2.9 Interfaces and Politics

2.9.1 - Introduction to Interfaces & Politics

[MUSIC] In 1980, Langdon Winner published a highly influential essay in which he asked,

do artifacts have politics?
- In other words, do technical devices have political qualities? - And the answer is yes. - All toasters are democrats. - Thermostats, as you might expect, are members of labor party. And pretty surprisingly - automobiles are actually green party members. - Okay, I’m kidding.
  - That’s not what we mean when we ask if artifacts have politics.
  - Here, when we say politics,
    - we mean whether artifacts can personify specific forms of authority or power,
      - whether for good or bad.
  - What we’re referring to is the fact that
    - artifacts,
      - are interfaces we design,
        
        change the world around us,
        
        just the way politicians or business interests do.
        
        Sometimes that’s by design,
        
        we might design interfaces;
        
        not for usability, or research,
        
        but to create change in the world.
  - Other times that social change happens in ways we didn’t anticipate,
    - we design interfaces that are used and affect the world in ways we never anticipated.
  - So in this lesson, we’re going to talk about two dimensions of this,
    - designing for change and
    - anticipating the change from our designs.
  - We’ll also touch on a field that explores these issues more deeply called
    - Value-Sensitive Design.

2.9.2 - Change: A Third Motivation

Most commonly in HCI,

we’re interesting in designing for usability.
- We want to make tasks easier through technology.
- So in a car,
  - we might be interested in
    - designing
    - a GPS that can be used with the fewest number of taps.
    - Or a dashboard that surfaces the most important information at the right time.
- Sometimes we’re also interested in designing for research,
  - though. We might design
    - a dashboard that includes some kind of visualization of the speed
      - to see if that changes the way the person perceives how fast that they’re going.But a third motivation is to somehow change the user’s behavior. Designing for change in response to some value that we have. Often times that may actually conflict with other motivations.
  - If we’re trying to discourage an unhealthy habit,
    - we might want to make the interface for that habit less usable.
- Cars actually have a lot of interfaces created with that motivation in mind.
  - If I started driving without a seatbelt on,
    - my car will beep at me.
  - Some cars will cap your speed at a certain number.
    - Those interfaces serve no usability goals but rather they serve the goal of user safety.
  - Now, that’s a simplistic example,
    - but it shows what I call the three goals of HCI.
      - Help a user do a task,
      - understand how a user does a task, or
      - change the way a user does a task
    - due to some value that we hold, like safety or privacy.

2.9.3 - Paper Spotlight: Do Artifacts Have Politics

The most influential paper on the inner play between artifacts and politics came from Langdon Winner in 1980.

The paper describes numerous ways
- in which
  - technologies,
  - interfaces, and
  - other artifacts
- demonstrate
  - political qualities, demonstrate
  - political motivations.
- For example,
  - he opens by noting the belief that nuclear power can only be used in a totalitarian society because of the inherent danger of the technology.
  - Solar power on the other hand,
    - pushes society towards a more distributed and egalitarian structure.
  - But of course, we understand that nuclear power isn’t on its own authoritarian.
    - It has no consciousness.
    - It can’t take political power.
  - Winner is proposing that the push for certain technologies carries with it certain necessary political adjustments.
    - That’s part of what it means to suggest that artifacts have politics.
  - In the paper, Winner outlines two distinct ways in which artifacts can be political.
    - One type is inherently political technologies.
      - These are technologies that due to their very design,
        
        are only compatible with certain political structures.
      - Certain technologies
        
        like nuclear power,
        
        whether due to
        
        complexity, or
        
        safety, or
        
        resources,
        
        require considerable top-down organization.
        
        Those lend themselves to authoritarian power structures.
        
        Others like solar power, someone might argue,
        
        are only possible in a more distributed and egalitarian society.
        
        So, these technologies by their very nature,
        
        dictate the need for certain political structures.
        
        The other type he discusses are technical arrangements as forms of order.
        
