teracting with a computer to the idea of interacting with a technology as
an artefact, a more complex artifact, of course: a machine is more com-
plex than a tool, a hammer or something, but it can still be seen as an arti-
fact, as a product of human activity and crystallized knowledge. Then this
idea was the first element that spurred my move away from a cognitive-
psychology-based HCI.
     A second element that bothered me emerged more through listening
to some people in the HCI community of the time, at the way they would
talk about users – often considering them as naïve, and as stupid users.
Even many of those who were supposed to talk from a ‘user-centered’
view would talk in this way. And this bothered me on two levels. On a
first level, ethically: it is not a good way to think about your fellow human
beings. I mean in general, not just in relation to technology and design, I
don’t think most people are stupid. And, on a second and more practical
level, I think it is a very bad concept to start with. If you think you are de-
signing for stupidity, you will design stupid interfaces, – you will produce
that behavior you are designing for. And so, what does that mean in terms
of trying to build something... if you think about somebody who is going
to be using the system every day or whatever, the idea of being able to
learn more while on the job, because you have made this very simplistic
sort of interface that doesn’t allow people flexibility, to take control of it,
to shape it to their own ends. This bothered me.
     By chance around the time when I was still in San Diego I met a cou-
ple of people who came from Scandinavia. Susanne Bodker was one. She
was at Aarhus Unviersity in Denmark, and was visiting [the Smalltalk
group] at Xerox PARC. I also met Pelle Ehn and Morten Kyng, who
were working on the UTOPIA project in Scandinavia, on graphic work-
ers and the design of better computer-based tools for newspapers. I
thought that what they were doing was interesting, in terms of their work
on participatory design – which was inspired by the Norwegian computer
scientist, Kristen Nygaard What I found interesting in terms of my own
initial sense of understanding of this, is that they were really working with
a kind of user involvement in design, and wasn’t it just user involvement
in the design of technology, but there was an explicitly political angle to
it, in the sense that you had management and labour, and management
was controlling the technology and labour didn’t really know that much
about what the technology could do. So they were very explicit in their
position: “Ok, we want to be consultants, computer scientists... but to
work with labour, to work with the trade unions”. This was something
rather startling! You must remember that the Trade Union movement
was very strong in Scandinavia at that time. They had started with educat-
ing people about the capabilities of technology, but then they became in-
terested not just in terms of understanding the context, but rather in ask-
ing: why couldn’t we have an influence on designing the future technology?
140                                                         Tecnoscienza - 6 (1)

