hi!

/wave o7

Yet again, it’s been over a year since I’ve posted. As I don’t have the time to sit down and bang out a lengthy update, I figured I’d simply share some articles I’ve found interesting lately — much like I used to do years ago. These are what I have open in my browser right now:

“Sensorveillance” Turns Ordinary Life Into Evidence – How our everyday devices became police informants by default

Sycophantic Chatbots Cause Delusional Spiraling, Even in Ideal Bayesians

Warframe community director says ‘nothing in our games will be AI-generated, ever’

Linux smashes past 5% on the Steam Survey for the first time

He Forked systemd to Stop Age Verification… Then the Original Dev Showed Up! (video)

Microsoft’s trust and safety head on why the space is worth investing in

GitHub’s Copilot will use you as AI training data, but you can opt out

AI Agent Traps

The Anti-Intellectualism of the Silicon Valley Elite

Last but not least because I’m a WoW lore nerd – Alleria’s Fate in the Voidspire Was Prophesised by a Whisper (warning /spoilers)

If anyone reads this anymore, let me know if any of these were interesting to you and why in the comments.

p.s. Just because it’s listed here, doesn’t mean I endorse it!

TL;DR

This post talks about emotions and technology. It talks about humans and AI. It provides insights into my opinions and observations on these topics based on my education, my understanding (which I’m always working toward improving), and my lived experiences. If you find your opinions, observations, understanding, or lived experiences are different from mine, great! Diversity in thought and perspective is the key toward a broader understanding of the human condition.

Note: My content and opinions are a form of my personal self-expression based on my lived experiences, education, and observations, which are in no way representative of my employer(s).

It’s the end of 2024 and as I update my books read challenge to complete my 30 for the year (1), I am amused by the fact that towards the beginning of the year I read Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience by Dr. Brené Brown and I have finished out the year with Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence by Dr. Kate Crawford (2). The juxtaposition of these two books defines my non-fiction reading quite well. They are both social scientists that lean in from complementary angles in very different ways. The first is all about uncovering truths about your emotive life and how you relate to the people and your lived experiences through various emotional states. The second uncovers truths behind the advancing technology that is slowly but surely inundating us and its impact both on us and the world that sustains us.

1. A modest number really, but it’s a stretch goal for me given my full time jobs of leading a design team and parenting 3 children. It’s a little less than 1 book a week and I’m only able to accomplish that through listening at 2.5 time speed to my non-fiction and physically reading everything else. To be honest, I usually have one audio, one e-book, and one physical book going at the same time.
2. This was one of seven books on AI I read this year but out of all, this and one other (see 3) had the most profound impact on me as it very eloquently put into a single volume many of the things I’ve tried often to share with others on what AI, at this time, really is and how it impacts people and the world around us through many behind the scenes ways.

Why I would recommend these books: Both authors go beyond the façade of their fields and expertise to surface information that lurks deep beneath and tugs at what it means to be human and retain our humanity in the rapidly changing experience that is this 3rd decade of the 21st century.

Why I personally enjoyed their works: They are both backed by research and they’re both written by women. As a woman who is a social scientist as well as a technologist, I find myself at their intersection.

Here are a couple of short descriptions on each.

Atlas of the Heart – Brown delves into the myriad of emotions and related experiences, 150 of them that surfaced in her research and 87 she narrowed that research down to write about, to map out how we move through life via many hues of feelings as we navigate from one moment to the next. Her intent, at least my perception of it, was to provide a guide to being able to find yourself no matter what your emotional state might be and then to find the path navigate forward from where ever you are to wherever you want to go.

Atlas of AI – Crawford explores all of the things that make up Artificial Intelligence determining that it is “…neither artificial nor intelligent … [it] is both embodied and material, made from natural resources, fuel, human labor, infrastructures, logistics, histories, and classifications (3)” (Crawford 2021, 8). In my experience, when most people think of AI, it manifests as some sort of mystical black box that performs magic to generate conclusions faster, better, and more accurately than humans ever could. Sadly, nothing could be further from the truth (4) and Crawford does her due diligence to show why that is the case.

3. Another book to read on AI classifications and how they can be not only incredibly biased but also unjust is Unmasking AI: My Mission to Protect What is Human in a World of Machines by Dr. Joy Buolamwini
4. Mini rant time: I have always referred to ‘Generative AI’ as ‘Derivative AI’ as algorithms do not generate anything on their own. All of their conclusions are derived from already existing data (usually stolen or biased or coerced or built on faulty origins – some without even knowing the source and many who do not consider consent an issue) that is classified or collected or maintained by exploitive human labor practices. GIGO – Garbage In, Garbage Out as the saying goes.

If you want to learn more about these books, I highly recommend them. I’ll leave it to their authors to fully inform you on their topics of expertise.

Switching gears now — while the rest of this post is inspired by my latest readings, it doesn’t directly relate to the books themselves. With that said, here’s a few of my hot takes based on my personal observations and experiences concerning AI as a social scientist and technology designer in 2024.

As the head of a design org (5), AI is both intriguing and terrifying. Neither in and of itself, rather, of how it is used and misused – especially considering my chosen field. Many see it as a shortcut, others see it as a necessary evil, and some see it as the death knell of their livelihood. My take is this, if you remove the human element out of design, you lack the ability to understand the human impact as well as the ability to embrace human innovation (6). Computers do not have a cognitive load, a culture, a spoken language, disabilities, emotions, or needs and wants. And, they cannot on their own create something out of nothing.

