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Chaos, Culture, Conflict and Creativity:
Toward a Maturity Model for HCI4D!
! Abstract
We propose a tentative
“maturity model” for
Human Computer
Interaction for
Development (HCI4D).
We focus on the last
phase which is proposed
to be transmutation in
which diversity of
cultures allows humanity
to find, formulate and
solve otherwise insoluble
issues. Furthermore, the
diversity of existing
cultures may provide the
framework for a space of
cultures allowing new
representations.
Author Keywords
HCI4D; cross-cultural; globalization; emergent
intelligence; singularity; artificial intelligence.
ACM Classification Keywords
H.5.m. Information interfaces and presentation (e.g.,
HCI).
Introduction
We propose a “maturity model” for Human Computer
Interaction for Development (HCI4D). We focus on the
last phase which we label “transmutation” and argue
that it offers a path to the potential solution for
complex issues and problems otherwise insoluble.
Briefly, the proposed stages are as follows.
â–Ș Isolation
â–Ș Exploration
â–Ș Exploitation
â–Ș Exhortation
â–Ș Exportation
â–Ș Localization
â–Ș Globalization
â–Ș Transmutation
Pros and Cons of Maturity Models
The advisability of the term “HCI4D” itself has been
debated [2,3,4,9]. In particular, the term
“development” may imply to some, because of its
biological metaphor, that there is a single linear
!‱
‱ License: The author(s) retain copyright, but ACM receives an
exclusive publication license.
‱ Each submission will be assigned a unique DOI string to be included
here.
John C. Thomas
!Problem Solving International
Solana Beach, CA 92075, USA
truthtable@aol.com
!!
“correct” path. There are many aspects of the so-called
“developed world” that make it questionable whether
HCI (or anything else) should unquestionably strive to
emulate that “development.” In a similar vein, a
“maturity model” as used in software development
models, for example, may imply that each successive
stage is better than the one before it. Rather than
argue, a priori, in the abstract whether or not maturity
models are good or bad, in this paper, we propose a
provisional maturity model as a conceptual framework
for thinking about the various ways that one society or
culture may interact with others, particularly in regards
to the subject of human-computer interaction. Over
time, the field will be able to judge whether such a
model proves useful as an organizing principle.
Provisional Maturity Model for HCI4D
The proposed stages of the Maturity Model are listed
above. Although the labels are hopefully somewhat
self-explanatory, a brief explanation is in order. In
“Isolation”, cultures A and B do not even know of the
existence of the other. In “Exploration,” one culture
explores, possibly to find out about another culture, but
more likely in search of water, food, minerals etc. and
happens upon another culture. Historically, it has often
happened that without any real attempt to understand
another culture, the one with superior weapons often
attempts to then exploit another one through slavery,
robbery, etc. At some point, it has sometimes happened
that the exploiting culture (say A) begins to feel some
guilt and exhorts the other culture (say B) to just be
more like it. This phase may then give way to a phase
where culture A attempts to trade with culture B. In
some cases, this has been voluntary and to the benefit
of both cultures. In other cases —- not so much. While
the earlier phases often happened before the advent of
computer technology, the “Exportation” phase is well
within the computer age. Culture A attempts to export
to Culture B its IT products and services. Many of these
initial attempts were financial failures. In response,
companies and nations began to realize that a greater
level of success was likely if the products and services
popular in culture A were “localized” for culture B. This
includes translation, the use of different icons, and a
sensitivity to differences in the associations of different
colors, for example. While this stage shows some
sensitivity to another culture, in “localization,” the
concept of the product and its value originate in culture
A.In a still more “enlightened” view, companies began
to cooperate globally and develop products and services
with an understanding of the actual values, needs, and
contexts of another culture B. In this phase, people
from culture B are often involved in the research,
development, production, distribution and sales of the
products and services. As a result, other things being
equal, such endeavors are more likely to be successful.
Because communication is easier when people speak
the same language and share similar values and
assumptions, it typically happens that in this
Globalization phase, people in culture B are not all
equally involved in the research, development,
production, distribution and sales of these products and
services. Indeed, it is often precisely those people from
culture B who are most familiar with and comfortable
with culture A who end up being most involved in the
“globalization” effort. For example, people working in
China for a US company are likely to be proficient in
English and be at least aware of the corporate culture
in a much higher degree than the typical Chinese
citizen.
Although there are often benefits for both parties in the
“globalization” phase, the underlying framework for
finding, formulating and solving problems is typically
explicitly or implicitly from a single culture (A). This
approach, we argue, limits the growth of human
wisdom and is insufficient for some of the issues that
humankind faces in the 21st century [13,23].
In the transmutational phase, people from various
cultures do not “converge” on a single way of looking at
the world. Rather, people from different cultures mainly
work from their root historical perspectives. This allows
a wider diversity of representational schemes and a
larger idea pool during divergent phases of problem
solving. In addition, by thinking about the larger space
of ideas and assumptions that come with different
cultures, frameworks may be constructed that allow for
a still further expansion of potential ideas beyond those
of any existing actual culture. Different cultures also
provide a wider variety of methods for the convergent
phases of problem solving. And, again, a consideration
of these various methods allows the construction of a
framework for inventing still other methods to use
during the convergent phases of problem solving.
The “transmutation” phase is largely hypothetical at
this point. We argue that it has desirable properties
using both indirect and direct evidence. Indirect
evidence is largely metaphorical from the field of
biology. Direct evidence exists but is still somewhat
sketchy and incomplete. Studies that compare
outcomes from groups composed of people from a
single culture with outcomes of groups composed of
people from multiple cultures are logistically difficult.
For example, how does one “sample” from multiple
cultures in a way that draws “comparable” people from
various cultures? It may well be that people who
volunteer to be in multi-cultural groups may be
disproportionally creative in the first place. How does
one measure outcomes in the kinds of complex, multi-
faceted problems and issues of the type that really
require the transmutational phase for solution? Design
problems are difficult (though not impossible) to
measure even when only a single culture is involved.