        Technologies can be used to achieve changes to social order when used in the correct way.
        
        The technology itself has no inherent political leanings like nuclear or solar power,
        
        but if used in a particular context for a particular purpose can nonetheless accomplish some political goals.
        
        Winner uses the example of a factory in Chicago in the 1880s,
        
        they replaced the workers with automated machines that produced inferior goods as a way of busting up the Union.
        
        The new technology was actually inferior,
        
        but it was used to serve a political purpose.
        
        So, according to Winner,
        
        artifacts may have two kinds of politics;
        
        they may be inherently political,
        
        in that they’re only compatible with certain forms of political order, or
        
        they may be used to achieve political motives,
        
        even though they have no inherent politics on their own.

2.9.4 - Negative Change by Design

Let’s start with the bad news.

The ability of interfaces to change behavior can be abused.
- We’re not just talking about places where people put explicit barriers up
  - like blocking certain people from accessing their content.
- There are instances where people create seemingly normal designs with underlying political motivations.
  - Winner describes one such instance in his essay
    - Do Artifacts Have Politics?
      - Robert Moses was an influential city planner working in New York City, in the early 1900s.
        
        As part of his role, he oversaw the construction of many beautiful parks on Long Island.
        
        He also oversaw the construction of parkways and roads
        
        to bring the people of New York to these parks.
        
        That’s actually where the word parkway comes from.
      - But something unfortunate happened.
        
        The bridges along these parkways were too low for buses to pass under them.
        
        As a result, public transportation couldn’t really run easily to his parks.
        
        And as a result of that,
        
        only people wealthy enough to own cars were able to visit his parks.
        
        What an unfortunate coincidence, right?
        
        The evidence shows it’s anything but coincidence.
        
        Moses intentionally constructed those bridges to be too low for buses to pass under.
        
        As a way of keeping poor people from visiting his parks.
        
        His political motivations directly informed
        
        the design of the infrastructure and
        
        the design of the infrastructure
        
        had profound social implications.
- This is an example of winners technology as a form of social order.
  - The bridges could have been taller.
    - There’s nothing inherently political about those bridges.
      - It was the way that they were used that accomplished this political motivation.
    - As an interesting aside, I learned recently that the design of Central Park inside New York City was an example of the exact opposite dynamic.
      - The designers were encouraged to put in places where only carriages could access so affluent people would have somewhere to go away from poor people.
        
        But the designers specifically made the entire park accessible to everyone.
  - It’s not to hard to imagine things kind of like that happening today either.
    - One of the arguments from proponents of Net neutrality is that without it,
      - companies can set up fast lanes that prioritize their own content
        
        or worse severely diminished content of their competitors or content critical of the company.

2.9.5 - Positive Change by Design

We can design for positive social changes well though.

This goes beyond just encouraging people to be
- nice or
- banning bad behavior.
Interfaces can be designed that’ll lead to positive social change
- through natural interaction with the system.
One example of this that I like is
- Facebook’s ubiquitous Like button.
  - For years, many people have argued for a Dislike button to compliment the Like button.
- Facebook has stuck with the Like button though,
  - because by its design,
    - it only supports positive interactions.
    - It dodges cyberbullying,
    - it dodges negativity.
  - For usability purposes,
    - it’s a weakness because there are interactions I can’t have naturally in this interface.
    - But this specific part of the Like button wasn’t designed with usability in mind.
  - More recently, Facebook has added to the like button with five new emotions,
    - love,
    - haha,
    - wow,
    - sad and
    - angry.
  - Even with these five new emotions though,
    - the overall connotation is still positive.
  - For three of them, it’s obvious why.
    - Love, haha and wow are more positive emotions.
    - Sad and angry are negative emotions,
      - but used in this context, they take on more of a sympathetic connotation.
  - If someone is ranting about getting into a car accident,
    - it seems to weird to like that.
  - But if you react with this angry emoticon,
    - then you’re basically saying you’re angry on their behalf.
  - It might be possible to use this for the more negative connotation
    - like if someone said they like a political candidate and
      - you react angrily,
      - then you could be opposing their political view.
    - But in the majority of cases,
      - these are still going to be used in a way that fosters positive interaction.
    - So it seems that this interface was designed to foster positive social interactions online.
      - At the expense of usability,
        
        it would come with supporting all social interactions online.
      - This also doesn’t have to be strictly about dictating change,
        
        but it can also be about supporting change.
        