5. I am the Senior Director/Head of Design at Blizzard for Battle.net, recently acquired by Xbox (Microsoft).
   • Reminder, thoughts and opinions expressed here are my own and are NOT representative of my employer(s).
6. Helping humans innovate WITH technology has been one of the many focuses of my career. I was part of the inaugural group who helped pioneer SAP’s Innovation Services in innovation management and was accredited with the SAP Innovation & Advisory Skill granted to those who showed the ability to identify appropriate business models, processes, applications, and data as well as applicable intelligent technologies needed to bring them to life.
   • I worked for SAP Innovation Services in Blockchain where I led the design practice (the discipline rather than a team), helped design blockchain backed systems, and led workshops to help Fortune 500 companies identify where blockchain could be useful for them. This was a similar situation to AI where it seemed every company clamored for the ‘latest and greatest’ tech without fully understanding it. Most companies just needed a database rather than adopting blockchain technology and it was my job to help them understand that even if it meant we were not selling them our blockchain services.
   • I LOVE technology. I am not against technology in any way. That said, I believe technology should by made by humans, for humans, and should work with them rather than strive to replace the human contribution in any way. As the quote goes, “I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes”. – Johanna Maciejewska

When it comes to things like art, writing, or even product design — if you want to embrace homogeny and “be different just like everyone else” then AI will suit you just fine and before long people will start to recognize how what AI has produced for you is no different than what it has produced for the next person/project/organization. When it all comes from the same source material, be it the data sets or the algorithms (and believe it or not, most reference the same things as it’s very hard and costly to build a large categorized and classified data set) it will all start eventually looking, feeling, acting, and working the same. If you actually care about making something for humans to embrace with their multi-contextual origins, wants, needs, and differing abilities, AND you want to make something for them that is differentiated from all the things that have come before it, humans are integral to the process.

Relating back to the emotional part of this post a bit. The emotional labor involved in protecting my designers, informing them, assuaging their fears, as well as educating and advocating for the human side of all that we do is intensive, but worth it. This is part of the reason why such books have made it on to my TBR (to be read) list and will continue to do so.

As an anthropologist (7) and information scientist (8) who specializes in cyber anthropology and social informatics (where humans and technology intersect) I am especially concerned with the human element, specifically culture, context, consent, and exploitation. Humans are not binary code made up of 1s and 0s and our experiences cannot be distilled down to an algorithm (9). This is where most systems, including a lot of AI, fail a diverse population. As I addressed in my Ph.D. dissertation, systems alone cannot provide everything that humans need to understand or interpret or utilize the world around them. Lived shared experiences are a necessary part of the human condition and one that AI cannot recreate.

7. During my mixed undergrad degree (anthropology, philosophy, and psychology) in the early 2000s, I did my ethnographic field methods research on the Motivations of Guilded Players in World of Warcraft – where my research was entirely online. This led me to getting my M.S. in Applied Anthropology with a focus on Design and Business where I studied the Fedora Project (the group behind what is monetized as Red Hat Linux) and their online experience for my Masters Thesis in my research on How to Grow, Maintain, and Sustain an Online Open Source Development Community.
   • While I use the term Cyber Anthropology other people have used Digital Anthropology or Digital Ethnography to describe this work. Though I was not the first to do this, I was one of the first to do it in World of Warcaft or MMORPGs in general.
8. My Ph.D. is in Information Science and my dissertation is An Ethnographic Study of Parental Information Behavior when Assessing Video Game Content for their Children where I researched how American parents did or did not use the ESRB (video game rating system) when making decisions about video game appropriateness. I developed a model of how a parent’s interaction with information on behalf of their children changes as their children age and what to do to develop a healthy relationship with their children and their children’s evolving media interactions over time.
   • Funny enough, many parents in my study wanted to see other humans interact with the content via play-throughs over trusting a system like the ESRB or simply reading reviews. With the advent of sites like Twitch this is much easier to do today than it was when I was researching this topic 2010-2016.
   • Why mention my degrees at all? I mention them for two reasons. 1) As a woman, I find I’m taken a little more seriously when I show that I have credentials in relevant fields, (See book: The Authority Gap by Mary Ann Sieghart) and 2) To show that while I embrace technology (I’ve worked in technology all my life) I focus on the human-computer partnership where the two collaborate together for work and play rather than putting humans second or treated as an expendable after thought on the path toward unsustainable profit growth.
9. This is where Dr. Buolamwini’s book finds its place. Other books to consider are Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy by Dr. Cathy O’Neil and Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism by Dr. Safiya Umoja Noble. These last two are on my 2025 TBR list along with several others.
   • While all of the books I’ve mentioned so far are by women with Ph.D.s, that is not a criteria for being on my TBR list, it just so happens that women with Ph.D.s make up a large majority of the people calling out the industry. I’ll leave it up to you to decide why that might be.

Humans are messy and chaotic and regardless of their perceived similarities, are highly complex and individual beings who all have their own unique wants and needs that are sometimes chaotic and contradictory. This is all part of the human experience, which is why inclusive design, open design, universal design, and accessibility are so important to me as a designer. The very notion of letting an AI design something for humans on its own is the exact opposite of inclusive and open design. Not to mention the fact that accessibility and universality are often second thoughts for most able bodied humans. How do we expect an algorithm to make them a priority?

Given I’m a human who depends on this planet to sustain me, my family, and my loved ones, I’m also highly concerned with the the impact AI has on our environment. Just like how electric cars aren’t truly environmentally conscious choices when you consider where all their parts originate (especially those used to create the lithium batteries) or where they get all the power that charges them — AI also has a way of hiding its huge impacts on the environment. The biggest limitation on the technology behind AI today lies with its dependency on ecologically unsustainable amounts of energy and water to power it. Companies are consuming enormous amounts of these resources putting a strain on the infrastructure that humans depend on to live. The additional human health impact is multilayered from those who work in the mining and smelting side to others having to contend with power hungry data centers in their back yards causing a myriad of illnesses they are powerless to fight against (10).

10. A few relevant articles on this topic
    • https://e360.yale.edu/features/artificial-intelligence-climate-energy-emissions
    • https://www.pcmag.com/news/google-goes-nuclear-buying-energy-us-reactors-power-ai-kairos
    • https://environmentamerica.org/texas/center/articles/data-centers-pose-energy-challenge-for-texas/
    • https://time.com/6982015/bitcoin-mining-texas-health/
    • On a personal note – as a Texan, don’t get me started on how our power grid can’t even withstand a storm of any sort (wind, rain, and ice have knocked out my power for days at a time here). The fact that there are so many companies moving their less than ethical operations here (Amazon, Tesla, Bitcoin to name a few) is infuriating to say the least. Profits over humans apparently never goes out of style. The realization that humans need to be able to live and make a living for these companies to make profits seems to have eluded them all. While they may not be feeling the impact yet, one can only hope their time will come.

