Mixing Social Science and Software Design

Is Electronic Currency the Next Big Thing?

Pascal Belouin — Thu, 26 May 2011 23:03:06 +0000

I recently came across Bitcoin and, being more and more interested in Economics, found the idea very exciting. Bitcoin could be described as a cryptography-based peer-to-peer currency, created in 2009 by Satoshi Nakamoto. People have an electronic wallet, which can contain a number of public addresses (one of mine is 1NgRqMgGu4BFVwBn8yEMPZgLdK5PXpBeRa, if you feel generous). Transactions between two addresses are public and stored across the peer-to-peer network. this structure has a number of advantages, such as for instance limiting the ways to cheat the system, and providing an alternative privacy model. Please don’t hesitate to have a look at Satoshi Nakamoto’s original article.

Another very important aspect of Bitcoin is the way the currency is itself generated. Any member of the network can participate in the creation of coins by solving a particular cryptographic problem. Some people are now even buying motherboards, graphic cards by the truckload to create ‘mining rigs’ dedicated to the generation of these coins. Some have apparently been busted by the police, who became intrigued by the unusual amount of electricity used by these ‘miners’. The difficulty of the problem that needs to be solved to generate the coins is regulated so as to increase every two weeks, which provides a very effective way to control the rise in the supply of coins. Production is scheduled to stop once the number of coins reaches 21 Millions, which is a very important point, as it means that (unlike fiat currency) bitcoins will be a scarce asset, in a way like gold or silver.

With the fall of the dollar, the economic collapse of 2008, and persistant warnings about the imminent collapse of the economy of a large number of american and european countries, more and more people are losing confidence in the ultra liberal banking system and look for ways to protect their assets against inflation, by for instance purchasing gold or silver.

The price of gold and silver have been rising at a steady pace over the last ten years. Although I do not want to oversimplify the reasons why this might be the case, this could be seen as an indicator of the loss of confidence in the dollar, and more generally in a money which is ultimately backed by billions of bad debt, ultra-leveraged financial products and wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow of quantitative easing. Gold and silver have the advantages of being as real as can be, relatively scarce, and known to have been used as currency for thousands of years. Not so long ago, most countries’ currency were backed by gold and silver, and some are now thinking about reverting to the gold standard.

Bitcoins seem to share a number of similarities with gold and silver: their quantity is limited, and they have been drastically increasing in value over the last few years. The network on which the Bitcoin currency is built is designed to provide a high level of trust to its users. However, the price of these commodities is greatly influenced by the existence of leveraged position, which renders it particularly volatile: what happened to the price of silver at the beginning of may could be seen as a good exemple of that. But at the end of the day, what makes a good currency? First, people who use it need to have trust in it. Second, they should be able to easily exchange this currency with goods or services, and vice-versa. These two aspects of trust and liquidity are found in fiat currency and, to a lesser extent, in gold and silver.

Technology has provided increasingly more sophisticated ways of performing monetary transactions, and we went from exchanging coins of silver or gold to swiping our credit or debit cards, or sending money through PayPal. More recently, The idea of using one’s mobile as a paying device is becoming more and more prominent, and we could assume that it won’t be long before this is possible: At the time I am writing this article, one of the trending topics on twitter is ‘Google Wallet’. In regards to what’s happening online, a bunch of services have been acting as a form of virtual currency, PayPal being one of the most prominent examples (It is interesting to note that a service proposing to sell bitcoins on PayPal got banned pretty quickly).

Bitcoin however goes beyond that in the way it actually implements a certain economic theory into a usable, robust system. Coins have gone from costing pennies to the respectable value of $7, and are accepted by more and more providers of goods and services. The Bitcoin community is very active and the ‘end user’ software allowing people to use bitcoins is becoming more and more usable as this project evolves. Coins can be exchanged against dollars and other currencies on various markets, one of the most prominent being Mt Gox. People have started building and selling physical ‘notes’ holding a particular value in bitcoins.

But will Bitcoin survive? It seems that the fact that it reduces the need for intermediaries. is relatively hard to manipulate and allows anonymous transactions to be performed would make it a pretty good candidate to be made illegal if it starts to seriously concurrence fiat currency. On the other end, there are numerous examples of successful virtual currency out there, from Entropia Universe‘s PEDs to World of Warcraft ‘Gold’. Let’s hope Bitcoin is allowed to fulfil its potential!

This is quite a fascinating subject, and I will try to add to this article in the next few days. In the meanwhile, I would love to read your comments.

Software as Discourse

Pascal Belouin — Mon, 23 May 2011 22:28:32 +0000

The central perspective that underlies most of the articles featured on this blog could be summarised by the notion of ‘software as discourse’. I would like to give an overview of what this concept means to me from a theoretical point of view, on which assumptions it relies, and what it entails from a methodological point of view. Please forgive my blatant oversimplifications, which I made for the sake of speed and clarity.

First, I would like to place this discussion in the context of the evolution of certain branches of the social sciences towards an acknowledgement of the central role of language in social life. This evolution can be traced back to Saussure’s work on the structure of language, and is illustrated by the apparition of disciplines such as discursive psychology or the structuralist and poststructuralist strands of sociology, to name a few. This entailed a certain distanciation from positivist/postpositivist thought, in stark contrast to the fact that positivist standpoints have become so dominant in the human and natural sciences.