    And that’s when they became interested in some of the HCI and user-
centered design work at UCSD, because they saw it as possibly fitting in
with their concerns. I thought that it was an interesting idea having peo-
ple involved in design, not just studying people. I became interested in
that approach, and so I started interacting more with those people and
discussing with them, and then they invited me to come and visit, so – af-
ter a rather long hiatus, a 2 year walkabout in Asia and Australia – I went
to join them and learn about their work in Scandinavia. At around the
same time, the mid-eighties, there was the emergence of the area called
CSCW – computer supported cooperative work. This started out in ’84
with a couple of people: Irene Greif and Paul Cashman in the US bring-
ing together a group of people from mixed backgrounds from all over the
world, interested in aspects of collaboration with and through technolo-
gies. So it included some people working in computer mediated commu-
nication, people like Murray Turoff, who worked on the notion of the
network nation, but it was more than that, people like Doug Engelbart
and his augmenting the human intellect project ar SRI, people in hyper-
media, people working on shared databases. So there was a mixture of
people, and they called this particular gathering in ’84 “CSCW”, Com-
puter Supported Cooperative Work, without having really a conceptual
frame for this term. But, out of that emerged a first public conference in
’86. I wasn’t there because I was travelling in Asia at the time (between
’85 when I left San Diego and ’87, I was travelling). The Second ACM
CSCW Conference was held in 1988, and Lucy Suchman was one of the
prgogramem chairs, if I remember right. She had at this stage become in-
terested in the work of people in Scandinavia working on participaroy
design. So here we had a a linking of some people in terms of ethno-
graphic studies and work practices on one hand, and on the participatory
design work on the other: so at the ‘88 conference there was a strong rep-
resentation of Scandinavians, and I was now in Aarhus, so I also went to
that conference. And so that became quite an important meeting place,
both for developing the European approach to CSCW, and for the devel-
opment of the Participatory Design (PD) Conferences, which started in
1990 in Seattle. I wasn’t there, but I had a paper with some other people
from Aarhus in the 1993 book from the 1990 PD Conference (Schuler
and Namioka 1993) The PD conference then became a more regular
event, so it kind of merged some of the PD and CSCW interests: these do
not overlap, there are separations, but there were linkages between peo-
ple in these communities. Because the notion, in general, is that if you
have a large database you access something in it, but traditionally it was
just you who individually access, and the system keeps a record that you
access something. But who accessed before you, or after you, the idea that
you might like to know or be aware of this, the ways in which the artifact
might mediate interactions – there is no notion of that in the software.
    But the other whole area in terms of CSCW was bringing together
people from the social sciences, where the idea was: if we are trying to
Mattozzi                                                                  141
build technology to fit into people’s work practices, then we need to
know their work practices, and so we need to investigate them, and so the
interest in what was termed “workplace studies”. And it just so happened
that a lot of the sociologists who got involved in the CSCW area hap-
pened to have a strong ethnomethodological connection or foundation.
And so, after a few years, the vast majority of work that you saw in some
of the CSCW conferences from sociologists was almost exclusively eth-
nomethodologically-inspired, written up in terms of members accounts,
mutual intelligibility, etc. So you had this kind of emergence of CSCW,
PD. What was interesting then is to see the way things evolved.
    At Xerox PARC, they brought a lot of very skilled computer scientists
and developed the personal workstation, the “Alto”, which was the fore-
runner to the “Star” and other machines. The Star was the first commer-
cial release of kind of a graphic type interface (a GUI), that later inspired
Apple’s Lisa and then Macintosh. So there was a strong AI orientation
initially, trying to make machine’s intelligent. but that’s also where Lucy
Suchman was working during her PhD studies, and so she had quite a big
influence on some of the people, like [Austin] Henderson, who was a
very well known software developer there. He started to realize that may-
be this approach to try to make the machine more and more intelligent
might not be the way to go. Taking on board some of the ideas from Lucy
Suchman’s work, he realized that you are never quite sure what’s going to
happen, so that you can’t predict in advance every possibility, and maybe
we’ve to re-think how we build systems, to allow for people to negotiate
through troubles, and provide resources for them to do so, and not have
the intelligent system try to “guess” what the user is trying to do. So I find
it very interesting to follow the trajectory of someone like Henderson, as
his writings become more open and exploratory, as to how to build tech-
nologies that support people in cutomizing and tailoring computer sys-
tems. And if you look at some of his much later work he has a company
called Pliant Systems, i.e. pliant, flexible systems. He workied with
Morten Kyng on a paper on tailoring and customization (Henderson and
Kyng 1992). So you had this interesting mix of a people from a US re-
search organization like Xerox PARC and Scandinavian people interested
in PD work and in CSCW.
    So, in my view, Lucy Suchman was a very influential bridge between
these groups. And I had known some of these people, but it’s not that I
was at the same level, I was a little bit more junior. From San Diego,
where I did have some informal links with Xerox PARC people, then to
Aarhus. Interestingly, after I got to Aarhus I discovered people from
Xerox PARC, who were setting up a new research lab in Cambridge, UK
– called Rank Xerox EuroPARC initially – also visiting in Aarhus, which
is a kind of interesting mix of corporations and Marxist-inspired activity!
A while later, I ended up working as a consultant in Cambridge for a
while and that was interesting too. When that started, a lot of people
working there were psychologists, studying HCI approaches, but within a
142                                                          Tecnoscienza - 6 (1)

few years there was a complete shift, so that the people who came in were
mainly sociologists, The British sociologist Bob Anderson became head of
the group, followed on later by another sociologist, Graham Button –
both of them ethnomethodologists. Other people who were connected
with Xerox at that time, included Christian Heath, and also Richard
Harper went to work there, and other people well known for ethnometh-
odology ended up having connections there – so there was really quite
interesting swing from psychology to sociology, from HCI to CSCW, at
Xerox EuroPARC.