To put this in perspective, Crawford discusses a paper (11) that calculated the carbon footprint of one natural language processing model (NLP – think ChatGPT) which “produced more than 660,000 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions, the equivalent of five gas-powered cars over their total lifetime (including their manufacturing) or 125 round-trip flights from New York to Beijing” (Crawford pg. 42). Is the cost to our planet worth it to have a conversation with a bot? What about the cost of the exploited human labor that was used to input the data into the NLP so it could work? All of a sudden that “free” AI art or prose isn’t so free after all, is it? As a note to employers, it may not be cost saving to you either as a recent MIT CSAIL study revealed there are economic limits to trying to replace humans (12). Given AI is largely not ecological, environmental, or economical, I have to wonder when the price (monetary and beyond) to create and run it will finally outstrip any perceived future profits companies believe they will glean from it.

11. Energy and Policy Considerations for Deep Learning in NLP: https://aclanthology.org/P19-1355/
12. https://www.csail.mit.edu/news/rethinking-ais-impact-mit-csail-study-reveals-economic-limits-job-automation

In the end, I’m not trying to be a doomsayer here. I think there can be a time and a place for humans and AI to work together, but that’s the crux of it, working together. Here is why I was inspired to even begin this now way too long blog post. While AI has already started to find a place in the ‘hard’ sciences (13), I think we in the social sciences can also find our place in this ever changing landscape. Especially since even the use of AI in hard sciences can be detrimental if it is based on biased or skewed data sets and there is a lack of awareness on how this might be an issue for under represented populations.

13. A few hard science examples:
    • https://www.cancer.gov/research/infrastructure/artificial-intelligence
    • https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/how-an-ai-scientist-turned-her-breast-cancer-diagnosis-into-a-tool-to-save-lives/
    • https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/chemistry/2024/summary/

And here’s where we begin to circle back to my previous statement about considering culture, context, consent, and exploitation when it comes to AI systems and how they are built and powered. As an information scientist and cyber anthropologist focused on the intersection of humans and technology, I find that myself and people like me, are in a prime position to be able to elevate the human side of this partnership that has largely been ignored or downgraded as an after thought. Both Dr. Crawford and Dr. Buolamwini point out in their books that content and data without context and consent can lead to technological failures and biases that directly affect people in the general population every day, whether they know it or not. And while I’m a proponent of inclusive and open design, I cannot ignore the fact that this can also cause problems for marginalized people who may be exploited as a means to an end of making a ‘better data set’ which could in turn be used against them. As I always stress to my designers, it is our job to not only think of how the things we design can help all people. It is also our responsibility to fight against ways they can be nefariously used as well.

The field of AI needs us more than it knows. We’ve moved past the time period of being ok with the field moving fast and breaking things to get a product out to market as quickly as possible, as the things moving fast are the depletion of our natural resources and those being broken are people caught on the exploitive labor side or the wrong end of an algorithm. While there may be short term profits for a few, the long term consequences will come for us all. And no, I’m not talking about some sentient robot uprising. I’m talking about ethics and sustainability. I’m talking about the ways not that AI can impact humans, rather the ways that humans can impact AI. While I’ve mentioned quite a few amazing humans above who’ve already had various impacts on AI, they are but a small part of a growing movement (14) that could always use a few more.

14. A few social science contributions:
    • https://www.anthropology-news.org/articles/ten-predictions-for-ai-and-the-future-of-anthropology/
    • https://culanth.org/fieldsights/anthropology-and-algorithms
      • https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1360780419857734
      • https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781003175605-47/algorithmic-violence-everyday-life-role-media-anthropology-veronica-barassi
    • https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2053951717738104
    • https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-anthropologist-of-artificial-intelligence-20190826/

Though it may seem like I’m a bit late to this conversation, it’s something that’s been brewing in my mind for more than a decade. My work history includes IBM who acquired the company I worked for in 2013 (4 years after I started), which was the largest privately owned hosting company in the world before the acquisition. We specialized in infrastructure as a service including managing severs in large data centers which is one of the myriad of things I designed the interfaces for. They used our infrastructure as the basis of their cloud computing offering, for which I also designed interfaces and researched uses in its early stages (and I am a rare designer with an OTAA to show for it — IYKYK).

As previously mentioned, I was also a design consultant at SAP in their innovation services utilizing edge technologies (Blockchain, IoT, ML, and more). Thus, I’ve peripherally touched on this throughout the better part of my career. Now that I find myself over a large team of designers working for a company which was recently acquired by yet another large technology corporation, and one that is putting big bets on AI, I find myself squarely at one of these intriguing intersections of people and technology yet again. So, I’m doing what any good researcher does, I’m diving in and consuming everything I can (15).

15. Books I’ve read this year on AI or related topics:
    • Thinking in Systems: A Primer by Donella Meadows (while not AI specifically, I felt it was related enough to include)
    • The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century’s Greatest Dilemma by Mustafa Suleyman
    • AI Ethics by Mark Coeckelbergh
    • Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control by Stuart Russell
    • The Battle for Your Brain: Defending the Right to Think freely in the Age of Neurotechnology by Anita A Farahany
    • Rebooting AI: Building Artificial Intelligence We Can Trust by Gary F. Marcus
    • Unmasking AI: My Mission to Protect What is Human in a World of Machines by Joy Buolamwini
    • Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence by Kate Crawford

If you’ve made it this far, thanks for sifting through this brain dump. It’s been a while since I’ve been inspired to write something like this and I’m glad I’ve been able to take advantage of my company’s imposed time off to do so.

Now, back to my TBR list.

p.s. The irony is not lost on me that the program I wrote this draft in originally kept trying to get me to use AI to “improve my writing”. For better or worse, this is all human made and no algorithms were involved in its creation.

I’ve been championing work for our design org around what I’m calling “Foundations”. These are the pillars where if any one of them were to be unsteady, it would affect everything else. They are represented by the following:

• Principles
• Purpose
• Values
• Mission
• Vision

The problem with doing these after an org has been well established (which it was before I got here) is that going back to do what should have been done from the beginning creates confusion on how to approach each of these. If nothing else, because it’s kinda like retconning. Also, many of these crossover with others and thus they can sometimes be hard to distinguish from each other.