It seems to me that this dominance of positivist thought is also present in computer science and even in human-computer interaction, where cognitivist interpretations of human-machine interaction seem to be in favour with both academics and practitioners. I would assume that one of the reasons for that is the mathematical filiation of computer science, which appears to have given a strong empiricist flavour to the field right from its birth.

On the other end of the spectrum, interface design and evaluation principles seem largely based on theories borrowed from the cognitive sciences, whereas requirement elicitation and analysis seem to be the areas where ‘softer’ approaches to human-computer interaction were adopted, through for instance the use of ethnography or grounded theory. I would however argue that most of the time, such data analysis methods are used without a full acknowledgment the epistemological assumptions on which they rely.

Another area in which I think saw an (unconscious) adoption of a postmodern perspective towards interactive system design is software development methodology, with the apparition, by reaction to process-heavy, rigid software development models, of agile development methods. I have written a few articles on this subject, and would encourage you to have a look if you’re interested!

I therefore think that what the apparition of agile development methodologies illustrate how interactive systems are now seen more and more as a particular type of discourse, discourse which is both created not only in the framework of the design and implementation phase of such systems, but also and more importantly through their actual use. Thus, instead of being seen as delimited products, interactive systems are now more understood as constantly evolving processes, shaped by the cross-fertilisation of different types of discourses representing different interests or stakes in these systems. Again, this resembles very closely to the definition of language adopted by postmodern thought.

If we adopt the perspective according to which interactive systems should be seen as ‘interactive discourse’, we can then argue that both the theoretical standpoint and the methodological toolkit provided by discursive approaches to social phenomena could be extremely useful for the elaboration of novel interactive system development (and evaluation) methodologies, by providing them with a solid (although challengeable by opposed theoretical standpoints), epistemological grounding.

Postmodern and phenomenological strands of sociology are rich and multiple, and this suggests that the ways through which such methods could be elaborated are also numerous. I have tried to explore a few in previous articles, and will try to keep at it as regularly as I can!

Applying Conversation Analysis Concepts to Interaction Design?

Pascal Belouin — Thu, 19 May 2011 23:02:16 +0000

Conversation Analysis could be defined as a discourse analysis method which relies on the assumption that only talk-in-interaction constitutes a valid object of analysis: relevant meaning is only created in the framework of an actual conversation between two or more participants.

Thus, Conversation Analysis is often described as a positivist approach: conversation analysts argue that it is indeed possible for researchers to be neutral and to achieve scientific objectivity. This contrasts with postmodern or poststructuralist approaches, which could be seen as rather dominant – I would argue, for good reasons – in the field of discourse analysis (I’ve written a little bit about these in a previous article). Conversation Analysis has nonetheless strong sociological roots, and is related to ethnomethodology which makes it even more interesting!

Conversation Analysis needs a bit of practice to master, and requires an understanding of a certain number of notions, which all revolve around the organisation of talk as turn-taking. It provides the analyst with a solid toolkit for describing the structure of a particular interaction. For instance, the term adjacency pair describes the couple made by a particular utterance which invites a response, and the response itself (these are thus quite common). As misunderstandings can themselves be quite common, a phenomenon described by conversation analysts as repair occurs. This term describes the set of actions undertaken by participants so as to reestablish the interrupted flow of a conversation. A last concept I would like to quickly add to this short list is the notion of preferred/dispreffered responses, which I hope is self-explanatory.

I’ve found a nice paper online (pdf) which describes conversation analysis much better than I do. I also posted an article a while back featuring a short example of how conversation analysis can be performed on a particular bit of conversation, in this case the transcript of a call to a suicide help line.

So how can we apply this interesting methodological framework to the analysis of a conversation not between two human subjects, but between for example a person and an interactive system? If we argue that each action of the user and each prompt/response of the system are equivalent to the utterances that form a natural conversation, we are now equipped with a powerful analysis tool that provides us with interesting ways of analysing (and hopefully, improving) the ‘interactional flow’ between user and system. The notions of adjacency pairs, repair, and preffered/dispreffered responses indeed seem applicable to interaction design, and there is much more to conversation analysis than these. For instance, the particular branch of conversation analysis dedicated to institutional talk might also yield some interesting results when applied to the study of human-computer interaction.

It would be quite interesting to find a small bit of interaction which could be analysed using conversation analysis see where it takes us. I would do that now if I weren’t so lazy, but hopefully this will be the subject of a future article!

A Short, Practical Example of User Experience and Interface Design for an Online Drink Ordering Service

Pascal Belouin — Thu, 12 May 2011 18:49:11 +0000

I recently had the opportunity to write a first draft for a web application allowing office workers to order hot and cold drinks online. It’s far from perfect, but gives an idea of how this problem can be approached!