        For example, until a few years ago,
        
        Facebook had a more limited set of relationship options.
        
        They had
        
        married,
        
        engaged,
        
        in a relationship,
        
        single and
        
        it’s complicated.
        
        As it’s target audience went from being college students to everyone,
        
        they also added
        
        separated,
        
        divorced and
        
        widowed.
        
        But it was a couple of years after that that they then added in
        
        a civil union and in
        
        a domestic partnership.
        
        Adding these concepts didn’t magically create these social constructs,
        
        they existed legally before Facebook added them here.
        
        But adding them here supported an ongoing societal trend and gave them some validity.
        
        And made people for whom these were the accurate relationship labels feel like they really were part of Facebook’s target audience,
        
        they were part of modern culture.
        
        That an accurate representation of their relationship status was available on this drop down
        
        meant they could accurately portray who they were on their Facebook profile.
        
        The same can be said for the more recent trend to expand Facebook’s gender options
        
        to allow people to put in a custom gender.
        
        This supports a diverse group of people feeling as if the interface is designed with them in mind.
        
        Which in turn supports society’s general movement towards acceptance.

2.9.6 - Design Challenge: Change by Design Question

Let’s tackle Change by Design by designing something for Morgan.

So Morgan has a desk job.
That means she spends a lot of her time sitting.
However, for health reasons, it’s best for her to get up once per hour and walk around just for a few minutes.
There are a lot of way we could tackle this
- by physically changing the design of her environment to a standing desk or
- by giving her an app that directly reminds her or rewards her for moving around.
But let’s try to do something a little bit more subtle.
So let’s design something for Morgan’s smartphone that gets to move around for a couple minutes every hour
- without directly reminding her to walk around or rewarding her for doing so.

2.9.6 - Design Challenge: Change by Design Solution

So here’s one idea.

Imagine a weather tracking app that crowdsourced weather monitoring.
Every hour participants are buzzed to go outside and let their phone take some temperature readings,
- maybe take a picture of the sky.
That design has nothing at all to do with moving around,
- but that’s the side effect of it.
Participation in this seemingly unrelated activity has the benefit of getting people moving.
Pokemon GO is a great example of this in a different context.
- It doesn’t spark the same kind of intermittent exercise but it gets people to exercise more generally,
  - all without ever actually telling them to do so.

2.9.7 - Positive Change by Happenstance

Positive change doesn’t always have to happen by design though. In fact there are numerous examples of positive change happening more as a bi-product of technological advancement rather than as a goal of it.

In Bijker’s, of Bicycles, Bakelites and Bulbs, this is the bicycle example.
- The story looks at what women can do before and after the invention of the bicycle.
- Before the bicycle, women tend to be pretty reliant on men for transportation.
- People generally got around with carriages, which were pretty expensive, so only wealthy people would own them.
- And so, typically men would own them.
- So if a woman wanted to go to a restaurant or go to a show, she typically had to go either with her spouse or with her father.
- As a result, society rarely saw women acting individually.
- They were usually in the company of whoever the prominent male in their life was at the time.
- But then the bicycle came along.
- The bicycle was affordable enough and targeted at individuals, so now women could get around on their own.
- So now a woman could go to a show or go to a restaurant by herself,
  - instead of relying on a man to take her.
- In the book though, what Bijker covers is not just the fact that this enabled more individual transportation,
  - but rather that this enabled a profound social shift.
- This technological innovation allowed women to start acting independently.
- And it also demanded a wardrobe change, interestingly enough, because you couldn’t wear a dress on a bicycle.
- So the invention of the bicycle simultaneously changed women’s’ attire, and changed the level of independence they could show in modern society.
- And both these changes force society to challenge traditional gender roles.
- The bicycle’s role in women’s liberation was so significant that Susan B Anthony actually once said,
  - I think bicycling has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world.
- But when the bicycle was invented, it’s doubtful that the inventor sat down and said surely this will be a great way to emancipate women and change our culture’s gender roles.
- That’s not what they had in mind.
- They were inventing a technological device.
  - But as an unintended positive side effect, that technological device profoundly changed society.