Indirect Evidence
First, consider the base of binocular disparity in human
vision. Human beings, along with birds of prey,
predatory mammals, and animals that jump from
branch to branch have their eyes in the front. Each eye
sees a somewhat different view of the world. For
distant objects, the view is identical but for nearby
objects, the views can be quite different The closer the
object, the more disparate the views. The predator
does not spend much time arguing about “which view is
correct” nor does the right eye try to convince the left
eye to see things more as it does. Rather the brain
combines the information to give a three dimensional
view of the external world.
In a similar fashion, the two ears hear various sound
events with different loudnesses and, more importantly,
with different times of arrival. The brain uses this
information to localize sound in three space.
While it is clearly possible for a species to evolve
without having two sexes, having two sexes allows for
more rapid adaptation to changes in the environment.
In addition, there is an additional mechanism possible;
viz., sexual selection. The process of choosing a mate
introduces another level of possible adaptation. In
many cases, the complexity of one species adapting
becomes intertwined with the life cycle and adaptation
of other species. For example, many flowers depend on
bees for their own reproductive cycle. In fact, the
flowers of a given species will bloom at different times
depending on when the other local species of flowers
bloom in order to maximize the overall time for bees to
pollinate. In this way, the individual species of flower
tends to have more exclusive use of the bees for a
short period of time. In addition, the bees have a long
season of constant pollen supply so they tend to stay
healthier and more prolific which in turn is good for the
bees.
Of course, these arguments are merely metaphorical.
When it comes to human behavior, indirect evidence
suggests that artificially impacting people from a single
culture with treatments that might mirror some of the
effects of a multi-cultural view can increase the efficacy
of problem solving. For example, in the 1970’s my
colleagues and I were studying problem solving and
developed both a structured and an unstructured “aid”
to problem solving. The structured aid asked subjects
to explicitly state the goals, the starting conditions, and
the allowable transformations. This aid turned out to be
a very effective aid — for the investigators! Indeed, we
could often see from this aid where subjects “went
wrong.” However, it had no discernible impact on the
performance of subjects on various problem solving
tasks. On the other hand, we also provided an
“unstructured aid” which consisted of a series of quasi-
random words which were meant to associate with a
wide variety of ideas. Subjects given this aid were more
likely to solve “insight problems” than subjects who
were not given the aid. They also produced chair
designs blindly judged to be more “creative” than
subjects not given the aid [11]. In later experiment, 30
subjects (college students) were given the floor plan of
an abandoned church and asked to design a restaurant.
These designs were judged both for “originality” and for
“practicality.” Originality was measured in terms of the
number of features that were relatively unique among
the population of all designs. Practicality was measured
according to the number of features that were
“necessary” according to a list of such features
provided by an expert. Half the subjects were given the
unstructured aid. Those subjects provided the word list
scored significantly higher on the practicality dimension
[12].
In another study [5] designed to explore potential
improvements to heuristic evaluation, subjects were all
given the flow chart of a proposed new audio service.
One third of the subjects were led to use “normal”
heuristic evaluation. One third were led to use the
“cognitive walk-through” method. One third were asked
to use a new variant on heuristic evaluation. In this
method, the subjects were asked to consider the design
successively from the perspective of eight different
“experts.” The viewpoint of each of the eight experts
was described briefly in a paragraph. The subjects were
asked to imagine what these various experts would
think of the new service in terms of both potential
issues and in terms of additional useful functions. The
eight “experts” were given in the following fixed order:
Self, Human Factors Expert, Cognitive Psychologist,
Behaviorist, Social Psychologist, Anthropologist,
Freudian Analyst, Health Advocate, Worried Mother,
Spoiled Child. Subjects were also divided according to
their professional expertise. One third were HCI/UX
professionals; one third were developers and one third
were clerical. The provision of the invitation to take
multiple perspectives did not aid the HCI/UX
professionals, but among the other two groups, there
were many more findings of possible issues as well as
many more suggestions for additional functions than
among the group who spent an equal amount of time
considering the audio service from their “own”
perspective.
Both of these studies were preliminary and in need of
replication. In later work on the business uses of stories
and storytelling, we developed a prototype tool that
encouraged people to consider the viewpoints of a
hypothetical “Board of Directors.” The idea [14,15] was
to take a problem and consider it successively from the
standpoint of each “Board Member.” To help concretize
this idea, various images and quotes were provided to
help “remind” the user of the life, work, and viewpoint
of each of these “Board Members.” They included
Einstein, Darwin, and Gandhi. For Gandhi, for example,
several quotes were provided and the story of the
grandfather who came to Gandhi asking that Gandhi
convince a grandson not to eat sugar. Basically, the
story illustrates Gandhi’s notion that one must be the
change one wants to see in the world.
Direct Evidence
!There are several more direct studies that suggest
multiple perspectives can improve creativity and
productivity. For example, Ashcraft and Breitzman [1]
found that 26 to 42% more IT patents arose from
mixed gender teams than comparable single gender
teams. Companies with more racial diversity tended to
have more sales revenue [6]. Companies with more
gender diversity tended to have more sales [10].
Having multi-cultural experience enhanced creativity in
[8].
Representational Limitations
!Arguably, one of the most important human
characteristics is our ability to use language to mediate
thought. In some sense, this is undoubtedly true, and
yet, we need to be aware that our capabilities are quite
limited. For one thing, our ability to categorize things
verbally is a double-edged sword. If the category is
appropriate to the situation at hand, we can quickly
come to apply a method we have already learned. We
do not have to invent a new method for each and every
situation. To take a trivial (but important) example,
once we learn a way to characterize geometric figures
(e.g., circles) in terms of abstract characteristics
(e.g.,radius and circumference) and a formula relating
these, (e.g., circumference = pi x 2r), we can calculate
the circumference of any circle by knowing the radius
regardless of how large or small the circle is and
regardless of its substance, color, location, and so on.
On the other hand, if we make a mistake in mapping
something in the real world into one of our pre-existing
categories, it can be quite dangerous (or humorous).
For example, there are 435 people in the United States
House of Representatives. How likely is it that at least
two people in the House of Representatives share a
birthday? Most clever ten year olds will see the solution
to this quite quickly. More educated people may have
issues with it. For example, I brought up this puzzle in
graduate school at a party at a colleague’s house.