Introduction
The aim of this document is to provide a first draft design for an online drinks ordering service aimed at office staff, allowing them to order with hot and cold beverages during their breaks.
It provides a starting point for the design & development of such as system, by detailing the potential business goals of such a service, an overview of the profile, needs and goals of its potential users, a more detailed analysis of the customer users of the system, and a list of the core requirements. A proposed solution for the implementation of these requirements is provided at the bottom of this article.

Business Vision & Goals
The main purpose of this service is to provide a fast, easy to use way for office workers to order hot and cold drinks during their breaks. Thus, the business goals for this project could be described as follows:

Main Business Goals

To deliver a variety of hot and cold drinks to office workers both quickly and with optimum
accuracy
To encourage repeat use of the service

Secondary Business Goals

To make the service enticing to potential customers

User Profiles
The two types of users of such a system could be divided in two categories, namely customer users and business users. Their main profile and goals are described below.

Customer Users
Customer
The person that makes the order

Main goal: to get an order composed of various hot and cold drinks delivered on time at his or her workplace on time and accurately
Secondary goals: to enjoy using the system

Potential Customer
A person interested in the service

Main goal: to get a good idea of how easy to use the service is
Secondary goals: to register for the service as painlessly as possible

Business Users
System Administrator
The person responsible for configuring the system, setting up the pricing rules, maintaining the list of available drinks and offers

Main goals: to manage the system easily and efficiently; to access various sorts of reports regarding the activity of the system.

Operator
The person responsible for receiving and preparing the customers’ orders

Main goal: to prepare customer orders accurately and quickly

Deliverer
The person responsible for delivering the customers’ orders

Main goal: to reach the customers’ workplace on time and to record successful deliveries

Customer User Experience
A series of interviews were conducted with typical office staff around the topic of ordering drinks for the purpose of drinking at work, and of an online drink ordering system. In addition, direct observation was conducted in a medium-size software company with a particular focus on behaviours revolving around coffee drinking and food-ordering. On the basis of this field research, the personas presented below were designed.

Personas
John (Primary)
John is a 23 years old web designer based in central Manchester. He works within a small team of 5 people and has unrestricted access to the internet from his desk. He is a regular coffee drinker, and often buys coffee and other drinks for his colleagues. Each colleague returns the favor on a per-turn basis.
He owns a coffee shop loyalty card and is quite keen on using it. John complains that it is sometimes difficult to know which beverage belongs to whom once they arrive in the office.

Linda (Secondary)
Linda is 52 and works as a secretary for a consultant at Manchester Central Hospital. She works alone in her office. She has limited experience with web applications, but has ordered books on Amazon a few times.
Linda’s boss often asks her to buy refreshments for meetings with his credit card. She does not really enjoy this, as the coffee shop is quite a long way away from the office.

The Experience of Ordering Coffee
Coffee and other hot drinks are most often ordered in a shop such as Starbucks. A typical takeaway coffee-ordering process in Starbucks could be summed up as follows:

Choosing one or more drinks from the menu
Ordering the drinks
Paying for the drinks
Waiting for the drinks
Putting required amount of milk and sugar into the drinks

In real-life situations, people always put the sugar or milk themselves in their drinks. The cups are marked to indicate the type of drink they contain.

Context Scenario: Ordering Drinks on Acme’s Online Drink Ordering Service
John arrives at his office on a Monday morning. He catches up with his colleagues and after a short discussion they decide to order drinks on Acme’s website.
Everybody gathers around his desk as he turns up his computer and navigates to Acme’s drink ordering service website. As he used the service before, he is already registered. He navigates to the “menu” page, and proceeds to ordering drinks for himself and each of his colleagues. Once he is satisfied with the order, he proceeds to the “complete order” page, which features a sum up of the order, its total price, and details such as the delivery address, the payment method he entered during a previous visit to the website.
The system asks him if we would like the order to be delivered immediately, or if we would like it to be delivered at a particular time. He picks the “as soon as possible” option, and clicks on the “finish order” button. A new page is displayed, allowing him to monitor in real time the status of his order. He gets confirmations that the payment was successful, and that the operator acknowledged his order, which is estimated to arrive at 10:30. He also receives a confirmation email summing up the detail of his order. Once the deliverer is on her way to John’s office, John receives a text message from Acme’s drink order service letting him now that his order is on its way.

Core Requirements
One of the main aims of the system would be to provide its users with an experience similar to the purchase of drinks in a real coffee shop, but enhanced with the capabilities offered by a web-based platform.

Customer Requirements
Customer

Login
View/ browse drinks menu
Create/edit order
- Select drink from a list
- Select size (small, medium, large)
- Select amount and type of sugar
- Remove selection from order
Finalise order
- Pick time of delivery
Get feedback on order status
View order history
View/edit user account details
View/edit personal details
View/edit payment method details
View/edit delivery address details

Potential Customer

Check if service is available at customer’s address
View menu
Register
- Enter personal details
- Enter payment method details
- Enter delivery address details

Business Requirements
System Administrator

Manage stores/locations
Manage business users
Manage customer users
Manage product choice and prices
View/browse operational reports
…

Operator

View/browse orders
Get new order alerts
Acknowledge orders and provide delivery time estimation

Deliverer

Update status of delivery

Interaction Framework
Form Factor & Posture
The way users are to interact with the system is through a web interface provided by a web browser.
According to w3schools.com, the resolution of the screens that will be used to access the system is 1024×768 pixels or higher.