    AM: The interest of your personal history relies in the fact that it
sounds as a sort of allegory – as was the original John Bunyan’s Pilgrim
Progess – of the recent history of design. The 70’s and 80’s were indeed a
period when cognitive psychology emerged as the new partner discipline
of design. Just think of the relevance and success of Norman’s book: The
Psychology of Everyday Things (Norman 2013). Whereas with the new
millennium design started to dialogue more and more with social scienc-
es, especially STS, of which today’s configuration has its roots also in the
workplace studies you mentioned. It really seems that you were always in
the right place at the right time!

    LB: Yes, I know. I sometimes make a joke about being a sort of For-
rest Gump figure. I happen to appear in various pictures and people
wonder: “What are you doing there?”. Because I wasn’t the driving force,
far from it, I was a rather minor player, in these strange inter-minglings,
but I was often in between these groups, acting as a kind of a mediator, as
I had links with the HCI, CSCW and PD communities.

   AM: Can you tell me about projects in which you feel you were able to
put all this knowledge somehow together?

    LB: It is not so easy. When I was in Denmark, also because I was not
speaking their language (although everybody in the University also speaks
English) it has not been always easy to fully collaborate on empirical
aspecs of proejcts. Also during the time I was there, it was a time of tran-
sition – some projects were finishing, others were starting. I was not in
the lead on those projects. Very often these projects started because
somebody knew somebody and they were able to get access to a particu-
lar workplace. So in PD what you’re trying to do is discuss with people
about their current work situation, and also talking and showing how
technology might create new possibilities, and then thinking about build-
ing prototypes. I think that some ideas from participatory design had a
strong influence in the long run on HCI and one of them has certainly
been paying attention to the necessity of creating prototypes. The idea
behind it is that we are not going to get it right on the first time, so that
you need to make a preliminary system, or part of the system, and have it
Mattozzi                                                                     143
tried out by people in their work situation... rather than showing people
abstract formulations – diagrams, charts, of what the system is going to
be, which does not mean anything to them, you actually create some sort
of a physical instantiation, even if it is fairly simple... just paper and pencil
or even cardboard... but the idea is that through this material instantia-
tion you can actually imagine working with this new system – you have a
screen like this, you do this, you then print there, and people are then
able to concretize what it might be like, then they can comment on it in a
meaningful way... which is completely different from the idea of showing
them a diagram with all these lines and arrows, which mean nothing to
them. And that in the long term has had a big influence on many fields.
But, the problem is that what happens when some approaches become
popular, it just becomes a buzzword... “Oh, we do ‘PD’”, and it becomes
banal, so somebody says: “We do participatory design”, and you ask,
“How do you do participatory design?”, “Oh, we do user surveys, we ask
people what do they think, and they are participating in our surveys”, but
well this not quite what we mean by PD!
     Another issue is that we must be aware of some of the limitations of
the work we do. We can get into difficulties by showing people g possibil-
ities, which can be interesting but also can be dangerous, because what
you do is to show people a desired future, but they don’t have it! In some
cases, the question is what power do they have to make it happen? and in
some cases they do not have that power, so in a sense after the project is
over, what are they left with? It is potentially a problem, because now
they know their work system could be better, it is like an expectation that
is not fulfilled...

    AM: The case of design eliciting desires and questions is a very inter-
esting case, contrasting with the idea of design as problem solving. And
this idea of design is somehow similar to that of radical or speculative de-
sign as proposed by John Dunne and Fiona Raby (2001; 2013), except
from the fact that Dunne and Raby usually work in an exhibition-gallery
context, whereas you were working within actual workplaces.