Someone piped up, “Ahem! Well, I just got my Ph.D. in
statistics and this is the famous “birthday problem.” It
would be trivial to solve if only I had some log
tables.” (This was in the days before hand held
calculators). I happened to know that my friend had log
tables so I invited this person to use the log tables to
solve the “trivial” problem. About an hour later, he still
had no solution.
The so-called “birthday problem” typically asks how
likely it is that at least two people share a birthday in a
much smaller group of about thirty people. Surprisingly,
it turns out that the probability even in such a small
group is about .5. This is counter-intuitive and the
student of statistics learns a method for calculating this
probability. When a person familiar with the “birthday
problem” hears the similar sounding problem about the
“House of Representatives” they immediately map the
new problem into the old known problem. Since the
odds are already pretty good for even 30 people, the
sophisticated person will say something like, “Oh, the
probability must be high. Certainly over .9. Maybe even
.99.” There are, however, only 365 days in a year and
435 people in the House. So, the probability is 1.0. No
calculation is necessary. Even if the first 365 members
are spread evenly among the days of the year, the
366th member (indeed, 366-435) must “match”
someone else’s birthday.
Unfortunately, this is not an unusual or atypical
example. What is worse, people who share cultural and
educational backgrounds will tend to have the same
“blind spots” when it comes to the appropriate
representation for a problem. Our habitual ways of
thinking about problems are often quite good for
solving classes of problems that we (individually or
collectively) have solved before. They may be irrelevant
(or worse) for novel problems. Of course, people have
faced novel situations throughout history, but the scope
and severity of novel complex problems is probably
greater today than ever before.
I claim that the representations and perspectives of
different cultures could be used, not only to offer a
wider variety of existing representations, but also that
various cultures offer the potential to induce
frameworks that allow completely novel representations
and perspectives beyond those of any existing culture.
Let us examine two trivial examples based on my own
limited knowledge of languages.
In English, we typically put the adjectives that modify a
noun before the noun. Thus, we might say, “The red
house.” In French, however, most adjectives come after
the noun. So, in French, we have, “La maison rouge.”
At one level, we could say that these two sentences
“mean the same thing.” However, the way in which
these two sentences are processed cannot be identical
in detail. If the English listener hears, “The red
” they
are already having internal representations of the color
“red” activated (and likely representations of “read” as
well). In contrast, the French listener who hears, “La
maison
” is having internal representations of a house
activated. If one were doing a complex design problem
that involved, say, matching color schemes to achieve a
particular effect, there may well be differences achieved
from the order in which information is presented. The
point here, however, is that a consideration of even
these two trivial differences in word order allows us to
construct a framework for describing and generating
additional possibilities. The temporal order could
include introducing the color well before the noun or
well after the noun as well as presenting the noun and
adjective simultaneously. A single human speaker may
find this difficult, but there is no reason it cannot be
done with modern technology. One can even imagine a
system in which different parts of speech are presented
in different locations in space or in which words are
presented in different locations that reflect their spatial
or temporal relationships. The more general point
though is that by considering that different languages
are different in the way in which they present
information temporally, we are led to examine
completely new ways to organize verbal information
temporally and spatially.
Of course, people are not just information processors.
We are also processors of meaning and emotion. To
take another simple example from English and French,
consider that in English, after we negotiate from
different possitions, I might say, “I agree” or “You
agree.” In the first case, there is an implication that I
am agreeing with your position or statement while in
the second case, there is an implication that you agree
with my position or statement. Theoretically, I could
say, “We agree” but this feels potentially manipulative
and if I am the one to say it first, it still seems as
though I am asserting that you agree with me. On the
other hand, in French, a common expression is
“D’accord.” This has the rather beautiful diplomatic
property of not implying that anyone has come to the
other’s view. A considertation of the differences in
implied agency by “I agree” versus “D’accord” could
potentially help us develop still other expressions and
concepts beyond those in English, French or any other
actual natural language.
Another limitation of the way that we human beings
use representational systems is that it takes a long
time to become facile with one. This tends to make us
very conservative in the use of such representational
systems. Once we become facile at one natural
language, or mathematical representation or a
computer programming language, we tend to use it for
all sorts of problems for which it might not be very well
suited at all. We seldom even consider the possibility of
using different representational systems for successive
steps within the same problem. (There are some
exceptions to this; for instance, a programming team
may write an “inner loop” in a low level language for
machine efficiency even though most of the code is in a
higher level language for ease of coding,
understanding, debugging, maintenance, etc.).
If a very large team of people is constructed to address
a very complex problem, we implicitly recognize that
people with very different skills at various
representational schemes will prove useful at different
sub-tasks. For example, some people will write JAVA
while others will provide documentation in natural
language and still others will “sell” the product via
advertising. In the globalization phase of HCI4D, it is
already recognized that the right way to “sell” a product
may be quite different in different cultures so we would
typically expect to use people to do this from different
cultures. But so far as I know, we have not yet
considered constructing a programming language based
on the most effective constructs from a wide variety of
cultures. Again, such a project might include more than
just an aggregation of concepts from different cultures.
Hopefully, as in the trivial noun/adjective case
mentioned above, we could construct a framework that
would allow us to build additional constructs that do not
currently exist in any natural language or culture.
Beyond language to express the programming solutions
to problems, a consideration of different cultures from
this transmutational perspective could also be used to
develop frameworks for finding and formulating
problems. It is here that we might expect to find the
greatest leverage from this approach.
The socio-technical Pattern, “Who Speaks for Wolf?”
illustrates this point [16,17]. This Pattern is based on a
story transcribed from the Iroquois by Paula Underwood
[26]. Briefly, in the story, there was a man in the tribe
named “Wolf” because he made it his life’s work to
understand wolves. While he and a number of other
braves were away on an extended hunting expedition,
the tribal council decided they were over-using the
resources in one area and they had to move. They sent
out scouts and held a council to determine the place to
move to. Some months after moving, however, they
discovered that they had moved into the spring
breeding ground of the wolves. The wolves were
stealing their drying meat and threatening the children.