I’m currently running a workshop with my design leadership team (this is after I led one with the whole org where each and every person got to provide their versions of these and we in leadership are using their inputs as the basis for our work) and we were having a hard time grokking the difference between some of the concepts. On paper the differences make some sense, but when you get to writing them you start to see how they all blend together and that is where things get confusing.

While enjoying a rewatch of one of my favorite series before it was taken off of Netflix, I had an epiphany. So, I got really nerdy and I came up with even more examples but all from a single source (versus the myriad of ones I had collected from multiple companies).

Thought some of my readers might enjoy this:

Star Trek: The Next Generation
Mission Statement
“Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its continuing mission: to explore strange new worlds. To seek out new life and new civilizations. To boldly go where no one has gone before!”

Series Principles 
“Roddenberry detailed five items in the handbook that must be followed to create a “Star Trek” story. Those were: the stories were about people; framed in an optimistic vision of the future; from the point of view of captain and crew; and the regular cast are each episode’s heroes, and the home base of the crew is the Enterprise.”

Value One – Inclusivity and Diversity
“The Enterprise crew should be ‘completely multi-racial.'”

Value Two – Optimism
“Leonard Nimoy often said that what set Roddenberry’s creation apart from the other science fiction franchises was optimism.”

Value Three – Hope
“‘A lot of science-fiction is nihilistic and dark and dreadful about the future, and ‘Star Trek’ is the opposite,’ Nimoy told the New York Times in 2009. ‘We need that kind of hope; we need that kind of confidence in the future. I think that’s what ‘Star Trek’ offers.'”

Vision
“Star Trek shows us that no matter how bad the world outside our windows gets, there is still a bright light at the end and that humanity has the potential to be so much more than it has ever been.” – Andrew Hales

I didn’t come up with all of these examples myself, you can find the source for most of the quotes (save for the mission statement), here. Rather, what I’m doing here is taking a unique approach to this problem space and applying the provided examples to help us understand some seemingly simple yet somewhat complex concepts we (should) find in the business world.

Let me know what you think.

Warning! Warning! Error! Error!

Well, it’s been a hot minute since I posted here. I just received notice a week or so ago that my server was being moved to a new one at my webhost (where I’ve hosted my sites for OVER TWENTY YEARS – how the hell is that possible?). So, I thought I’d come check out the site and well there are some bugs here and there. I’ve tried to clean up as much as I could, but it’s 3am on a Monday morning (hey, it’s a holiday if that matters), and I’m over it at this point. So if you find some weird characters where punctuation should be, just know it’s due to the fact that it wasn’t encoded in the database correctly when it was originally posted and well there are nearly 15 years of posts here at this point, which means going back to fix them all will take some time.

I do have to say though it was a bit of a trip going back to April of 2007 for this blog’s first entry (though the first official one was September of 2007, it went back to April because I’d brought over some LJ posts I’d made to a corresponding community I’d started there prior to starting this blog). So yeah, I’ve tried to catch as much as I could, but I’m sure I’ve missed some and others I’m too tired to deal with at this point (I know for a fact my undergrad work under the academic nav point needs to be fixed, but that’s more than I’m willing to take on right now).

So, where have I been?

Alas, I’ve been absent here since about July of 2020 due to starting a new job (as an Associate Director of Design at Blizzard – holy crap, I actually work there) a couple of months after my last post. Then, over the next year, we had 3 deaths in our family and moved across the state for said job. Combine all of that with the fact that I’m also homeschooling my 3 kids and now taking care of my soon to be 98 year old grandfather with Alzheimer’s (my grandmother passed in August of last year due to catching COVID at the hospital, which makes me his caretaker now), and well – time has been a bit scarce.

Still Gaming

Don’t worry, I’m still raiding (mythic 7/10 this tier [SoD – ends tomorrow] horde side though I still kept my beloved NELF and just leveled up my Troll so I could mythic raid with friends) on top of all of that. I’ve stuck with playing WoW as it’s my pixel therapy that I hold in high priority as it’s the one thing my husband and I really enjoy doing together and it allows us to socialize with people out there in the real world without having to be actually out there in the real world. I also play FFXIV now as a Red Mage (have since May of 2020 – I have a few other jobs as well, like you do) and I’ve picked up Lost Ark as a Bard (came out in the U.S. last week), because why not.

Say Hi

Not sure anyone reads this much anymore, but if you do – feel free to leave a comment and say hi or use the Contact page to shoot me a message. I may try to post more often if there are still readers out there.

Update: I’ve edited a few parts to make it a little clearer. Same message, just easier to understand. Iteration for the win!

This could have also been titled: “Why you are doing your organization a disservice if you’re hiring researchers to only conduct usability testing, or hiring designers to do research.”

Welcome to this week’s soapbox post! 

If you’re familiar with me or my work or you’ve been keeping up with this blog, you know that I am currently in the market for a new job. I fully realize in a post-COVID world that being a researcher (while it should be one of the most important roles today for a lot of companies during turbulent times) is actually a very tough position to be in when looking for a job as it’s always one of the first cut in product development. 

I think this happens for several reason, two of which I am going to address today. 

One: A lot of job descriptions I’ve read lately are looking for UX people who are capable of conducting research and doing usability testing. While these are indeed admirable traits to have as a UXer, and I’m one of those UXers that embodies them, I would not recommend relying on your designers to do all of the research work that should be done. Why? Well, if for no other reason these are two different skillsets. Additionally, if you have an agile environment with a continuous release cycle, your designers are already too busy keeping up with that. Not to mention the fact a proper research team should be a full quarter or two ahead of them! It is difficult to encompass both of these capabilities in the same role. Research should be a full quarter or more ahead, you ask? Yes, and this brings me to my second reason. 

Two: There is a lack of understanding of what research is and how it can be useful. Usability testing (and yes it’s usability testing NOT user testing – we are testing the usability of a site not the user’s ability to use it, those are two different things and this means a lot when you get into inclusive design) is not the end all be all of user research. In fact, it is a tiny sliver and if the appropriate research has been done ahead of time in your organization, you will not need it as often and you won’t have to rely on it as much.