2.9.8 - Negative Change by Happenstance

Just as we can create positive changes by accident, if we aren’t careful, we can also inadvertently create negative changes as well, or further preserve existing negative dynamics.

A good example of this is the proliferation of the Internet in the first place.
When the Internet first came along, it piggybacked on existing phone lines.
Then it started piggybacking on more expensive cable TV lines.
And now it’s following along with very expensive fiber optic lines.
At every stage of the process, areas with more well developed infrastructure get the latest Internet speeds first.
However, generally the areas with well developed infrastructure are the wealthier areas in the first place,
- either because wealthier citizens paid for the improved infrastructure.
- Or because people with the means to move wherever they want to move, will move somewhere with better infrastructure.
High speed internet access is a big economic boon.
And yet areas that are already economically advantaged are generally the first ones to get higher speed internet access.
Even today, in poorer parts of the United States the only available Internet connections are slow, unreliable satellite connections with strict data caps.
And in the rest of the world this issue can be even more profound, where many areas have no internet access whatsoever.
- And yet, this isn’t intentional.
Unlike the bridges on Long Island, no one is saying,
- let’s withhold broadband access from poor people to keep them poor.
Instead, it’s natural to install better connections where there’s already an existing infrastructure to build on.
But that very natural plan has profoundly negative implications for equitable access to the Internet.
So if we’re not careful, completely innocent and completely logical design ideas can actually perpetuate negative effects in society.

2.9.9 - Value-Sensitive Design

In HCI, we describe the idea of interfaces becoming invisible.

Some of that is a useability principle, but it also applies more broadly to the way that interfaces integrate themselves into our everyday lives.
And if our interfaces are going to integrate into people’s lives,
- then they need to share the same values as those individuals as well.
This connects to the field of value sensitive design.
The Value Sensitive Design Lab at the University of Washington defines this idea by saying,
- value sensitive design seeks to provide theory and method to account for human values in a principled and systematic manner throughout the design process.
In this way, value sensitive design is another dimension to consider when designing interfaces.
Not only is an interface useful in accomplishing a task and not only is it usable by the user,
- but is it consistent with their values?
One of the most well-developed application areas of value sensitive design is privacy by design.
Privacy is a value, and privacy by design has aimed to preserve that value in the design of systems.
It’s possible to design useful usable interfaces that don’t take privacy into account anywhere.
That’s what makes an examination of user’s values an extra dimension of interface design.

2.9.10 - Paper Spotlight: Value Sensitive Design and Information Systems

Batya Friedman is one of the co-directors of the Value Sensitive Design Research Lab at the University of Washington, and she co-authored one of the seminal papers on the topic, Value Sensitive Design and Information Systems.

Friedman, Khan and Borning together provide this excellent paper on the philosophy.
In it, they cover three investigations for approaching value sensitive design.
First, the cover conceptual investigations.
- Conceptual investigations are like thought experiments where we explore the role values play in questions like
  - who are the direct and indirect stakeholders, and
  - how are both classes of stakeholders affected?
Second, they cover empirical investigations.
- Empirical investigations go out and use real users, exploring how they make sense of interfaces and answering questions like
  - how do stakeholders apprehend individual values in the interactive context?
  - How do they prioritize individual values and usability considerations?
Third, they cover technical investigations.
- Technical investigations are like empirical investigations that target the systems, instead of the users.
- They ask the same kind of questions but they’re especially targeting whether or not the systems are compatible with the values of the users.
The paper also proposes some of the fundamental features of value sensitive design.
- For example, value sensitive design should be proactive and values sensitive design distinguishes between usability and human values.
If you’re playing to work in an area where human values play a significant role, and I would argue that, that’s probably most areas of HCI, I highly recommend reading through this paper.
It can have a profound impact not only on the way you design interfaces but on the way you approach user research.