Now, they had another council meeting. Should they
destroy the wolves? Or, post guards? Or, move again?
They finally decided to move again, but they also said,
“How can we avoid making such a mistake in the
future?” Someone said, “If Wolf would have been here
at our previous council meeting, he would have told us
not to move here.” They agreed that thenceforeward,
they would always ask, “Who speaks for Wolf?” to
consider whether their were any missing perspectives.
In this case, the missing perspective was in finding a
problem. The tribe was not even aware that there was
a problem. We can extend this idea to include, not only
perspectives that actually exist within our “tribe” but
also to include hypothetical viewpoints of interest. This
was the inspiration of the “Board of Directors”
prototype referred to earlier. In that case, the “Board”
was meant to remind the user of actual people who had
interesting and unique perspectives. There is no reason
one could not expand this to include characters from
fiction or characters specifically constructed to have
uniquely useful perspectives for a given situation.
Humankind evolved for millions of years mostly in small
close-knit tribes where people shared goods, chores,
and information. The concept of an “in-group” was
probably useful at this time. Today, there is a huge and
growing interdependence across the globe. We need to
develop new ways of finding, formulating and solving
problems. Interacting and working across different
languages and cultures provides challenges. In this
paper, however, I argue that such differences may also
provide the beginnings of solutions to humanity’s most
urgent and complex problems. Further explorations
along these lines can be found in the
following[18,20,21,22,24,25].
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank all the participants in previous
workshops on cross-cultural issues in HCI [18] as well
as HCI4D [2,4,7,9]. I would also like to thank Paula
Underwood for transcribing some of the oral history and
learnings of her branch of the Iroquois into English[27].
References
[1] Ashcraft, C. & Breitzman, A. (2007). Who invents
IT? An analysis of women’s participation in information
technology patenting. Technical Report, NCWIT. March,
2007.
[2] Best, M., Deardon, A., Dray, S., Light, A., Thomas,
J.C., Buckhalter, C., Greenblatt, D., Krishnan, S.,
Sambasivan, N. (2007). Sharing perspectives on
community centered design and international
development. Human-Computer Interaction, INTERACT
2007. New York: Springer.
[3] Ceriejo-Roibas, A.,Dearden, A., Dray, S., Gray, P.,
Thomas, J.and Winters, N. (2009), Ethics, roles, and
relationships in interaction design in developing
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10.1007/978-3-642-03658-3_132.
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(2007). Participatory design for international
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October 11-15. Santa Monica, CA: Human Factors and
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C-Y. (2008). Multicultural experience enhances
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Harvard Business Review. September, 2004. Reprint
R0409G.
[11] Thomas, J.C., Lyon, D. & Miller, L. (1977). Aids for
problem solving. IBM Research Report. RC-6468.
Yorktown Heights, NY: IBM Corporation.
[12] Thomas, J.C. and Carroll, J. (1978). The
psychological study of design. Design Studies, 1 (1),
pp. 5-11.
[13] Thomas, J.C. (1999). Facilitating global
intelligence. Presented at Human-Centered Computing,
Online Communities and Virtual Environments Report
on the First Joint European Commission/National
Science Foundation Advanced Research Workshop, June
1-4, 1999, Chateau de Bonas, France"Human-Centered
Computing, Online Communities and Virtual
Environments", IEEE Computer Graphics and
Applications, Vol 19,No 6, pp 70-74, 1999.
[14] Thomas, J.C. (2001). Perspective modulation
through interactive fiction. Workshop paper presented
at CHI workshop: Interactive narrative and knowledge
stewardship. 2001; Seattle WA
[15] Thomas, J. C. (2001) Collaborative innovation
tools. In T. Terano (Eds.) New Frontiers in Artificial
Intelligence, JSAI 2001 Workshop, LNAI 2253, 27-34.
Presented at Matsue City, May 25, 2001.
[16] Thomas, J. C., Lee, A., and Danis, C. (2002), “Who
Speaks for Wolf?” IBM Research Report, RC-22644,
Yorktown Heights, NY: IBM Corporation.
[17] Thomas, J. C. (2003). Toward a socio-technical
pattern language. Invited keynote presentation at the
10th ISPE international conference on concurrent
engineering: Research and practice. Madeira Island,
Portugal, July 29, 2003.
[18] Thomas, J.C. (2007). Panelist, Meta-design and
social creativity: Making all voices heard. INTERACT
2007, Rio de Janeiro, BZ, Nov., 2007.
[19] Thomas, J. C. (2007). The Walking People
construed as a persistent conversation. IBM Research
Report, RC 24187.
[20] Thomas, J.C. (2008). Using Story Templates as a
Method to Cumulate Knowledge in HCI and
International Development. Workshop paper for CSCW
2008.
[21] Thomas, J. (2011). Toward a Socio-Technical
Pattern Language for Social Systems in China and the
World. Workshop position paper accepted for CSCW
2011 workshop: Designing social and collaborative
systems for China. Hangzhou, China, March 19-23.
[22] Thomas, J. (2011). Toward a Socio-Technical
Pattern Language for Social Media and International
Development. Workshop position paper accepted for
CSCW 2011 workshop: Social media for development,
Hangzhou, China, March 19-23.
[23] Thomas, J. C. (2012). Patterns for emergent
global intelligence. In Creativity and Rationale:
Enhancing Human Experience By Design J. Carroll
(Ed.), New York: Springer.
[24] Thomas, J. (2012) Understanding and Harnessing
Conflict. CHI Workshop Position Paper for HCI for
Peace: Preventing, De-escalating and Recovering from
Conflict. CHI 2012, Austin, Texas.
[25] Thomas, J. (2012), Enhancing Collective
Intelligence by Enhancing Social Roles and Diversity.
CSCW Workshop Position Paper for Collective
Intelligence and Community Discourse and Action.
CSCW 2012, Bellvue, WA.
[26] Underwood, P. (1994). Three Native American
Learning Stories. Georgetown, TX: A Tribe of Two Press.
[27] Underwood, P. (1993). The Walking People. San
Anselmo, CA: A Tribe of Two Press.