Although we could expect that the main user will be seated at her desk while using the service, it is likely that that several people would look at the interface at the same time during the actual selection of the drinks which compose the order.

Data Architecture
The main objects represented in the system are shown in the entity relationship diagram presented below.

Screenflows & Interface Mockups
A proposed solution for the design of the system is presented in the following interface mockups; please note that these also illustrate the main customer user journeys. The scale of these mockups is 1:1.

Towards a Critical Discursive Analysis of Neuroscientific Accounts of Addiction

Pascal Belouin — Thu, 12 May 2011 17:27:43 +0000

I take the liberty of going off-subject a little bit by publishing this essay I wrote recently. Hope some will find it of interest!

Abstract
Neuroscientific discourses about addiction have greatly contributed to our understanding of the biological phenomena that accompany repeated, compulsive drug use. We now have a deep understanding of the mode of action of most psychoactive drugs on the brain, as well as of their short and long-term effects on areas responsible for managing high-order thinking, emotions and reward. However, they rely on a theoretical and methodological framework that could be challenged by approaches that emphasise the ‘constructed’ nature of social reality, and the singular role of the structure of language in this construction. Indeed, modern neuroscience relies on assumptions inherited from the empirical scientific tradition so pervasive in modern science in this day and age. However, some of the bases on which such a view of the world relies could be considered incompatible with a definition of addiction unavoidingly rooted in language.
The questioning of the neuroscientific discourse about addiction presented in this essay is thus decomposed in three main parts. After a brief exploration of the theoretical roots of neuroscience, an overview and critique of recent neuroscientific articles about addiction is made in the second part. Finally, the final part of this essay is dedicated to presenting a critique of neuroscientific discourse about ‘addictive behaviours’.

Introduction
One of the strongest appeals of neuroscientific accounts of addiction lies in the fact that they are part of a certain realist, objectivist, empirical tradition that has been very successful in what is commonly called the ‘hard’ sciences since Bacon and Newton. The modern scientific paradigm of knowledge production has had a revolutionary impact not only on our understanding of the world but also on our daily lives and on the way we perceive ourselves and others around us (Smith, 1998).
When applied to the functioning of the brain, the empirical scientific paradigm has provided us with great insight into the biological processes that accompany particular behavioural phenomena. Modern neuroscience has allowed us to understand the role of certain parts of the brain in for instance language processing (Bear et al., 2001), or the experience/anticipation of a reward (Berridge, 1993). Neurophysiology has allowed the discovery of new drugs for the treatment of ailments such as epilepsy or dementia, and will certainly be the source of great breakthroughs in the near future.

The empirical scientific paradigm has also been adopted in ‘softer’ sciences such as psychology, where it took the form of behaviourist and cognitivist approaches to the study of animal and human behaviour. These behaviourist and cognitivist approaches in psychology provide neurophysiologists with a way to interpret the physiological phenomena observed in the framework of empirical research, through what is commonly called a reductionist approach. Reductionists make the assumption that the correlative observation of particular phenomena on a molecular, structural/physiological, and ‘psychosocial’ level entails causal relations between the phenomena happening at these different levels of ‘objective truth’ (Bray, 1997). In this framework, the problematic notion of addiction has been in recent years framed as a ‘disease of the brain’, on the basis of a certain interpretation of the neurophysiological data gathered in the framework of experiments carried on animal models as well as human subjects. However, we would like to argue in this essay that, for a number of reasons, establishing the validity of the observation of a particular psychological (or sociological) phenomena could be considered much more problematic than it is generally acknowledged in neurophysiological-behaviouristic accounts.

Indeed, neurophysiologically oriented interpretations of animal behaviour (and, often, their extrapolation to explain human behaviour as well) rely on a theoretical framework that could be challenged by certain epistemological positions that acknowledge the central role of language in any account of an objective truth. Although rules of experimental design exist so as to allow behavioural neurophysiologist researchers to assert the legitimacy of their results, their conclusion still rely on certain definitions of addiction and are always ultimately grounded in a particular epistemological position in regards to what constitutes ‘objective truth’. We would therefore like to argue in this essay that exploring the epistemological roots of neurophysiologically-grounded accounts of addiction could be a salutary exploratory exercise which may pave the way to a more socially and culturally-aware understanding to the group of phenomena conceptualized under the highly-politicised notion of addiction.

The theoretical roots of neuroscientific accounts of addiction
The mechanical body
The current neuroscientific interpretation of animal (and human) behaviour, distributed amongst disciplines such as physiological psychology, or behavioural neurology, relies on theoretical and methodological bases which could be traced back to Hippocrates and his suggestion that “from nothing else but the brain come joys, delights, laughter and sports, and sorrows, griefs, despondency, and lamentations”. (Carlson, 2009). This opposition to the idea that the human mind is somewhat detached and of a different nature than the body, although not endorsed by Descartes, was nonetheless developed thanks to his work. His understanding of the body, and more particularly of the brain as a system responsible for the behaviour of the body to which it belongs, allowed for the birth of experimental physiology, which seek to adopt the scientific methods of enquiry established in sciences such as physics to the study of animal (and human) behaviour.