So let’s break that last point down. Usability testing is generally what I see organizations who are new to research using to dip their toes into the discipline. They have read and seen why it is important and think that it will make a difference for their users. This is all correct. The problem is many organizations who are new to this think that’s all there is to research and they feel they have to test every single thing before it is released. In reality, research should be more about problem finding than trying at the very end to work on testing solutions to problems that were likely not fully understood to begin with. 

If you have a research team that is versed in problem finding (utilizing generative/exploratory/discovery methods) and uses those skills to help your product people fill their gaps and blind spots, it is likely that a lot of the issues that your products or services are currently challenged with will be solved as a nice side effect when you focus on those uncovered during this phase. Why? Because, solutionizing right out of the box is how a lot of products and services find themselves in trouble. Going problem finding opens your organization up to a whole host of new possibilities and opportunities that would be otherwise missed and cause issues down the road because you didn’t know they existed.

By conducting exploratory and discovery sessions first, you’re connecting with the people in your space who are trying to solve their problems with your product or service. When you understand what those are, it makes it easy to see that they are the problems your work should be focused on. If your product or service does not solve problems for your users, it doesn’t matter how usable it is or how many features it has, it will never end up being what they are looking for. 

Additionally, the treasure trove of data your researchers will come back with during this phase will likely reveal a lot more opportunities for ideation and innovation than any single product manager will have the capacity to do. (This also helps relieve some of the pressure product managers have due to all of the other responsibilities they are saddled with in this day and age.) The added bonus is that when you use data to drive your designs from the beginning, it results in designs that have fewer hurdles to cross when it comes to usability testing because they started with a firm foundation of data to support them. 

In the end, this results in faster design, development, and testing time which equals faster time to market. This, however, ONLY works if you have a research team that is able to work well ahead of your design and development teams while at the same time also working through the design and development phases to continue advocating for the users throughout the entire product life cycle. This is why I do not recommend designers be the ones who also have to shoulder that responsibility. Yes, EVERYONE on the team should be a part of the research process, but they also have their own roles to play and the researcher is there to help make it easier, faster, and more efficient for them to do so. 

So the next time you’re writing a job description, I beg of you to keep all of this in mind. And, when you’re looking to cut – consider the amount of money a researcher can save you and make you if you truly utilize them in the right ways.

The first I heard of COVID-19 was at the end of January. I had a team member visiting family in China. She had flown out the morning the news broke here so she was in the air when we all found out what was going on. I was worried for her safety and her safe return. None of us had any idea that the effects of it would become so much broader than the concern we had at the time for our single team member. Within 2 months everything was locked down to help slow the spread. For a research team at a hospitality company, that meant our work took a hit as well. Three months later, we find ourselves here.

Last week was a hard week for my team at Hilton. We had hope we’d make it through, but in the end it was all for naught. I have to say, I really liked my job. I loved leading a team of amazing and brilliant researchers consisting of PhDs and Masters. They made it easy. They knew what they were doing and were able to carry out their work with no need for micromanagement (that’s not my style anyway). When problems or questions came up, they were interesting and challenging and we worked together to solve them.

At first I didn’t understand why they wanted a director with 14+ years of research experience yet was tasked with no hands-on research (even as the head of a research team at IBM, I still did a lot of heavy lifting). It was only after I started fielding actual on the job issues that it became much clearer. Though this was a different experience than the one I had at IBM where I had to build a team from scratch and then teach each of them what it meant to do research in the corporate world (much through example), I still found it worthwhile and fulfilling.

What was great about this team was that no one was afraid of what they had to do even if it was something completely new to them. Though we rarely worked together on the same project (they were all embedded on separate teams), when someone needed help, everyone jumped in!

For example, it is practically impossible to run an eye-tracking study alone. We spent an entire day together working out the research plan and then getting the hardware and software setup and running. It was a true team effort from researchers working on the ins and outs, to me setting up (and scavenging) the hardware and observation setup, to our research ops manager getting the eye-tracking company on the phone to help us get the software working. There was a real camaraderie where everyone was there for each other. We all wanted it to be successful and we knew we had to work together to make that happen.

The best part about my job was I felt like I really made a difference. I mean, what more can you ask for when you walk into an existing team. I focused on building up the team culture as well as the practice of research and the strengths of each individual. We worked hard to show the value we could bring and why research was important.

We had regular 1:1s where we discussed whatever they needed to that week. We had regular team meetings where we shared knowledge and expertise and learned from each other at all levels. And, we had a bookclub where we learned with each other. We genuinely cared about each other and our work, our users, and the company.

We haven’t worked together for nearly 3 months, but we all still chat in my personal Slack where I field everything from mentoring questions to keeping up with our ongoing bookclub and now help finding jobs. We may not work together anymore, but we are still a team.

What is sad is we had only been together 5 months. We were just getting started. I had a lot of great plans for the team. We were working on building up our own research repository that met our needs and would eventually fulfill the self-service needs of those with whom we worked. My next goal was to get our own Jira board and workflow setup so that we could standardize the way we took in research requests and so that it would be easy for me and my ops partner to show data to support the work our team was doing and that we had more work than people! (This worked well for me using Git at IBM, I was really excited about getting it going at Hilton, too.)

Additionally, I was making an effort on maturing the research model within the company. This meant gradually moving it from one where design relied heavily upon a lot of usability testing to one who tested when needed, but also prioritized problem finding – looking deeper into the wants and needs of our users from our guests to our hotel staffs – so we could solve the problems that really mattered instead of just focusing on things one screen at a time. I was also working out how to create a more inclusive research and usability testing process reaching out to our recruiters and panel companies on how to do this with dignity and purpose.

At the team level, I pushed for them to be thought leaders and to find ways to share their knowledge and craft with the outside world. One of our goals was to have Hilton Research representation at as many conferences as possible. The last panel we submitted was on how brick-and-mortar businesses could go through their own digital transformations and come out the other side with some very innovative products and services (digital key and connected room were my two favorite future facing technologies we worked on).