     LB: Yes, and this is something that people are concerned about in
terms of long-term engagement with people in work environments. And
this is difficult with the research funding models we have. So this is the
kind of institutional problematic, you know, you’ve got funding for two
years on your project, or even less, and you’ve engaged with some people
in a work domain, and you start to work with them, you are taking their
time and they are engaged with the idea. And sometimes you make a pro-
totype and then and they say: “Oh, we like it, we want it”. But the point
is: it is not necessarily robust enough to give to people, or it doesn’t fit
into the current way they are working or whatever. And then it can be a
bit of a let down... like in terms of what do we provide for the people in-
volved... it can be an issue in some cases. Again, it has to do with building
144                                                             Tecnoscienza - 6 (1)

with people, developing mutual trust and support having to answer ques-
tions such as: “Who are you? What are you doing? What are you looking
to get from us?” And what will you do for us?”. Even if people have the
best intentions, it is not straightforward, there are a lot of practical issues.
So, on one hand it’s sort of ironic that PD has moved from being a very
small number of people mainly in informatics, outside of the mainstream,
who were not interested in publications, but more in working with the
trade union world, to becoming gradually more mainstream and accepted
on the academic front, and very popular, and so in a way some of the PD
activity has become more mainstream within general HCI and user-
centred design practices. This may be a good thing, but also thigns
change over time, both internally, and also the external political, neo-
liberal environment. Social democracy, and trade unionism are no longer
as strong as they once were. In some case, PD is everything and nothing,
and again, it’s a sort of ‘gentrification’ process, as in the urban context, an
appropriation, that makes it different from what you expected.
    After Scandinavia, I went back in Ireland for a brief period trying to
set up a HCI and CSCW consulting practice, but I found there was not
very much opportunity for this kind of work in Ireland at the time (1990).
Then I went back to Denmark, then I worked in Copenhagen again for a
while again doing CSCW, and then I moved to Limerick and I tried to set
up a CSCW center there, but it was very difficult at that time, there
wasn’t much funding in Ireland, and it was difficult to get funding to do
field research, and I found it hard to get money from agencies or compa-
nies,. So after a couple of years that CSCW side of things reduced, and I
moved into interaction design. Interaction design... what’s the link wit
hthe other topics? Well it’s a bit tricky. Some people like Terry Wino-
grad, who was one important person in the emergence of interaction de-
sign also was influential in HCI and CSCW and PD for instance, and
people like Susanne Bodker also crosses these fields. What is new with
Interaction Design (IxD) is the engagement of the profession of Design
with various technology communities. They had really been separate,
both in terms of professional training, traditional design, industrial de-
sign, graphic design, often in separate professional schools, not in univer-
sities. It didn’t really had much to do with computing or interaction. But
what you started to see was a lot of designers shifting from a focus on
product to process and services, and they realized that the computer was
becoming not just a tool to make things, but a processing element. So
there was an interest on the design side – becoming more interested in the
capabilities of these technologies. But on the other hand you had people
on the engineering side who realised that the computing environments
that were becoming possible moved them away from factory workplaces
into homes and public arenas – areas where they had little experience or
understanding. You have technologies such as ubiquitous computing and
then suddenly computation leaves the computer box, the PC, and starts
to become something that you can embed in the world and in the envi-
Mattozzi                                                                  145
ronment. Then the issue is how do you mix the physical and the digital,
how do you even think about ‘augmented’ desks: and so suddenly you are
dealing with the presence of these things in your lives, it’s not like simply
using the technology or an application, it’s actually living with the tech-
nology. So that the whole frame changes and we need to ask how do we
design actual spaces that are now augmented with technologies? And ac-
tually back in my early Aarhus days, Pelle Ehn and I we came up with the
idea of a kind of an exploratory student seminar on ideas from architec-
ture and industrial design for people in software, in informatics. Pelle had
an interest in the Bauhaus, in art and technology and the socialist orienta-
tion of that, and he thought: “What might a digital Bauhaus be?”... and I
had an interest in architecture and planning, design ideas of creating
spaces, thinking about inhabiting spaces, information spaces... and maybe
we could get some ideas about the linkage between the physical and the
digital. So we read various pieces by different people... we also used a col-
lection edited by John Thackara Design after Modernism that had just
come out, and had a bunch of interesting papers by people like Christo-
pher Alexander, J. Chris Jones, and other design theorists that we found
stimulating. The idea of interaction design became a place where we
could explore ideas of human activity, human ways of interacting, em-
bedded in new technologies. Thus, it shifts from the more engineering-
focused work on the workplace. But again, there are some quite strong
overlaps... some people like Terry Winograd who promoted interaction
design also had a strong political interest in the work of PD, and he was
one of the few supporters of the Scandinavian work in the US in the very
early days. He also had an interest with Flores in the phenomenological
approach, so that opened up again another idea of how we think about
what computing is. “Do categories have politics?” (Suchman 1993). This
brings us back to that debate between Suchman and Winograd that I
helped bring together in the CSCW Journal, which several of us started in
the early 90’s.
    To go back to your earlier question, in terms of particular projects in
interaction design I was involved in, when I was back in Limerick... one
was an EU project called “SHAPE – Situating Hybrid Assemblies in Pub-
lic Environment”. The focus of that was exploring ubiquitous technology,
but it was part of a program called: “The disappearing computer” (DC).
We wanted to move towards getting people away for thinking of ‘using
the computer’, the PC or whatever, and instead, have them explore
thworld through augmenting the world with computation.. And this par-
ticular project, in which our Interaction Design Centre at the University
of Limerick was involved, brought a lot of interesting people together,
along with other DC projects. Just like, in the early 90’s, an EU CSCW
project called COMIC, and lead by the UK computer scientist Tom Rod-
den was very influential in developing a European CSCW community, the
DC programme helped creat an IxD European community. It was a very
influential and significant project, and involved a lot of interactions, espe-
146                                                         Tecnoscienza - 6 (1)