2.9.11 - Value-Sensitive Design Across Cultures

One of the challenges with value sensitive design is that values can differ across cultures.

The internet makes it technologically possible to design single interfaces that are used by people in nearly every country,
but just because it’s technologically possible doesn’t mean it’s practically possible.
And one reason for that is different countries and cultures may have vastly different values.
A relatively recent news worthy example of this occurred with the rights to be forgotten.
The right to be forgotten is a law in the European union, that allows individuals some control over what information is available about them online.
That’s a value held by the European Union.
However, technologies like Google were not generally developed with that value in mind.
So there’s actually been an extraordinary effort to try to technologically support that right to be forgotten, while still providing search capabilities.
Making this even more complicated is the fact that the value isn’t universally shared.
Many people argue that the law could actually effectively become internet censorship.
So now we start to see some conflict in the values between different cultures.
One cultures value of privacy, might run a rye of another cultures value of free speech.
If we’re to design interfaces that can reach multiple cultures, we need to understand the values of those cultures.
- Especially if it might force us to design different systems for different people in order to match their local values.

2.9.12 - 5 Tips: Value-Sensitive Design

Here are five tips for incorporating value sensitive design into your interfaces.

Number one, start early.
- Identify the values you want to account for early in the design process and check on them throughout the design process.
- The nature of value sensitive design is that it might have significant connections not just to the design of the interface,
  - but to the very core of the task you’re trying to support.
Number two, know your users.
- I know, I say this a lot. But in order to design with values in mind, you need to know your user’s values.
- Certain values are incompatible with one another or at least present challenges for one another.
- Privacy as a value is in some ways in conflict with a value of record-keeping.
- To know what to design, you need to know your user’s values.
Number three, consider both direct and indirect stakeholders.
- We usually think about direct stakeholders.
- Those are the people that actually use the system that we create.
- Value sensitive design encourages us to think about indirect stakeholders as well.
- Those are people who do not use the system but who are nonetheless affected by it.
- When you’re designing the internal system for use by a bank for example,
  - it’s used by bank employees,
  - but bank customers are likely to be impacted by the design.
Number four, brainstorm the interface’s possibilities.
- Think not only about how your design system to be used but how it could be used.
- If you wanted to make a system that made it easier for employees to track their hours for example,
  - consider whether it could be used by employers to find unjust cause for termination.
Number five, choose carefully between supporting values and prescribing values.
- Designing for change is about prescribing changes in values.
- But that doesn’t mean we should try to prescribe values for everyone.
- At the same time, there are certain values held in the world that we would like to change with our interfaces if possible with regard to issues like gender equality or economic justice.
- Be careful and be deliberate about when you choose to support existing values and when you choose to try to change them with your interfaces.

2.9.13 - Exploring HCI: Interfaces and Politics

The idea of artifacts or interfaces having political clout brings up two challenges for us as interface designers.

First, we need to think about places where we can use interface design to invoke positive social change, and
second, we also need to think about the possible negative ramifications of our interfaces.