The application of the experimental paradigm used in the natural sciences to the study of neurophysiological phenomena through, for instance, the study of pathological cases as well as direct intervention on the functioning of the central nervous system of experimental subjects was, as it has been in most other disciplines, a phenomenal success. The work of, among others, Johannes Müller, Pierre Flourens and Paul Broca led the way to a revolutionary change in our understanding of neurophysiological phenomena, and in the identification of the role of certain parts of the brain in allowing high-level, human functions such as for instance the ability for language (Bear et al., 2001).
The validity of neurophysiological accounts of the behaviour of animals (and, by extension, and although much more problematically, of humans) relies on several bedrock epistemological assumptions. First, neurophysiologists rely on a strictly monist and realist standpoint: objective reality can be discovered and understood through the correct and rigorous use of the scientific method. In this framework, the conscious mind, as an intangible, ‘out-of-the-body’ object, disappears or at least becomes a ‘consequence’ (both causally and evolutionarily) of the body that ‘hosts’ or ‘produces’ it. One of the main consequences of this monist, functionalist and realist approach was the idea that what has been called the conscious mind, and even the soul in ancient times was the product of the activity of the nervous system of humans.

The commitment of neurophysiologically oriented psychologists to an empiricist, scientific methodological paradigm is also reflected in their stated goal to produce multi-level generalisable accounts of psychological phenomena and, as a consequence, of the behaviours they observe. One of the main rules for considering the general laws established by researchers as valid is their ability to predict in which conditions a particular phenomenon is to happen again. The design and implementation of experiments whose results could be considered as being able to predict a particular kind of behaviour thus became the main activity of researchers involved in the field of behavioural and, later on, cognitive psychology. The rapprochement with neurophysiology and, later on, genetics (with the sound grounding of Darwin’s evolutionary theory) made sense, and resulted in an explosion in the production of neurophysiological accounts of behaviour.
As we will see in the further parts of this essay, this approach therefore relies on the assumption that the working of the components of an observed phenomenon are identified, and that there exists a strict causal relationship between the phenomena observed at one level and the one observed at the level below.

The computer metaphor and the birth of a new science
According to neuroscientists, animals and humans are complex systems whose behaviours can be explained on different but causally related levels: Descartes’ central notion that the world could be understood in purely mechanistic terms resulted in what is now call reductionism. Reductionism could be understood as the process through which the observed behaviour of a complex system is defined as the product, or the cause, of the operation of its identified parts (Bray, 1997). Thus, a particular behaviour (smoking a cigarette) will be explained in terms of the consequence of the reception of a particular stimulus (let us say, watching somebody else smoking).

On a physiological level, the behaviour will be explained on the basis of the firing of particular neurons in particular parts of the brain (for instance, what is commonly called the reward system). This in turn can be explained on a biochemical level by the interaction of neurotransmitters and chemical signalling between neurons, which causes certain parts of the brain to be activated. Note that ideas such as the meaning of smoking at a particular moment by this particular person at this particular point in this particular culture is considered as irrelevant, and that it does not form a part of the ‘context’ in this account of the ‘behaviour of smoking’.

As higher levels of causal explanation are required, a more sophisticated theoretical framework is therefore needed to explain the influence of the environment on the subjects being studied. One could argue that this is where behaviouristic and cognitivist approaches to psychology are integrated into neurophysiological accounts of behaviour so as to provide a seemingly complete, objective account of a particular observed phenomenon. Thus, neurophysiologically-oriented psychological perspectives put forward the idea that a certain observed phenomena at what we could call the psychological or psychosocial level, such as, for instance, depression, can be explained (and therefore predicted) through their decomposition on the neurophysiological, neuropharmacological and even genetic levels.
Neurophysiological accounts of psychological phenomena thus often use the theoretical framework brought about by the behaviourist school in psychology, an approach noticeably introduced by the work of Ivan Pavlov and B.F Skinner (Carlson, 2009). Behaviourism considers behaviour as being solely the product of a reaction of humans and animals to stimuli present in the environment. Animal and human behaviour can then be explained through the reinforcing action of certain behaviours in relation to the environment. Purely behaviourist approaches to psychological phenomena can be challenged on a number of grounds, one of the strongest being that they do not acknowledge the existence of high-order thinking in humans. Indeed, behaviourist accounts of human behaviour through a process of reinforcement tend to fail to acknowledge or leave room for the fact that the behaviour of humans and animals is based on the representation they have of their environment and not on the environment itself (Baum, 2005).