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Sigchi extended abstractsjct

  • 1. Chaos, Culture, Conflict and Creativity: Toward a Maturity Model for HCI4D! ! Abstract We propose a tentative “maturity model” for Human Computer Interaction for Development (HCI4D). We focus on the last phase which is proposed to be transmutation in which diversity of cultures allows humanity to find, formulate and solve otherwise insoluble issues. Furthermore, the diversity of existing cultures may provide the framework for a space of cultures allowing new representations. Author Keywords HCI4D; cross-cultural; globalization; emergent intelligence; singularity; artificial intelligence. ACM Classification Keywords H.5.m. Information interfaces and presentation (e.g., HCI). Introduction We propose a “maturity model” for Human Computer Interaction for Development (HCI4D). We focus on the last phase which we label “transmutation” and argue that it offers a path to the potential solution for complex issues and problems otherwise insoluble. Briefly, the proposed stages are as follows. â–Ș Isolation â–Ș Exploration â–Ș Exploitation â–Ș Exhortation â–Ș Exportation â–Ș Localization â–Ș Globalization â–Ș Transmutation Pros and Cons of Maturity Models The advisability of the term “HCI4D” itself has been debated [2,3,4,9]. In particular, the term “development” may imply to some, because of its biological metaphor, that there is a single linear !‱ ‱ License: The author(s) retain copyright, but ACM receives an exclusive publication license. ‱ Each submission will be assigned a unique DOI string to be included here. John C. Thomas !Problem Solving International Solana Beach, CA 92075, USA truthtable@aol.com !!
  • 2. “correct” path. There are many aspects of the so-called “developed world” that make it questionable whether HCI (or anything else) should unquestionably strive to emulate that “development.” In a similar vein, a “maturity model” as used in software development models, for example, may imply that each successive stage is better than the one before it. Rather than argue, a priori, in the abstract whether or not maturity models are good or bad, in this paper, we propose a provisional maturity model as a conceptual framework for thinking about the various ways that one society or culture may interact with others, particularly in regards to the subject of human-computer interaction. Over time, the field will be able to judge whether such a model proves useful as an organizing principle. Provisional Maturity Model for HCI4D The proposed stages of the Maturity Model are listed above. Although the labels are hopefully somewhat self-explanatory, a brief explanation is in order. In “Isolation”, cultures A and B do not even know of the existence of the other. In “Exploration,” one culture explores, possibly to find out about another culture, but more likely in search of water, food, minerals etc. and happens upon another culture. Historically, it has often happened that without any real attempt to understand another culture, the one with superior weapons often attempts to then exploit another one through slavery, robbery, etc. At some point, it has sometimes happened that the exploiting culture (say A) begins to feel some guilt and exhorts the other culture (say B) to just be more like it. This phase may then give way to a phase where culture A attempts to trade with culture B. In some cases, this has been voluntary and to the benefit of both cultures. In other cases —- not so much. While the earlier phases often happened before the advent of computer technology, the “Exportation” phase is well within the computer age. Culture A attempts to export to Culture B its IT products and services. Many of these initial attempts were financial failures. In response, companies and nations began to realize that a greater level of success was likely if the products and services popular in culture A were “localized” for culture B. This includes translation, the use of different icons, and a sensitivity to differences in the associations of different colors, for example. While this stage shows some sensitivity to another culture, in “localization,” the concept of the product and its value originate in culture A.In a still more “enlightened” view, companies began to cooperate globally and develop products and services with an understanding of the actual values, needs, and contexts of another culture B. In this phase, people from culture B are often involved in the research, development, production, distribution and sales of the products and services. As a result, other things being equal, such endeavors are more likely to be successful. Because communication is easier when people speak the same language and share similar values and assumptions, it typically happens that in this Globalization phase, people in culture B are not all equally involved in the research, development, production, distribution and sales of these products and services. Indeed, it is often precisely those people from culture B who are most familiar with and comfortable with culture A who end up being most involved in the “globalization” effort. For example, people working in China for a US company are likely to be proficient in English and be at least aware of the corporate culture in a much higher degree than the typical Chinese citizen.
  • 3. Although there are often benefits for both parties in the “globalization” phase, the underlying framework for finding, formulating and solving problems is typically explicitly or implicitly from a single culture (A). This approach, we argue, limits the growth of human wisdom and is insufficient for some of the issues that humankind faces in the 21st century [13,23]. In the transmutational phase, people from various cultures do not “converge” on a single way of looking at the world. Rather, people from different cultures mainly work from their root historical perspectives. This allows a wider diversity of representational schemes and a larger idea pool during divergent phases of problem solving. In addition, by thinking about the larger space of ideas and assumptions that come with different cultures, frameworks may be constructed that allow for a still further expansion of potential ideas beyond those of any existing actual culture. Different cultures also provide a wider variety of methods for the convergent phases of problem solving. And, again, a consideration of these various methods allows the construction of a framework for inventing still other methods to use during the convergent phases of problem solving. The “transmutation” phase is largely hypothetical at this point. We argue that it has desirable properties using both indirect and direct evidence. Indirect evidence is largely metaphorical from the field of biology. Direct evidence exists but is still somewhat sketchy and incomplete. Studies that compare outcomes from groups composed of people from a single culture with outcomes of groups composed of people from multiple cultures are logistically difficult. For example, how does one “sample” from multiple cultures in a way that draws “comparable” people from various cultures? It may well be that people who volunteer to be in multi-cultural groups may be disproportionally creative in the first place. How does one measure outcomes in the kinds of complex, multi- faceted problems and issues of the type that really require the transmutational phase for solution? Design problems are difficult (though not impossible) to measure even when only a single culture is involved. Indirect Evidence First, consider the base of binocular disparity in human vision. Human beings, along with birds of prey, predatory mammals, and animals that jump from branch to branch have their eyes in the front. Each eye sees a somewhat different view of the world. For distant objects, the view is identical but for nearby objects, the views can be quite different The closer the object, the more disparate the views. The predator does not spend much time arguing about “which view is correct” nor does the right eye try to convince the left eye to see things more as it does. Rather the brain combines the information to give a three dimensional view of the external world. In a similar fashion, the two ears hear various sound events with different loudnesses and, more importantly, with different times of arrival. The brain uses this information to localize sound in three space. While it is clearly possible for a species to evolve without having two sexes, having two sexes allows for more rapid adaptation to changes in the environment. In addition, there is an additional mechanism possible; viz., sexual selection. The process of choosing a mate introduces another level of possible adaptation. In many cases, the complexity of one species adapting
