User:Rita Graca/gradproject/project proposal 2

Draft II
30 September

What do you want to make?

General Introduction

A platform to experiment with pervasive and persuasive software focused on interfaces.

I would like to make a project that makes evident how software infiltrates and influences our daily routines as we spend more of our days mediated through interfaces. In the last years, as online engagement turned into a commodity, our behaviors and identities on the web became assets. Consequently, the prediction and control of these behaviors grew into valuable practices. I would like to inspect the bias on interfaces that reinforces or blocks personal ambitions, frustrations, fears, and dreams, that allows certain actions and ignores others.

Specifically, I'm talking about the unfair violence we deal with every time we use technology: the impossibility of anonymity, the feedback loop on social media, the notifications of our phones, the gender-binary forms, the online/offline status, read signs, the infinite scroll, non-disclosured advertisements, influencers, fake accounts, notifications, dark patterns, followers count, filter bubbles, spam, trackers, clickbait.

I believe that we, as users, should feel empowered to claim change. In my project I would like to make clearer how some things work, providing tools to gain agency.

How do you plan to make it?

1. by focusing on how software changes our dialogues and influences our lives through small prototypes to explore omnipresent expressions of technology in our bodies. Right now I'm starting with the gestures that we use to navigate interfaces: swipe up, double-tap, scroll motion, pinch-to-zoom. I'm also keen on exploring the language changes through online trending topics and hashtags.
2. reflect on what kind of actions are facilitated or blocked by the platforms’ affordances by analyzing the critics and demands happening online, from the users (bottom<up) and the reactions of the platforms' companies (top>bottom).
3. thinking about the future, by putting the prototypes all together to build a set of tools that can be used to think about these issues and that would also allow the conceptualization of better online futures.

What is your timetable?

September, October — Ground my interests, make clear what I want to work on by researching and finding projects. Fast prototyping.
November, December — First chapter is written so my scope is set. Have a more specific direction for the prototypes. Follow it.
January — Allow the feedback from the assessment and the break to feed new inputs to the project. Adjust and continue.
February, March — Put my prototypes together to create a bigger platform, the project will expand from small experiments to a combined project.
April, May — Written thesis is delivered. Focus on the project. Test my prototypes, perform them or put them online.
June, July — Finish everything: conclusion of the final project. Prepare the presentation.

Why do you want to make it?

Feels urgent: If we are being manipulated to feel and act in certain ways, only allowing and upvoting certain views of the world, this is what is disseminated. “We shape our tools and therefore our tools shape us”.

Feels contemporary: The users have been demanding more reliable platforms and the companies picked out the trend by providing some changes. In April TikTok added two new features to promote a safer app experience, “Screen Time Management” and “Restricted Mode”. In July Instagram tested hiding its likes in several countries to benefit their users’ experience. Youtube promised to release soon new features that will allow people to know why a certain channel is being recommended in an attempt to be more transparent with their algorithms. It’s true that the real effects of these features are debatable and also part of well-thought marketing strategies. However, they show the audience is engaging with this type of discourses.

Feels like I can join the conversation: Understanding and making clearer how things happen so we can gain agency.

Who can help you and how?

Marloes de Valk, because of her knowledge on persuasive design, especially with the connection with Impakt festival;
Past Xpub students like Lucia Dossin and Lídia Pereira, which have work on similar topics;
Femke Snelting, with the connection with Critical Interface Toolbox;
Xpub staff and students;

Relation to previous practice

I understand that design shapes our ability to access, participate in, and contribute to the world (Holmes, 2018). As a graphic designer myself, I always had interested in the biases we implement in the things we build, especially when those determine who can participate and how they do it.
Last year we discussed decentralised networks on Special Issue 8 and this build up my interest in the subject. I understood how building new platforms and looking for alternatives reveals the desire for bottom-up changes and more active end-users. It became clear that centralised models of technology widely propagate certain ideas, and those ideas shape our society. As a project for that same Special Issue, I prototyped some tools that helped me visualize the ideas I was discussing. To turn the research into tools that other people can use, to turn the passive viewer into an actor, is something that I intend to continue for this final project.