cially between some of the sociologists of Lancaster and software people.
It was quite an influential project in the European CSCW, in which I was
involved – I was still in Scandinavia at that time. And then, in the early
2000, this later DC project was SHAPE, in which we were designing mu-
seum installation: so there was a form of participation, it wasn’t in the
sense of ‘full’ participative design... in the sense that we talked with the
curators in the museum, we did visitor interviews in the museum, we
shadowed people, and so on. But we didn’t exactly have a design team
composed of a certain number of visitors or curators; we did interact with
them, but the ideas came more from the design group. We thought about
participation in different aspects of the study, and one of the elements
was that we wanted to encourage engagement with the exhibits, we want-
ed to encourage people to question things in the museum, not just to
think of the museum as a one-way device, you know, the place telling you
how you should think about the past, or the people. We conducted the
study at the Hunt Museum in Limerick: it’s a museum exhibiting a large
private collection, of Mr. and Mrs. Hunt. They had a huge variety of
things, like Picasso’s, Chinese ceramics, Neolithic bronzes, all sorts of
stuff, some quite interesting. But what we tried to do, we still wanted to
get away from this curatorial perspective of telling people things, so we
discovered some objects in the collection that were of questionable prov-
enance: what they were, what was their function, nobody knew! So we
encouraged people, the visitors to the museum, to engage with these arte-
facts and think about what they were, and then we asked them to record
their opinions, we tried to do that in a way that wasn’t intimidating, by
using a telephone-type device that was easy to engage with. And then we
collected all the responses, and we played it back on a radio-type device
and people could ear the opinions of others in real-time: so there was a
sense of inclusion, a kind of engagement, in the sense of people partici-
pating in the outcome of the work... which was interesting, but not at the
level of true participatory design. Here we have participatory engagment
with the designed exhibits, so there is a n element of continuing the de-
sign of the exhibit through the involvement of the visitors – their contri-
butions do become a part of the resulting exhibition, which is interesting
So, we come back to the very issue of participation: what do we mean by
it, what are we participating in, and under what conditions?