What undesirable stereotypes are we preserving or
what new negative dynamics might we create?
Now, obviously I work in online education and I’ve been struck by both sides of this.
On the positive side,
- I’ve been amazed at the power of online education to diminish the significance of superficial obstacles to people’s success.
- I’ve spoken with people who have had difficulty succeeding in traditional college settings due to social anxiety disorders or other disabilities,
  - things that had no real connection to how well they understood the material,
  - but that made it difficult to interact with other people or to attend to physical classes.
  - But by putting everything in forums and emails and text and videos,
    - they’ve been able to overcome those obstacles.
But there’s also the risk that online education will only benefit people who already have advantages.
- The early data suggests that the majority of consumers of online education are middle-class American white males
  - There’s little data to suggest that it’s reaching
    - minorities, reaching
    - women, reaching
    - international students or reaching
    - economically disadvantaged students, and
  - while I believe that’s a problem that can be solved,
  - it’s certainly something we need to address.
- Otherwise, we risk online education being a luxury more than an equalizer.
So, that’s how these principles relate to online education.
Take a moment and reflect on how they apply to the area of HCI that you chose to explore.
What role can your technology play in creating positive societal change and what risks are there if your technology catches on?

2.9.14 - Reversing the Relationship

We’ve talked a good bit about how technology and interfaces can affect politics and culture and society, but we wouldn’t be telling the whole story if we didn’t close by noting the alternate relationship as well.

Political relationships and motivations can often have an enormous impact on the design of technology.
From Bijker’s book Of Bicycles, Bakelites, and Bulbs,
the bulbs part refers to the battle of the design of the first flourescent lightbulb in 1938.
- General Electric created a new kind of light that was far more energy efficient.
- The power companies were afraid that this would reduce power consumption and cut into their profits.
- After a long drawn out battle involving the Anti Trust Division of the US government and the US Department of War,
- the fluorescent bulbs that were ultimately sold were not as good as they technologically could be in order to preserve others’ business interests.
That issue is more prevalent today than ever.
More and more, we see compatibility between devices and usage policies for technologies determined
- not by what’s technologically possible but by what satisfies political or business needs.
So here’s an example. To keep up with everything that I like to watch on TV I have five different subscriptions.
- I have cable TV,
- I have Hulu,
- I have Amazon Prime,
- I have Netflix and
- I have an HBO subscription
- on top of my cable subscription.
- And that’s not to mention things that I watch for free on their own apps like Conan or anything on YouTube.
- And you might think wouldn’t it be awesome to just have one experience that could navigate among everything I want to watch.
- And it would be awesome, and there’s no technological reason against it.
- But there’s a complicated web of ownership and licensing and intellectual property agreements that determine the way that technology works.
Technology changes society but society changes technology too.

2.9.15 - Reflections: Interfaces and Politics Question

You have almost certainly experienced political or business motivations changing the way in which a technology of yours works.

Similar to the fluorescent light bulb,
oftentimes these motivations are to preserve the power or profit of an influential organization in the face of radical change.
Sometimes they might be the products of a relationship or an agreement between vendors or organizations to emphasize one another’s content.
Generally, these are instances where technology either
- performs sub-optimally or
- has certain features because someone besides the user benefits.
So reflect for a second and see if you can think of an instance where some technology you use was designed with this kind of political motivation in mind.

2.9.15 - Reflections: Interfaces and Politics Solution

This question can have some pretty loaded answers and I encourage you to give those answers.

But I’m going to give a slightly more innocuous one,
- exclusivity agreements in video games.
Imagine I’m a video game developer and Amanda is Nintendo.
And I’ll say hey, Nintendo I’ll agree to release my game only on your console,
- if you agree to promote my game in your console advertisements.
I benefit from free advertising,
Nintendo benefits from getting a selling point for its console.
There’s probably no technological reason my game can’t run on other consoles.
But there’s this business relationship determining the way that the technology works.

2.9.16 - Conclusion to Interfaces & Politics

In this lesson, we’ve discussed

the different ways in which interfaces interact with
- existing power structures or
- political motivations.
We looked at how interfaces can have negative repercussions either
- by design or
- by happenstance.
We looked more optimistically at how interfaces can be powerful tools for equality and justice in the world,
- whether intentionally or accidentally.
We also looked at how it’s important to keep in mind different cultures values while designing interfaces.

Now, notice how all of these perspectives hearken back to the idea that user experience exists not only in individuals and groups, but in societies.