  • 4. becomes intertwined with the life cycle and adaptation of other species. For example, many flowers depend on bees for their own reproductive cycle. In fact, the flowers of a given species will bloom at different times depending on when the other local species of flowers bloom in order to maximize the overall time for bees to pollinate. In this way, the individual species of flower tends to have more exclusive use of the bees for a short period of time. In addition, the bees have a long season of constant pollen supply so they tend to stay healthier and more prolific which in turn is good for the bees. Of course, these arguments are merely metaphorical. When it comes to human behavior, indirect evidence suggests that artificially impacting people from a single culture with treatments that might mirror some of the effects of a multi-cultural view can increase the efficacy of problem solving. For example, in the 1970’s my colleagues and I were studying problem solving and developed both a structured and an unstructured “aid” to problem solving. The structured aid asked subjects to explicitly state the goals, the starting conditions, and the allowable transformations. This aid turned out to be a very effective aid — for the investigators! Indeed, we could often see from this aid where subjects “went wrong.” However, it had no discernible impact on the performance of subjects on various problem solving tasks. On the other hand, we also provided an “unstructured aid” which consisted of a series of quasi- random words which were meant to associate with a wide variety of ideas. Subjects given this aid were more likely to solve “insight problems” than subjects who were not given the aid. They also produced chair designs blindly judged to be more “creative” than subjects not given the aid [11]. In later experiment, 30 subjects (college students) were given the floor plan of an abandoned church and asked to design a restaurant. These designs were judged both for “originality” and for “practicality.” Originality was measured in terms of the number of features that were relatively unique among the population of all designs. Practicality was measured according to the number of features that were “necessary” according to a list of such features provided by an expert. Half the subjects were given the unstructured aid. Those subjects provided the word list scored significantly higher on the practicality dimension [12]. In another study [5] designed to explore potential improvements to heuristic evaluation, subjects were all given the flow chart of a proposed new audio service. One third of the subjects were led to use “normal” heuristic evaluation. One third were led to use the “cognitive walk-through” method. One third were asked to use a new variant on heuristic evaluation. In this method, the subjects were asked to consider the design successively from the perspective of eight different “experts.” The viewpoint of each of the eight experts was described briefly in a paragraph. The subjects were asked to imagine what these various experts would think of the new service in terms of both potential issues and in terms of additional useful functions. The eight “experts” were given in the following fixed order: Self, Human Factors Expert, Cognitive Psychologist, Behaviorist, Social Psychologist, Anthropologist, Freudian Analyst, Health Advocate, Worried Mother, Spoiled Child. Subjects were also divided according to their professional expertise. One third were HCI/UX professionals; one third were developers and one third were clerical. The provision of the invitation to take multiple perspectives did not aid the HCI/UX
  • 5. professionals, but among the other two groups, there were many more findings of possible issues as well as many more suggestions for additional functions than among the group who spent an equal amount of time considering the audio service from their “own” perspective. Both of these studies were preliminary and in need of replication. In later work on the business uses of stories and storytelling, we developed a prototype tool that encouraged people to consider the viewpoints of a hypothetical “Board of Directors.” The idea [14,15] was to take a problem and consider it successively from the standpoint of each “Board Member.” To help concretize this idea, various images and quotes were provided to help “remind” the user of the life, work, and viewpoint of each of these “Board Members.” They included Einstein, Darwin, and Gandhi. For Gandhi, for example, several quotes were provided and the story of the grandfather who came to Gandhi asking that Gandhi convince a grandson not to eat sugar. Basically, the story illustrates Gandhi’s notion that one must be the change one wants to see in the world. Direct Evidence !There are several more direct studies that suggest multiple perspectives can improve creativity and productivity. For example, Ashcraft and Breitzman [1] found that 26 to 42% more IT patents arose from mixed gender teams than comparable single gender teams. Companies with more racial diversity tended to have more sales revenue [6]. Companies with more gender diversity tended to have more sales [10]. Having multi-cultural experience enhanced creativity in [8]. Representational Limitations !Arguably, one of the most important human characteristics is our ability to use language to mediate thought. In some sense, this is undoubtedly true, and yet, we need to be aware that our capabilities are quite limited. For one thing, our ability to categorize things verbally is a double-edged sword. If the category is appropriate to the situation at hand, we can quickly come to apply a method we have already learned. We do not have to invent a new method for each and every situation. To take a trivial (but important) example, once we learn a way to characterize geometric figures (e.g., circles) in terms of abstract characteristics (e.g.,radius and circumference) and a formula relating these, (e.g., circumference = pi x 2r), we can calculate the circumference of any circle by knowing the radius regardless of how large or small the circle is and regardless of its substance, color, location, and so on. On the other hand, if we make a mistake in mapping something in the real world into one of our pre-existing categories, it can be quite dangerous (or humorous). For example, there are 435 people in the United States House of Representatives. How likely is it that at least two people in the House of Representatives share a birthday? Most clever ten year olds will see the solution to this quite quickly. More educated people may have issues with it. For example, I brought up this puzzle in graduate school at a party at a colleague’s house. Someone piped up, “Ahem! Well, I just got my Ph.D. in statistics and this is the famous “birthday problem.” It would be trivial to solve if only I had some log tables.” (This was in the days before hand held calculators). I happened to know that my friend had log tables so I invited this person to use the log tables to
  • 6. solve the “trivial” problem. About an hour later, he still had no solution. The so-called “birthday problem” typically asks how likely it is that at least two people share a birthday in a much smaller group of about thirty people. Surprisingly, it turns out that the probability even in such a small group is about .5. This is counter-intuitive and the student of statistics learns a method for calculating this probability. When a person familiar with the “birthday problem” hears the similar sounding problem about the “House of Representatives” they immediately map the new problem into the old known problem. Since the odds are already pretty good for even 30 people, the sophisticated person will say something like, “Oh, the probability must be high. Certainly over .9. Maybe even .99.” There are, however, only 365 days in a year and 435 people in the House. So, the probability is 1.0. No calculation is necessary. Even if the first 365 members are spread evenly among the days of the year, the 366th member (indeed, 366-435) must “match” someone else’s birthday. Unfortunately, this is not an unusual or atypical example. What is worse, people who share cultural and educational backgrounds will tend to have the same “blind spots” when it comes to the appropriate representation for a problem. Our habitual ways of thinking about problems are often quite good for solving classes of problems that we (individually or collectively) have solved before. They may be irrelevant (or worse) for novel problems. Of course, people have faced novel situations throughout history, but the scope and severity of novel complex problems is probably greater today than ever before. I claim that the representations and perspectives of different cultures could be used, not only to offer a wider variety of existing representations, but also that various cultures offer the potential to induce frameworks that allow completely novel representations and perspectives beyond those of any existing culture. Let us examine two trivial examples based on my own limited knowledge of languages. In English, we typically put the adjectives that modify a noun before the noun. Thus, we might say, “The red house.” In French, however, most adjectives come after the noun. So, in French, we have, “La maison rouge.” At one level, we could say that these two sentences “mean the same thing.” However, the way in which these two sentences are processed cannot be identical in detail. If the English listener hears, “The red