Relation to a larger context

My interest in persuasive technology touches on...
Software, so inbuilt in our lives that sometimes it's hard to unravel that black box: what is doing, on what assumptions;
Interface politics, centralized infrastructures, and social media: the increasing automation of our systems means less control and less accountability;
Online manipulation and weaponised design;
Transparency and activism;
Discrimination and Data.

References

• Hollanek, T., 2019. Non-user friendly: staging resistance with interpassive user experience design.

Hollanek explains how interfaces have been designed to be organic for the user, allowing intuitive and seamless operations. However, this immediacy of comfort also hides what goes on behind the interface. The author questions the manipulation that we may be under, disguised as personalisation to allow better performance.

To encourage resistance the article argues for alternative design practices such as cognitive glitching and interpassive interfaces. These are ways of exposing the power structures of platforms through glitches, imperfect features, disturbing or illogical processes.



• Lialina, O., 2018. Once Again, The Doorknob. On Affordance, Forgiveness and Ambiguity in Human Computer and Human Robot Interaction [WWW Document]. URL http://contemporary-home-computing.org/affordance/ (accessed 9.17.19).

Lialina offers insight over articles, projects and people for and against the mainstream thought on User Experience Design. 

The author reflects on Don Norman idea that “the computer of the future should be invisible”, meaning that the user would focus on the task they want to do instead of focusing on the machine. Much like a door, you go through it to go somewhere else. But Lialina reminds us that computers are much more complex devices, and that closed or opened doors allow different degrees of agency.

This keynote also reflects on affordances, questioning if forgiveness is still a feature on contemporary interfaces and how this influences AI machines.



• Williams, J., 2018. Stand Out of Our Light. Section I Distraction by Design

Williams explains how the technology industry fights for our attention with their tools, products, and platforms. There is a lot of information available to us, but this can weight on our attention span and self-regulation.
 The author opposes to the idea of a neutral technology because all design holds intentions, goals, and values. Design has the power to shape society, managing identities, framing interests, moulding habits. It is interesting how the author frames the threats of these problems as global, far from a first-world problem. The consequences of tech manipulation can be larger for underprivileged people who lack knowledge and willpower.

This book section evolves around persuasive design, but not as new or unique to digital technologies. However, with today’s technology, the users can be tightly controlled: page views, search queries, location, clicks, and so on. This provides huge feedback that boosts better strategies of manipulation. Some of these features we recognise in our daily lives browsing the web, it’s the infinite feed, the pull-to-refresh, the likes. 

• Kitchin, R., Dodge, M., 2011. Code/space: software and everyday life, Software studies. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. I Introduction
  

Instead of being pessimist and determinist about the controlling aspects of technology, or too positive about the benefits, the authors choose to see software as a generative force that makes things happen. This introduction explains how the interest for the authors is software itself and not the technologies working with it.

Software is found on diverse objects and systems but is not always perceptible or understandable. Indeed it can seem to operate through magic, an idea shared by other authors (e.g. ‘What algorithms want’). This is often a problem when things cease to work but the system became too opaque to understand. In this way software studies tries to open the “black box”, looking for its methods and routines.

It is explained the concepts of coded objects, coded infrastructures, coded processes and coded assemblages. Although different all these categories expose how software influences socio-economic routines and is embedded in everyday life. This universal presence is referred as “everyware” (Greenfied 2006). How software changes space and gives it new meanings is explored through examples such as the supermarket that relies on machines to register the products. This is an example of a code/space because depends on software-driven technology.

An interesting part for my own research is the mention of alluring software and how people enjoy the logic of technology. This means people happily overlook the downsides because of the benefits software can provide.

Project References

See here