No room for intentionality: challenging the computational/information processing model of the brain
The limits of behaviourism were sought to be overcome through the introduction of cognitivist accounts of human psychology. According to Neisser (1967), cognitive psychologists see the mind not as a ‘black box’ unavailable for scientific study as did behaviourists, but as a signal-processing system similar to a computer. Behaviours are thus understood as responses to external stimuli are thus understood as being the products of the processing of information available in the environment.
The fact that behaviourist and later on cognitivist approaches to psychology share with disciplines like biology the certainty of the discovery of an objective reality through empirical pursuits made this an ideal way to provide an integrated account of animal and human behaviour. However, as we will see in the further parts of this essay, this definition of ‘psychological’ phenomena could be challenged on various grounds, noticeably in regards to the nature of language itself and of its subjection to social, political and cultural values.
Not only the computer metaphor that underlies most neuroscientific accounts of addiction has been the subject of criticisms from the continental school of philosophy, but also from thinkers belonging to the analytic tradition such as John R. Searle, for example, challenged this purely ‘computational’ model of the brain on the grounds that it did not leave any room for intentionality.

More precisely, Searle argues that the purely formal manipulation of symbols which ultimately constitutes the activity of the brain as it is endorsed by researchers claiming a belonging to the cognitivist tradition does not account for our capability as human beings to attach meaning to the symbols we (unconsciously or consciously) manipulate in our brain. In this famous “Chinese room argument”, Searle makes a very strong case against views of the brain as a purely mechanistic tool for the manipulation of symbols by arguing that the sole manipulation of symbols is not enough for allowing understanding (Searle, 1990). In other words, although computational models of the brain are allowed to mimic the ‘signal processing’ that goes on within the brain, the presence of a ‘thinking being’ is required to give sense to the symbols and signals manipulated by a human brain. High-order thinking is only possible if the subject somehow ‘represents’ and attach meaning to sensory data.
Thus, cognitivist models of the brain could be seen as missing something, namely ‘what it feels like’ to experience the world as a subject. Although Searle’s argument has been the object of numerous attacks from researchers belonging to the cognitivist tradition (see for instance Chalmers, 1994), his definition of intentionality remains an interesting point of departure for an argument that would challenge the purely objectivist view of addiction as it is championed by recent accounts of addiction as a ‘brain disease’ such as for instance the one proposed by Volkow et al. (2010).
Neuroscience was therefore born out of the alliance of the study of the biology of the central nervous system and behaviourist-cognitivist accounts of the mind fused into an interdisciplinary whole, united both in the pursuit of a better understanding of animal and human behaviour and by a common epistemological view of the world through the empirical, scientific method of knowledge production. It provided a scientific license to the use of certain psychoactive substances to counteract the effect of ‘drugs of abuse’, and paved the way to behaviourist and pharmacological treatments to ‘addiction’.

Explaining addiction with the body: the neuroscientific understanding of addiction
Therapeutic expectations: neuroscience as a medical science, addiction as a illness
Unlike physics, neurophysiology and physiological psychology have a particular role for humans: they are framed as a part of medical science, the “science of dealing with the maintenance of health and the prevention and treatment of disease” (Princeton University, 2010). Thus, it could be argued that the attention of neuroscientists working on addiction and addictive behaviours has been directed from the start towards finding ways to ‘cure’ or to solve the problem of addiction, through means that correspond to each of the level at which they traditionally analyse their object of study. Thus, appeared chemically, behaviourally and psychologically based treatments based on neuroscientific research.

In this framework, it could be argued that neuroscientists were directed towards the study of addiction on the basis of a definition of the phenomena inferred from the ‘malfunctioning’ of individuals affected by it in society, and on the physiological consequences that the repeated use of certain substances have on the body of users. This particular aspect of the neuroscientific discourse of first addressing the issue of addiction as a social or societal problematic phenomenon is particularly salient in a short article by Nestler (2002), which starts with the following sentence: “In terms of lost lives and productivity, drug addiction remains one of the most serious threats to our nation’s public health” (Nestler, 2002, p. 1076).
In the same order of idea, the chapter dedicated to addiction in Physiology of Behaviour (Carlson, 2009), a widely used textbook covering the subject of the neurophysiology of behaviour starts by enumerating the “disastrous effects” of addictive substances such as drugs or alcohol. These, according to Carlson, include not only a range of physical ailments such as cirrhosis of the liver or strokes, but also social problems caused by illegal drug markets and the spread of infectious diseases amongst ‘addict populations’. One could argue that these statements help to highlight the need for a better understanding of addiction as a certain form of behaviour. However, this framing of addiction as problematic behaviour could also be seen as having a role in the definition of the very phenomena neuroscientists studying addiction are investigating.

The experimental bases of neuroscientific accounts of addiction
Our understanding of the neurophysiological mechanisms that underpin the behaviour of animals and humans has greatly increased over the course of the last three decades, thanks both to great technological advances in terms of neuroimaging and to the empirical scientific paradigm of knowledge production. In this framework, neuroscientists have been investing the notion of addiction over the course of the last 50 years. This resulted in a large amount of experimental data and literature now available on the subject (White, 2000).
In this sense, neuroscience is a very powerful tool for understanding the biological grounding and manifestation of drug use. The first biggest breakthrough was the discovery of neurotransmitters (Tansey, 2006), made by Henry Dale and Otto Loewi. Interestingly, Tansey even hints in this article at what might be the first mention of what is now commonly called an “addictive drug”, nicotine, as acting as a neurotransmitter (2006, p. 420).
The biological phenomena that underpin addiction where also investigated in the framework of experiments involving animal models such as mice, dogs, or monkeys. These experiments adopted a behaviourist approach to the study of drug self-administration in rodents, mostly relying on apparatuses borrowed from the behaviourist experimental toolkit, such as the ‘Skinner box’ or a T-maze.