” they are already having internal representations of the color “red” activated (and likely representations of “read” as well). In contrast, the French listener who hears, “La maison
” is having internal representations of a house activated. If one were doing a complex design problem that involved, say, matching color schemes to achieve a particular effect, there may well be differences achieved from the order in which information is presented. The point here, however, is that a consideration of even these two trivial differences in word order allows us to construct a framework for describing and generating additional possibilities. The temporal order could include introducing the color well before the noun or well after the noun as well as presenting the noun and adjective simultaneously. A single human speaker may find this difficult, but there is no reason it cannot be done with modern technology. One can even imagine a system in which different parts of speech are presented in different locations in space or in which words are
  • 7. presented in different locations that reflect their spatial or temporal relationships. The more general point though is that by considering that different languages are different in the way in which they present information temporally, we are led to examine completely new ways to organize verbal information temporally and spatially. Of course, people are not just information processors. We are also processors of meaning and emotion. To take another simple example from English and French, consider that in English, after we negotiate from different possitions, I might say, “I agree” or “You agree.” In the first case, there is an implication that I am agreeing with your position or statement while in the second case, there is an implication that you agree with my position or statement. Theoretically, I could say, “We agree” but this feels potentially manipulative and if I am the one to say it first, it still seems as though I am asserting that you agree with me. On the other hand, in French, a common expression is “D’accord.” This has the rather beautiful diplomatic property of not implying that anyone has come to the other’s view. A considertation of the differences in implied agency by “I agree” versus “D’accord” could potentially help us develop still other expressions and concepts beyond those in English, French or any other actual natural language. Another limitation of the way that we human beings use representational systems is that it takes a long time to become facile with one. This tends to make us very conservative in the use of such representational systems. Once we become facile at one natural language, or mathematical representation or a computer programming language, we tend to use it for all sorts of problems for which it might not be very well suited at all. We seldom even consider the possibility of using different representational systems for successive steps within the same problem. (There are some exceptions to this; for instance, a programming team may write an “inner loop” in a low level language for machine efficiency even though most of the code is in a higher level language for ease of coding, understanding, debugging, maintenance, etc.). If a very large team of people is constructed to address a very complex problem, we implicitly recognize that people with very different skills at various representational schemes will prove useful at different sub-tasks. For example, some people will write JAVA while others will provide documentation in natural language and still others will “sell” the product via advertising. In the globalization phase of HCI4D, it is already recognized that the right way to “sell” a product may be quite different in different cultures so we would typically expect to use people to do this from different cultures. But so far as I know, we have not yet considered constructing a programming language based on the most effective constructs from a wide variety of cultures. Again, such a project might include more than just an aggregation of concepts from different cultures. Hopefully, as in the trivial noun/adjective case mentioned above, we could construct a framework that would allow us to build additional constructs that do not currently exist in any natural language or culture. Beyond language to express the programming solutions to problems, a consideration of different cultures from this transmutational perspective could also be used to develop frameworks for finding and formulating
  • 8. problems. It is here that we might expect to find the greatest leverage from this approach. The socio-technical Pattern, “Who Speaks for Wolf?” illustrates this point [16,17]. This Pattern is based on a story transcribed from the Iroquois by Paula Underwood [26]. Briefly, in the story, there was a man in the tribe named “Wolf” because he made it his life’s work to understand wolves. While he and a number of other braves were away on an extended hunting expedition, the tribal council decided they were over-using the resources in one area and they had to move. They sent out scouts and held a council to determine the place to move to. Some months after moving, however, they discovered that they had moved into the spring breeding ground of the wolves. The wolves were stealing their drying meat and threatening the children. Now, they had another council meeting. Should they destroy the wolves? Or, post guards? Or, move again? They finally decided to move again, but they also said, “How can we avoid making such a mistake in the future?” Someone said, “If Wolf would have been here at our previous council meeting, he would have told us not to move here.” They agreed that thenceforeward, they would always ask, “Who speaks for Wolf?” to consider whether their were any missing perspectives. In this case, the missing perspective was in finding a problem. The tribe was not even aware that there was a problem. We can extend this idea to include, not only perspectives that actually exist within our “tribe” but also to include hypothetical viewpoints of interest. This was the inspiration of the “Board of Directors” prototype referred to earlier. In that case, the “Board” was meant to remind the user of actual people who had interesting and unique perspectives. There is no reason one could not expand this to include characters from fiction or characters specifically constructed to have uniquely useful perspectives for a given situation. Humankind evolved for millions of years mostly in small close-knit tribes where people shared goods, chores, and information. The concept of an “in-group” was probably useful at this time. Today, there is a huge and growing interdependence across the globe. We need to develop new ways of finding, formulating and solving problems. Interacting and working across different languages and cultures provides challenges. In this paper, however, I argue that such differences may also provide the beginnings of solutions to humanity’s most urgent and complex problems. Further explorations along these lines can be found in the following[18,20,21,22,24,25]. Acknowledgements I would like to thank all the participants in previous workshops on cross-cultural issues in HCI [18] as well as HCI4D [2,4,7,9]. I would also like to thank Paula Underwood for transcribing some of the oral history and learnings of her branch of the Iroquois into English[27]. References [1] Ashcraft, C. & Breitzman, A. (2007). Who invents IT? An analysis of women’s participation in information technology patenting. Technical Report, NCWIT. March, 2007. [2] Best, M., Deardon, A., Dray, S., Light, A., Thomas, J.C., Buckhalter, C., Greenblatt, D., Krishnan, S., Sambasivan, N. (2007). Sharing perspectives on community centered design and international development. Human-Computer Interaction, INTERACT 2007. New York: Springer.