We could have done so much. I’m so thankful for having had the opportunity to have been a part of it all. It’s rare that I’m at a job less than a year (though my last one was a year and a half, the one before that was nearly 9 years). While this one was short, it will always have a place in my heart.

I know this socio-economic crisis has had a real human toll across the entire world. And for us, though we no longer have jobs, we are all physically safe and healthy. And for that, I am thankful. However, I know we all have families to support and that is very hard to do without an income. So, I am going to end this post with LinkedIn profiles of a few I know still looking for work including my own. Please feel free to forward these on to anyone needing top research talent and/or research & design leadership experience. Hilton only hired the best, so please let their loss be your gain.

Agile UX Qualitative Researchers & Usability Testers:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jadesjenkins/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/erikayi/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/heathersroth/

Research Ops/Marketing Research Specialist: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jackie-brilliant-cooperman/

Strategist, Innovator, Architect, Research & Design Leader: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dianaharrelson/

(To learn more about me, check out my projects page and CV. For access to my locked portfolio and more recent work, please contact me.)

Thanks for reading.

I recently found out my contact form was not working properly. As I’m not sure how long it has been down, I have to say if you’ve tried to contact me over the last 6 months or so (maybe even longer!), it may not have worked. However, I have fixed it! And, now you can contact me without issue. I also have a backup solution that will catch anything should it break again.

My apologies for any previous inconvenience!

On the 4th anniversary of the release of my dissertation, and since I haven’t had time to publish to any journals like most academics do (read: 3 kids plus a full time job leaves little time for little else), I’ve made use of my furlough time to do a quick (well academically quick) writeup of the model I developed as a part of my research on parental assessment of video game appropriateness for their children. Some may find it interesting or wish to challenge it or both. I figure anything is better than letting it stagnate in a 200 page dissertation no one is going to read.

Below you will find the simplified model, an explanation of its basic parts, as well as the more developed version below it. For a full explanation with examples from my study, it starts on page 169 of my dissertation. If this has piqued your interest, I have also created a quick writeup of my study (to save you from reading the entire dissertation) and I have published the slides I used in my dissertation defense.

This is simplified from my original version (see below), but I think that makes it easier to utilize for other studies and other types of parental information behavior above and beyond video game assessments.

Breakdown:

The model consists of 4 basic parts.

1. The first is the dividing line that separates Interaction For Children and Interaction With Children.
2. The second are the intersecting domains of Learning, Teaching, and Understanding
3. The third is the age timeline from 0 to 18
4. The last are the stages from 1 to 4

Part 1:
Concept – the interactions of parental information behavior and their children change as their children age.

The first major delineation of the model is moving from interacting FOR children to interacting WITH children.

This defining line made itself evident after evaluating how parents of children of different age groups interacted with information when it concerned their children and how *successful that interaction was depending on the type and domain of interaction and the child’s age.

It became evident after evaluating the data that parents who had more conversations with their older children and who made decisions with them had far more success in having open and clear communication about media and its appropriateness than those who decided everything for their children and subjected them to a more authoritarian rule. Those parents who worked with their older children were less worried about their children’s interactions with media than those who preferred to do things for them.

*success is of course subjective here but usually included the lack of a need for discipline or worry because the parent/child relationship was such that there was a clear level of trust or at least an evolving one that they were working on together

Part 2:
Concept – the parental information behavior domains parents interact within, as it concerns their children, changes as their children age.

The second major delineation is broken up into three domain spheres: Learning, Teaching, & Understanding

The Learning domain consists of all of those things parents do to learn what they need in order to parent. This includes the information rush parents go through when they find out they’re expecting as well as interacting with it to fulfill their children’s information needs before their children are able to do so on their own.

The Teaching domain consists of the information behavior as it relates to the parent helping to teach the child whether it be a homeschool situation or supplemental to an external student learning system. It is also about teaching the child how to interact with information on their own. This environment bridges the For children and the With children as the child ages and becomes more independent in their own information behavior.

The Understanding domain is the beginning of a mutual understanding between the child and the parent as the child becomes independent in their information behavior and the parent seeks to understand their child’s new information needs and behaviors.

Part 3:
Concept – tracking parental information behavior as the child ages from 0 to 18.

This is shown via the timeline that cuts through the middle of the model.

Though my research focused on recruiting parents of children 4 to 17, parents discussed their younger and older children as well as their participant children’s behaviors when they were younger. For example, the average age most children in the study started gaming was 3.5. This timeline is most important as it relates to part 4.

Part 4:
Concept – parental information behavior, as it concerns their children, tends to go through 4 stages corresponding to the child’s age. **

1. Stage 1 – Birth to Age 4
2. Stage 2 – Age 4 to Age 9
3. Stage 3 – Age 9 to Age 14
4. Stage 4 – Age 14 to Age 18

Stage 1
Birth to Age 4
In this stage the parent’s information behavior as it concerns their children is for their child and focuses primarily on learning about parenting and then transitioning into teaching as the child hits pre-school age.

Stage 2
Age 4 to Age 9
Parental information behavior in this stage is a two pronged approach still on learning, but with an emphasis on teaching. Here, the child starts to become more independent and starts to be able to take on their own information needs, but they tend to still have a lot of needs that only their parent can fulfill. Additionally, due to their young age, they still have a lot of supervision.

Stage 3
Age 9 to Age 14
This is the stage where parents were most concerned in my study. This was for two important reasons. One, children were becoming completely independent in their own information behaviors needing less assistance from their parents. And two, this is the stage where most children start to enter puberty. Here, parents were less concerned with violence and more concerned with sexual content or other improper things like language and drug use.

Stage 4
Age 14 to 18
By the time the child enters high school, or just after, and until they are deemed an adult by culture and society there is an interesting phase where the child can in some cases surpass the parents abilities and understandings when it comes to media and information behavior as it pertains to popular culture and even technical aspects. If a parent has not fully transitioned from For to With and has not moved into wanting to understand what their teen is doing and why, from the teen’s perspective, they will likely lose all control, access to, and input on the teen’s media consumption. This is especially the case the more authoritarian they become and this will cause the teen to hide their information behavior instead of share it (or at least a portion of it) with their parents.