    AM: From what you are telling, it seems to me that the issue of ques-
tioning, of raising questions is something related to participatory design,
at least in your practice. Before you said: “through prototypes you ques-
tion things: what if things were different?”... and now you say that you
wanted people to participate through asking questions and raising doubts
rather than provide answers...

   LB: Sure, sure. These are fundamental questions concerning how do
we think about the standard story or the rhetoric around participative de-
Mattozzi                                                                 147
sign practice. One of the other things we should mention is that some-
times there was a tendency for people to think: “Oh, in PD you do cer-
tain things”... specific techniques... Robert Jungk’s notion of Future
Workshops, for instance, which is a useful enough technique in some cas-
es to get people engaged, to have people start to talk in front of others,
because it’s a very simple way of identifying what is somebody’s problem,
what has happened in the current situation, and what is a possible future.
So there is nothing mysterious about it, but suddenly you think that what
some people want is just “give me the box of trciks (techniques) and we
will implement that”. And that’s not really what it’s about, it is back to
the issue of how you’re engaging with people; are you open to listening,
as well as supporting some kind of enabling process? When you make
something, what is it? It’s about going on a journey, a journey of explora-
tion, rather than thinking of something finished. I know you’ve read the
design chapter that Pelle and I wrote: Pelle has become very interested in
this idea, especially with Latour’s work on things as assemblies and pro-
jects as matters of concern (Ehn 2008). And so he’s been thinking in
terms of social innovation, as well; this changes what we have today in
terms of the meaning of participative practice, and trying to engage with
different publics. It is quite a different space.
    As for myself, my own recent work is focussed more on the issue of
the replacement of human intelligence by machines. For instance, there
are many projects that try to predict and control human action. I feel that
such an approach tends to actually limit our design conceptual spaces.
The relevant issue is spending enough energy thinking how it could be
otherwise, how we could augment human capabilities in different ways. It
seems that we do not even explore that space. Rather than augmenting, it
is all the time: substitute, substitute... Even within most of the ubiquitous
computing models, approaches tend to focus on ambient intelligence. So,
we try to model people, we try to guess what your desire is, what your af-
fect is, what your emotions are, and then we try to do things via the tech-
nology. It’s a strange scenario when the technology is actually the actor.
The person becomes passive. And this brings us to the old issue tackled
by STS, and especially by Actor-Network Theory. The reason why I so
strongly push on the actor perspective, i.e. the human actor, comes from
what I was saying before. Which is saying: “look, people act!”. Whereas
much energy is spent on making the machine more active and all we want
from people is their input: we just want to track them, to follow their
movements in a room. Actually, they do not do anything. It is the system
that tries to do everything: it opens the window, it turns the controls...
Why? Why not say: “Look, we have this, we have ubiquitous technology,
we can have sensors, we can hav systems pick up lots of data”, but at the
same time starting to think more creatively in terms of what people may
want to do with that, and how people can shape and frame these things –
turning data into meaningful information. What tools do we need to help
people to engage with the material being collected – to organize, assem-
148                                                         Tecnoscienza - 6 (1)