  • 9. [3] Ceriejo-Roibas, A.,Dearden, A., Dray, S., Gray, P., Thomas, J.and Winters, N. (2009), Ethics, roles, and relationships in interaction design in developing regions, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Interact 2009. 5727, 963-964, Springer. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-03658-3_132. [4] Dearden, A., Dray, S., Light, A., & Thomas, J.C. (2007). Participatory design for international development, Workshop for CHI 2007, San Jose, CA, May 2007. [5] Desurvire, H. & Thomas, J.C. (1993). Enhancing performance of interface evaluators using non-empirical usability methods. In Proceedings of the Human Factors 37th Annual Meeting, 2, 1132-1136. Seattle, WA: October 11-15. Santa Monica, CA: Human Factors and Ergonomics Society. [6] Heerring, C. (2009). Does diversity pay? Race, gender and the business case for diversity. American Sociological Review, 74(2), 208-224. [7] Kellogg, W. and Thomas, J. (1993) Cross-cultural perspectives on human-computer interaction: a report on the CHI'92 workshop, SIGCHI Bulletin, 25 (2), 40-45. [8] Leung, A.K., Maddux, W., Galinsky, A.D. and Chiu, C-Y. (2008). Multicultural experience enhances creativity: the when and how. Amrican Psychologist, 63(3): 169-181, 2008. [9] Sambasivan, N., Ho, M., Kam, M., Kodagoda, N., Dray, S., Thomas, J. C., Light, A., and Toyama, K. 2009. Human-centered computing in international development. In Proceedings of the 27th international Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Boston, MA, USA, April 04 - 09, 2009). CHI '09. ACM, New York, NY, 4745-4750. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1520340.1520731 [10] Thomas, D. A.(2004). Diversity as strategy. Harvard Business Review. September, 2004. Reprint R0409G. [11] Thomas, J.C., Lyon, D. & Miller, L. (1977). Aids for problem solving. IBM Research Report. RC-6468. Yorktown Heights, NY: IBM Corporation. [12] Thomas, J.C. and Carroll, J. (1978). The psychological study of design. Design Studies, 1 (1), pp. 5-11. [13] Thomas, J.C. (1999). Facilitating global intelligence. Presented at Human-Centered Computing, Online Communities and Virtual Environments Report on the First Joint European Commission/National Science Foundation Advanced Research Workshop, June 1-4, 1999, Chateau de Bonas, France"Human-Centered Computing, Online Communities and Virtual Environments", IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, Vol 19,No 6, pp 70-74, 1999. [14] Thomas, J.C. (2001). Perspective modulation through interactive fiction. Workshop paper presented at CHI workshop: Interactive narrative and knowledge stewardship. 2001; Seattle WA [15] Thomas, J. C. (2001) Collaborative innovation tools. In T. Terano (Eds.) New Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence, JSAI 2001 Workshop, LNAI 2253, 27-34. Presented at Matsue City, May 25, 2001. [16] Thomas, J. C., Lee, A., and Danis, C. (2002), “Who Speaks for Wolf?” IBM Research Report, RC-22644, Yorktown Heights, NY: IBM Corporation. [17] Thomas, J. C. (2003). Toward a socio-technical pattern language. Invited keynote presentation at the 10th ISPE international conference on concurrent engineering: Research and practice. Madeira Island, Portugal, July 29, 2003.
  • 10. [18] Thomas, J.C. (2007). Panelist, Meta-design and social creativity: Making all voices heard. INTERACT 2007, Rio de Janeiro, BZ, Nov., 2007. [19] Thomas, J. C. (2007). The Walking People construed as a persistent conversation. IBM Research Report, RC 24187. [20] Thomas, J.C. (2008). Using Story Templates as a Method to Cumulate Knowledge in HCI and International Development. Workshop paper for CSCW 2008. [21] Thomas, J. (2011). Toward a Socio-Technical Pattern Language for Social Systems in China and the World. Workshop position paper accepted for CSCW 2011 workshop: Designing social and collaborative systems for China. Hangzhou, China, March 19-23. [22] Thomas, J. (2011). Toward a Socio-Technical Pattern Language for Social Media and International Development. Workshop position paper accepted for CSCW 2011 workshop: Social media for development, Hangzhou, China, March 19-23. [23] Thomas, J. C. (2012). Patterns for emergent global intelligence. In Creativity and Rationale: Enhancing Human Experience By Design J. Carroll (Ed.), New York: Springer. [24] Thomas, J. (2012) Understanding and Harnessing Conflict. CHI Workshop Position Paper for HCI for Peace: Preventing, De-escalating and Recovering from Conflict. CHI 2012, Austin, Texas. [25] Thomas, J. (2012), Enhancing Collective Intelligence by Enhancing Social Roles and Diversity. CSCW Workshop Position Paper for Collective Intelligence and Community Discourse and Action. CSCW 2012, Bellvue, WA. [26] Underwood, P. (1994). Three Native American Learning Stories. Georgetown, TX: A Tribe of Two Press. [27] Underwood, P. (1993). The Walking People. San Anselmo, CA: A Tribe of Two Press.