**Side note: There may be differences as to how parents approach these stages with subsequent children and that may also depend on the age gap between their children. Additionally, I did NOT do any research on child information behavior specifically, nor did I focus on any previous research on children and media. My research was focused solely on parents, so this can certainly be added to over time as needed to focus on the needs of children if it makes sense to do so.

Now, if you review my presentation of my dissertation defense, you will see a more detailed version of this model, which I will add below.

Added details: Any information behavior activities the child has at this stage are actively and directly observed by parent and tend to be on a closed system (no outside access).

Added detail: At this stage, parents tend to provide their children their own devices, but in a locked down mode, which allows for semi open interactions that can be supervised as needed (passive) but in the presence of their parents (direct). Online access usually comes in the form of white listed programs or school related needs.

Added Detail: During this stage children become more independent in their media use and information needs as they need less help from their parents in order to do so. While the system may still be only semi open (some lock downs still exist), the child is now able to interact with their media outside of the parents purview. This new independence tends to come with a cost though as the parent becomes more active in paying attention to what their child is doing via remote observation (nanny programs).

Added Detail: In this stage parents had the least amount of influence or control over the information with which their children interacted, thus their children made most of their information behavior decisions on their own. While parents still made decisions at this stage, children tended to have more influence on the decisions being made. Here there were natural barriers to Mature content which included initial cost and access to a credit card.

Though most teens had open access to interact with information as they pleased in that they were less restricted the older they were, their parents still had control over the access itself and would remove wireless/mobile access when needed (passive monitoring – decisions made here were usually based on grades, attitude etc.) instead of trying to control access to specific things at an application level. This meant it ended up as an all or nothing for the teen. As teens tend to be very protective of their online access, it was a line few wanted to cross.

So? What’s the point?

From my dissertation:

This model was designed to show how interconnected parent-child interactions are with parental information behavior and the effects of this interconnectedness on it. To put it simply, parental information behavior cannot exist without this interconnectedness and it is because of this interconnectedness that it needs to exist as well as persist and change over time.

The examples [see dissertation starting on p. 169] were provided to show how parent-child interactions affect parental behavior on a multitude of levels including information, communication, and decision-making strategies. Additionally, they were to show how this behavior both changes and becomes more complex as children age. Thus, a ratings system that provides the same type of information for every level at every stage may lose the ability to successfully help the parent as their child ages and they reach the later stages, which is arguably when both parents and children need it most.

The major take-away is that children can greatly affect how and why their parents interact with information and it goes well beyond age in the sense of restricting material based on age alone, especially the age ratings that are in place today. Finding ways to educate and assist both parent and child, to provide information in such a way that both can interact with it, and each other, is key to successful family information behavior and any information system that wants to support it.

This presentation was originally given at DFW Beyond 2018 (October). I was the last of the speakers on the main stage for the morning (meaning: there were a lot of people in the crowd!). I’m going to add my script here as I originally wrote it along with the screen shots from the Prezi presentation. If you want to see the original presentation as it was presented, you can find it here.

Intro
Hello everyone! We’ve heard a lot of great talks this morning and now all that’s standing between you and lunch is me! It’s like an epic boss fight. If you survive this then you’ll be on your way to victory. So, with that, let’s take a left turn here and have a little fun. 

Gaming Team
Anyone here play video games? Anyone here play video games with other people? How about large groups of people? 

Work Team
Now let’s think about the people you work with. 

How many of you work with 4 other people? 9 other people? 19 other people? How many of you work with 19 other people for an intense non-stop three to four hours at a time multiple times a week? Could you do that? Would do you do you that? 

What kind of skills do you think would be required to be able to do that calmly, collectively, and collaboratively even in the face of failure after failure after failure until you finally succeed? 

Do you think we can learn from groups who are able to do this and do it successfully and do so repeatedly on purpose? I am here because yes, I think we can.  

Who am I
My name is Dr. Diana Hubbard. I am currently a design consultant for SAP specializing in Blockchain (I’m now a Director of Research for Hilton). In my previous role, I was the head of strategic research and insights for IBM Public Cloud. You can also tell I’m also an academic by the length of my title and my strategically placed colon.  

For the past 11 years, I have had the opportunity to pull together successful research, design, and development teams in multiple organizations ranging from Software as a Service to Infrastructure and Cloud Services to now with Edge Technologies. 

I contribute the success of these teams to lessons learned from World of Warcraft. 

Academically I am an anthropologist and information scientist who has studied gamers, gaming, developers, and open source development communities for the last 12 years. 

Druid
I am also a max level Resto Druid (I main a horde druid these days) in a newly built high-end raiding guild (I’ve changed guilds since then) in World of Warcraft. 

Though I’ve played for the last 14 years and been a part of many raid teams, this one was put together specifically for the expansion that just came out in August.

I raid with up to 19 other people 3 to 4 nights a week for 3 to 4 hours at a time. This is on top of my job and taking care of my family of 5 including 3 children, as well as our 3 dogs, and our home.

Learning
Today I am going to highlight a few things I think people like us, who build and manage teams, can take away from these organically grown communities of practice who come together both inside and outside the game to voluntarily put in a lot of time and effort to successfully collaborate in highly intense situations toward a common goal. 

And they do this in the face of failure and defeat and the possibility of getting nothing but a virtual repair bill for their hard earned broken digital armor. 

Since my time is so short (I only had 20 minutes) I will only be able to go into these at a high level but I will provide a link at the end of to my blog where I will talk about it in detail and link to this presentation.  (<– this is just now happening)

Culture
Let’s start with Culture. 

What is culture anyway. Is it where we live? What we do? The clothes we wear? 

As an anthropologist, especially one who studies geographically dispersed online communities, I obviously have an opinion on this. I define it as shared ideas, thoughts, beliefs, and behaviors with a common language and shared vocabulary. 

This is an important distinction because raid teams do not normally all hail from the same countries or even speak the same first language, but they all know, understand, and have a passion for Warcraft. The same can be said for many of our product teams in relation to our businesses. 