ble, see patterns etc.?. So to go beyond simply seeing people as mere as-
semblages within a system, I believe there are both philosophical and
pragmatic problems with the AI and ambient intelligence story.
    Instead, we could start to move within this other conceptual space,
where we can start thinking of how do we represent data for people to
interpret. In this way they could choose how they want to do things.
Maybe in part they want to hand off to a machine, or in part they may
say: “No, I want to control these things. I do not want the blinds to open
automatically. I want to control it”. It is in that sense that the human-
actor-narrative has meaning for me. It is in this context of that debate.
    These issues are very relevant in for instance complex systems. Some-
times, there is the danger of trying to blame the human actor for every-
thing. It is not that people do not make mistakes, but the issue is why
they make mistakes, what is the context, the institutional arrangement
around the system’s presentation of information. It is much more com-
plex. For some people, the way we get over the underperformance of
humans is to eliminate them through machines. But this is also problem-
atic in many real world situations. We need to realise the over-automation
can also be a problem in complex systems (see the book by Gene Rochlin
Trapped in the Net). So, how do we think about these human-machine
systems in interesting ways? I agree that the human actor is not the only
“actant” in complex systems, and so this does make me interested in
some fo the ANT formulations, although I feel my understanding of
much fo this work is still very basic – but I am working on it J.

   AM: I think that Latour and Actor-Network theory in general would
not be so distant from your perspective: the main issue – very well point-
ed to by a recent paper published in Social Studies of Science (Sayes
2014) is distribution. It is a sort of misconception the one about opposing
humans to machines, humans to non-humans. It has been a rhetorical
gimmick to raise an important issue about human agency, with the aim
not so much to praise machine or non-human agency but to take into ac-
count the distribution of agency. Thus, what you were saying it is not
something that Latour could not agree on. So, instead of talking in term
of human or non-human agency we could reframe the issues, following
your concerns, in terms of designing systems that provide you with an-
swers, even before you ask a question, and systems that allows you to ex-
plore the question, etc.

    LB: Sure, sure. I’ve been working on this paper about human-centred
design trying to question this concept (Bannon 2011). Within a particular
context, it has meaning, especially historically. However, it has now be-
come a sort of mishmash. It is even included in the ACM index of terms
and it actually refers to just a mishmash of HCI concepts like hci, accessi-
bility and a bit of visualization. In this reading, is not a conceptual con-
struct. It has become more a convenience term in everyday conversation,
Mattozzi                                                                  149
for talking about things. I myself, nowadays, also don't think it's a clear
conceptual construct.
    When I say “human-centred systems”, what I actually mean is systems
that don't just model the user – try to put the user into the machine in a
way, but rather allow for some space of flexibility for that person acting
in the setting. My concern regarding this concept is also why I started try-
ing to work with people in STS, through people around me that are more
familiar with this tradition. For instance, I have been very influenced by
people like Susan Leigh Star, the way she frames issues, I find it very per-
ceptive, very meaningful. More recently an Italian colleague now at Lim-
erick, Cristiano Storni, has been gently trying to educate me about STS
approaches, and I am becoming more comfortable with some of the con-
cepts, but I still have a long way to go! I have no problem with some of
the STS work that I’ve read at times. Certainly talking about the role of
car bumps and traffic policemen and things like that... you know... yes,
certainly I can see its relevance... I understand Latour in terms of getting
beyond the standard, human-machine conception, the social-technical
divide. I think it's certainly intriguing and I have no problems with cer-
tain accounts in term of talking about networks, but I find the strong
symmetry argument, for instance, extreme. It’s a step too far somehow... I
can't quite integrate that in my thinking at the moment.
    I am not certainly here to pronounce about, you know, what I think is
right or wrong: it's really about the utility of the theoretical formulations
in addressing some of the questions we have. I am interested in how do
we understand the human-machine relation, the social and the technical
relation. So, I ask myself: “How do we talk about technology?”. The
problem, as I see it, given that I am normally residing in computer de-
partments is that when I talk with engineering and computing people,
they talk about the technical, and the human is not seen within the tech-
nical. It is really about trying to understand how do we talk about these
things, both at the macro level, like in the history of technology, and at
the micro level. We can wonder about how to talk about technology fol-
lowing all these different people, Heidegger, Marcuse, whatever... but
there is also a notion like computation, through which computers are
considered as machines as well as humans. And, this concept allows to
explore certain questions, but then it leaves other issues out. So, the ques-
tion with STS seems to be not so much whether I can follow it, or I can
understand it, but in some cases, I am not sure what to do with it, in
terms of my design concerns...