Thompson (1965) traces the first behaviourist experiments on the reinforcing effect of drugs self-administration back to 1955 and the work of Nichols, Headlee and Coppock (Nichols et al., 1956). More animals such as monkeys or cats where subjected to such experiments over the years, and by the beginning of the 1980s a lot of data had been generated to show that model animals, in an experimental context, would self-inject large amounts of most known ‘drugs of abuse’ (Woods, 1978). These experiments paved the way for wider-ranging research endeavours where neurophysiological data and behavioural/phenomenological data would be correlated with more and more precision, thanks in part to advances in neuroimaging and computer science.

Current neuroscientific understandings of addiction
As illustrated by Hyman and Malenka (2001), Modern neuroscience allowed the discovery of the way psychoactive drugs act on the brain by disrupting the ‘normal’ action of certain neurotransmitters by either binding to specific receptors (agonists, like opiates), disrupting the binding potential of certain receptors (antagonists, such as ketamine) or by disrupting the reuptake of certain neurotransmitters (like, for instance, cocaine, amphetamine or SSRIs).

Furthermore, neuroscientific accounts of addiction provide great insight into the physiological mechanisms accompanying addictive behaviours. Carlson (2009) provides a useful overview of the quite large number of different brain areas and synaptic receptors that are particularly involved in behaviours and subjective sensations related to drug use. These include the forebrain circuits, and more precisely the prefrontal cortex ventral and dorsal striatum. Golstein et al (2002) present strong evidence that activity of the orbitofrontal cortex and the anterior cingulate gyrus is correlated to “intoxication, craving, and bingeing” in “addicted subjects”. As Golstein points out, neuroscientific research has linked these areas of the brain with high order thinking and, in behaviourist terms, in “the ability to track, update, and modulate the salience of a reinforcer as a function of context”. Addiction is therefore characterised by neuroscientists as the cause of craving, the decision of taking drugs ‘regardless of long-term negative consequences’, and relapse. The importance of environmental cues in relapse was also posited in, among others, the work of Childress et al. (1993).

It has also been shown that taking certain drugs for an extended period of time triggers long-time structural anomalies in the same regions and in the nucleus accumbens, involved according for instance to Carlson (2009, p.621) in the regulation of emotions. Thus, researchers such as Laura Peoples (2002) argue that the anterior cingulate cortex and related brain areas have a role in mediating reward expectancy and “willed control of actions”. Peoples therefore argue that abnormalities in these areas could impair addicts’ decision-making process regarding their drug use. Thus, the long-term effects of drug use on the structure of reward pathways are understood by neuroscientists as having a central role in compulsive behaviour.
On a lower level on the reductionist scale, the effects of psychoactive drugs at a molecular level have also been the objects of thorough neuroscientific investigations, and a short overview of the molecular and cellular sites of action of most psychoactive drugs is provided by Teesson et al. (2002). One of the most known illustrations of this is the discovery of the inhibitory action of cocaine on dopamine reuptake, which gave birth to what is now called the ‘dopamine hypothesis’. In contrast to the short-term effects of what could be called the mechanisms of intoxication, researchers such as Hyman and Malenka (2001) present some of the long-lasting effects of various psychoactive drugs on the expression of a number of genes and proteins within neurons. Supposedly drug-induced changes at the molecular, intra cellular level comprise a change in the activation of genes and proteins having a role in transcription, such as the Fos family, CdK5 and CREB, which have a role in the remodelling of neural processes. Furthermore, long-term use of certain drugs of abuse seems to have an effect on the expression of GLuR2, a protein involved in the normal functioning of the brain.

The evolution of the neuroscientific definition of addiction towards the notion of brain disease
The neurophysiological approach to an explanation of addictive, or compulsive behaviour reached its peak in the current understanding of addiction as a brain disease championed mostly (but not only) by the National Institute of Drug Abuse in the U.S. The fact that addiction to psychoactive substances as well as to the ‘high’ experienced by people addicted to gambling or the use of certain psychoactive substances has identical, long-lasting effects on brain chemistry and that, according to Volkow et al., “these studies have shown how repeated drug use can target key molecules and brain circuits, and eventually disrupt the higher order processes that underlie emotions, cognition and behaviour” (2010) seems to indicate that the mechanisms underlying the behaviour that accompany addiction are the same as in most rewarding experiences. In this framework, disorders such as over-eating (or food addiction), pathological gambling (Wareham and Potenza, 2010) and even romantic love (Reynauld et al, 2010) find their origin in brain chemistry imbalance. The role of the dopaminergic channels and more generally of the ‘reward system’ is thus put to the fore by proponent of the ‘brain disease’ paradigm as central in causing such behaviours (Volkow et al., 2010).