Being a cultural anthropologist, it is no surprise I have found culture to be an essential element of successful teams. There are many ways it is important, but for the purposes of this talk I’ve distilled it down to 3. Culture of Research, of Knowledge Sharing, and of Failure. 

Research 
Considering research, the most essential part is that everyone does it. And this isn’t necessarily user research activities, though as a UXR I do highly recommend all members of product teams participate in at least some user research activities. 

In this case, research is a bit more high level including topics such as the problem space. Everyone conducting some sort of research at this level not only helps individual knowledge, but it also improves the overall interaction of the team as it helps level the playing field and gets everyone on the same page. 

The purpose is not necessarily to get all of the answers, but to know what questions to ask. Lastly, it should be noted that research never stops. The game is always changing, as projects do, so research is always ongoing and evolving which is why knowledge sharing is important. 

Knowledge Sharing
Knowledge sharing is fundamental to the progress of the team because not everyone can know everything at all times. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a mythic raid boss fight, so imagine your favorite sports game and add earth quakes, volcanos, lava, tornados, hurricanes, and tidal waves all happening while your team is trying to score a goal and that might give you some idea of how much is going on any one time that everyone needs to have some knowledge of. 

Though knowledge sharing may seem like a small thing, it creates an environment where team members come to rely upon each other and learn how to be relied upon, which is important when it comes to progress through failure – something that is a given for a mythic raid team.  

Failure
It is nearly impossible for a team to walk into an encounter or a problem space for the first time and be successful. 

We should all know this going in as it’s what we signed up for. Those with egos do not make it very far in mythic raiding because you have to be ok with giving up your invulnerability. You have to be willing to fail with the team if you’re going to ever succeed with them. 

There have been nights where we have died an upwards of 30 times, half of them trying to get past a single boss. 

However, every time we died we got a little further and learned a little more and all those little failures are what helped us succeed in the end. The important part was we kept going and kept each other’s spirits up as we did, which is a very important skill to have.  

Skills
Skills can mean many things, but for this talk I’m going to keep it simple. I love the straightforwardness of this definition – expertise gained from experience. It plays very well into the three skills I consider essential for raid and product teams, which are getting things done, playing multiple roles, and leading at all levels. 

GTD
We’ve all heard of GTD or getting things done, but how many of us practice it? How many of us have meetings about meetings or walk out of a meeting having accomplished absolutely nothing? 

For a raid team, time is precious. Not only does our chance to progress reset every week, but we all also have lives and jobs and even children fighting for our time and attention. So, when we meet in game it is always with a purpose and a goal and a timeline.  

We all want to see our guild name move up the rankings and we all know we have the power to make that happen but it takes commitment and dedication. We will progress only if we show up together and get things done. And to get things done we sometimes have to step into someone else’s role. 

MultiRoles
Having people play multiple roles is not the same thing has having a team of unicorns. Rather, it is about having a team of people who can pick up the slack when someone is sick or on vacation or the deadline has just been moved up. 

It’s about team members who have empathy for each other and understand each other’s strengths and weaknesses. Building a team of people who have both breadth and depth creates an environment that is both adaptable and versatile making it an exceptional place for leaders to grow. 

Leaders
Leaders who strive for adaptability and versatility need other people who are willing to take on leadership positions within their teams in order to lead successfully. This is more than delegation. It is about creating a supporting atmosphere for team members to own their contributions and to mentor others. 

It’s about creating a space where they feel empowered enough to do new things and take risks to improve the team’s chances for success. Encouraging leadership at all levels provides ample opportunities for motivational and inspirational interactions. 

Interactions
Interactions are simply reciprocal actions or influences. It’s the reciprocity that makes a difference for collaboration, communication, and critique. 

Collaboration
Organic collaboration may seem a bit strange, but we’ve all had those scheduled collaborative sessions that weren’t really collaborative at all. 

The idea here is that people get better at what they do and they produce better work when they are able to spontaneously collaborate as needed, work together in smaller groups on smaller problems, and work with people outside of their team for additional or missing expertise. 

In WoW we call this pugging or creating a Pick up Group. Doing these things increases team relationships both internally and externally, which improves the success of the team overall especially in communication. 

Communication
Free and open communication is essential to the success of every team because it helps build relationships through trust which is needed when the situation gets intense. 

The key here is to establish a method of communication everyone can participate in and to make sure it is kept active and relevant. That said, though we may want to try to keep everything on topic, I always recommend a time and place for off-topic chatter because people matter and this is where you really learn what matters to them. 

And knowing people is really important when it comes to critiques. 

Critique
Critiquing can be difficult to do well and even more difficult to take, but when it is simply a part of the team’s regular interactions it becomes normalized and accepted and even sought after. Giving and accepting critiques is only the first step. 

The step that really counts is immediately testing or applying the feedback. This should be done even if the feedback seems silly or counter intuitive because if nothing else it gives you a different way of looking at your problem, which may be what you need to make a difference and that may be all it takes to get a ding. 

Dings
What’s a ding? Traditionally a ding is what players in WoW would refer to when they completed a character level. I’ve taken it a step further to use it as a way to celebrate progress. Many of us have likely been on teams working on a project that seems like it never ends, much like an MMO. Dings are useful break up the monotony and to keep people motivated as they mark movement forward. So, I recommend building in dings to give something to look forward to and to look back on.

Resources:
https://bigthink.com/videos/how-world-of-warcraft-could-save-your-business-and-the-economy-2
https://www.forbes.com/sites/sap/2015/06/24/7-ways-world-of-warcraft-builds-better-leaders/#6773055e3fee
https://www.cnet.com/news/the-business-lessons-of-world-of-warcraft/
http://www.digra.org/wp-content/uploads/digital-library/10343.52340.pdf
https://www.academia.edu/495889/Minions_of_the_Night_Ethnography_of_a_World_of_Warcraft_guild
https://www.academia.edu/1007653/Collaboration_beyond_the_game_How_gamers_work_together_beyond_gaming_environments_to_make_their_shared_gaming_experiences_better
(The last two links are my papers.)

Note: All images are owned by their owners including Blizzard Activision and are used here in Fair Use for scholarly purposes. This talk was given pro-bono and this information is being shared for free. You can find a portfolio of all of the slides here.