    AM: This issue of the utility of certain categories reminds me of my
personal experience with student designers. I discovered that I have to
rethink most of the things I tell them... I try to teach them, in term of
their utility for design purposes, in terms of their translatability in design
terms. But this is an interesting constraint that forces me to actually re-
think many concepts and theories and question them on many more
150                                                           Tecnoscienza - 6 (1)

grounds.

    LB: Design... actually this is another reason why I got close to STS. To
me one of the things is to get away from this notion of design as some-
thing that is done only through a creative act. I am not trying to trivialize
the notion by saying that we are all designers. Clearly, there is a sense in
which we are indeed all designers, in that we all shape our environment,
we move desks around, we arrange artefacts in space, etc.... For certain
purposes that is important, to think about our creative acts, the way in
which we all shape, and move in, our environment. At the same time,
there are certain skills people have who are very good at synthesizing, and
taking ideas and exploring design space, and I appreciate those skills very
much in certain people. But I don't like, as it happens for instance in ar-
chitecture, this hubris that you find in some cases, where people state: “I
am the (only) designer”, “ Design is my sole prerogative, it is my creative
act”.
    That is why notions coming from STS such as “shaping”, “infrastruc-
ture”, etc. I think are helpful to show the imbrication of these things.
Other notions such as the work involved in the construction of concepts
such as categorization and classification (Bowker and Star 2000) are very
important for people in computer science. The danger is that people in
computing often take their model for reality. The people who build mod-
els are normally aware of the model limitations. The problem is that those
models are picked up and used by other people. These people think the
model is how the world is... No, it's not!
    To think more about work in STS, that I find intriguing, look at An-
nemarie Mol. I found her work very inspiring. Her book, The logic of
care, for instance (Mol 2008). I found it very insightful for my purposes. I
think that is something very relevant for people who work in design and
technology in terms of how we think about health. I am moving in this
space, trying to discover, trying to understand, and if I look at my trajec-
tory, I can still talk about it in terms of a ‘pilgrim progress’: pilgrimage
here in its literary sense of a journey – not its religious significance. Some
prefer to call this nomadism, but I do not agree, as nomads do not just
journey, they move, but they do not move into the unknown, they move
between known places So, that idea of travelling like the pilgrim, in the
sense of exploring, of trying to understand, that's what I could say of my-
self. This is what I have been trying to do: articulating, over thirty or more
years, how to talk about this relation between the social and the technical,
the human and the machine; how to understand it. And I will be the first
to admit that I still have a long way to go!
    Speaking from within computing, I always wonder how we can get it
so wrong, how do we seem to build systems of all forms, pieces of soft-
ware, technology in general, buildings, whatever, that seem so unfit for
people and their activities. And how is it that, notwithstanding the smart
people working in technology development, with all their knowledge,
Mattozzi                                                                      151
with all of their skills, we continue to do this. This is what I wonder
about: what's behind it, what are the underlying models or, better, the
underlying assumptions that lead to this mess?
     And then, what is it to be human, when we think of it. We need to re-
flect about the implications of holding assumpions about the need to de-
sign for stupid people, for people that are thought to be non-creative. So
here, many concepts from anthropological and sociological frames of un-
derstanding – members practices, members language, accounts, stories
become useful in order to counter this idea of stupid users. Think of no-
tions taken from activity theory or practice theory: looking at mediating
activities by moving away from the technology per se, trying instead to
support our practices.
    These are all framework, approaches, concepts that I find useful. Of
course you could say that many of these concepts are coming from some-
what conflicting perspectives. But I don't have a single position. And
even though I am associated with this term ‘human-centered” computing,
or design, today I feel that the term, while of historical importance, is not
as useful as we look forward, as a way of thinking about new forms of
human-machine interweavings. And that is where my engagement with
the STS community will I hope bear fruit in the next years – in terms of
new ways of thinking about the design of socio-technical complexes. We
need to work on listening to, and understanding, each other better!


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