The legibility of everyday life

At OZCHI 2007, Paul Dourish presented a wide-ranging paper called “Seeing Like an Interface” that explored ideas of “legibility” and organisation of spaces and settings with a focus on mobile and ubiquitous computing.Dourish notes that ubicomp has often begun with the idea of extending desktop-type applications and everyday scenarios to mobile settings.

However, we do not just experience technologies in situ – we also experience everyday settings through the technologies we have at our disposal.

That is, Dourish is thinking about how people experience and understand the settings in which they find themselves. And he is interested in the representations that people use, or construct for themselves, to engage with and understand particular settings.To explore this big idea, Dourish starts with James Scott’s Seeing Like a State which is an exploration of how “some schemes to improve the human condition have failed”. Scott’s book describes how states introduce abstractions in order to understand and control particular situations. Sometimes these abstractions take the form of maps. Dourish quotes Scott,

In case after case, however, we have remarked on the apparent power of maps to transform as well as merely to summarize the facts that they portray.

Dourish again:

Scott is concerned, then, not just with the forms of abstraction and representation that are introduced, but with the ways in which these come to constitute the legibility of everyday life to the practice of statehood; they are the forms of “seeing” in which states can engage.

Whenever we engage with a setting through mediated interaction, we are seeing it through a representation or abstraction. As such, computers are becoming part of the way that we engage with the world, they have become cultural objects, a fact that Dourish believes requires further investigation.

What I want to draw attention to here is not simply the fact that computers have become faster, smaller, and more powerful as technological artifacts, but that they have emerged as cultural objects in a radically different way than they did before.

Because ubicomp systems are (going to be) so much a part of the world, Dourish suggests that they may be a good place to begin exploring the idea of “reflective” systems, ones that are “concerned with the critical dimensions of design, and is also oriented towards promoting reflection and critical inquiry into technological devices on the part of ‘users.’ “

As a design strategy, we have been interested in the ways in which we might be able to use information technologies to turn attention towards modes of seeing – strategic modes, tactical modes, surveillant modes, practical modes, and more. Our concern is to highlight the forms of representation and standardization at work, to turn attention to the processes through which they emerge and the sites at which they are negotiated, and so to make visible the various grids in which people are enmeshed and which they enact in the course of daily life.