Thus, by focussing on brain chemistry, addiction researchers have come to the conclusion that addiction was a disease, as it modifies sometimes permanently the structure of the brain. As recent evidence seems to suggest that any type of activity, not necessarily pathological could potentially fit this profile, it could be argued that getting married, having a job and a couple of children also entail ever-lasting modifications in the structure of the brain, by, for instance, associating the view of one’s children with a strong sense of reward. Thus, the question arises: what is the difference between a lover on a date and a junkie enjoying a fix?
Although Goldstein (2002) mentions the involvement of parts of the brain involved in high-order thinking in behaviours considered as addictive, she does not acknowledge the fact that high order thinking may have itself a causal role in what could be described as the subjective sensations that play a central role in the neuroscientific understanding of addiction such as craving, or behaviours such as relapse.
These challenges to the idea that drugs had a specific, long-term action on the brain both at a structural and a molecular level has been sought to be overcome through a redefinition of the neuroscientific notion of addiction in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, as illustrated by Fascella et al. (2010). In the short extract presented below, Fascella et al. argue for a widening in the definition of ‘substance related disorders’ to include disorders which, although not related to the presence of extraneous psychoactive substances in the central nervous system, result in the same behavioural patterns.
Substance-related disorders were initially “carved in” under Sociopathic Personality for the first DSM, in 1952,3 and were still considered personality disorders for the next DSM revision, in 1968 (DSM-II4). They eventually were “carved out” for independent status in 1980 (DSM-III5) and have remained thus for nearly 30 years. But in each of these prior nosologic revisions, the substance-related disorders (whether “carved in” under broader categories or “carved out” to stand alone) together and defined by substance taking. In con- trast to prior revisions, DSM-V is considering whether addictions can be defined apart from drug taking—a fundamental shift in the way these disorders have previously been viewed.

Could it be incidental that the study of addiction led to the discovery of the reward system and of the dopaminergic pathways in learning and reward processing? It could be argued that the fact that addiction research has been at the forefront of ‘reward research’ enticed researchers to make the assumption that strong activation of the reward system was a phenomenon typical and limited to psychoactive substances, and that the subsequent discovery of the role of the same parts of the brain in a large range of human activities associated with strong rewards challenged this special status.

Alternatives to cognitivist & behaviourist interpretations of the physiological phenomena accompanying addiction
Towards a discursive approach to the notion of addiction
Cognitive scientists reject the dualist notion of the subject as introduced by Descartes in their analysis of the relationship between brain states and behaviour. However, dualist accounts of the mind, and particularly of the dichotomy between individual and society seem to still play an important role in their definition of addictive behaviours, and to what constitutes the context of such behaviours. While the mechanical metaphor may be plausibly retained in the analysis of model organisms in the framework of tightly controlled experiments, it could be argued that the notion of context, or environment, becomes central in the analysis of the human beings, importantly but not only due to the fact that both observer and observee are themselves part of a complex system of interrelationships between human subjects. Interesting in this regard is the work performed by Bruce Alexander et al. on the environmental factors of opiate self-administration in rodents (1981). In place of traditionally clinical, prison-like environment that characterises many of the experiments involving rats, Alexander placed his subjects in a ‘Rat Park’, where they could breed and form colonies, have nests: lead a normal rat life. He found that “colony males ingested much less morphine solution than isolated males though there was no difference in preference for sweet or bitter-sweet solutions.” Could such a finding be extrapolated to investigate drug self-administration in humans?
Neuroscientific notions of addiction such as the one provided by Nestler (2002), according to which “addiction can be defined as the loss of control over drug use, of the compulsive seeking and taking of drug regardless of the consequences” seem to make the assumption of an isolated, Cartesian subject independent of the historical, social and political context within which it inscribes itself into. Certain actions or behaviours are exhibited by the subject, of which the causes can be explained by the response of the central nervous system to a variety of external (and internal) stimuli.

Alternative epistemological positions, found for instance in the work of Marcel Mauss (1985), Max Weber (1930), Michel Foucault (1985), Louis Althusser (1964) and even Jacques Lacan seem to suggest that the notion of individual human subject, far from being an autonomous entity set apart from ‘society’, could be understood as a culturally-constituted phenomenon. Indeed, such a perspective hints towards a new conception of the subject as the direct product of particular “techniques of the self” which can be uncovered and understood through what Foucault calls the “genealogical method”. The work of Foucault on the creations of institutions such as the mental asylum (1972) highlighted the way certain types of ‘subject positions’ are made available within culture, such as for instance the evolution of the notion of ‘mad individual’. Could the notion of ‘addict’ be explained using such a theoretical apparatus? If human subjects are constituted through culture, and more particularly through the interplay of institutionalised, dominant forms of discourse, what signification does the notion of ‘context’ takes in regards to the explanation of the behaviour of these subjects?

The institutional role of neuroscientific discourse about addiction
An interesting illustration of the crucial epistemological problem posed by the delicate problem of the definition of addiction and addictive disorders is provided by Scott Vreko (2010): Vreko proposes that the recent emergence of different discourses about addiction which now labels behavioural compulsive disorders such as pathological gambling are, behind the mask of therapeutic legitimacy, part of what could be called ‘civilizing technologies’, used to produce “better citizens”.
Thus, neuroscientific discourses about addiction could also be understood as having an institutional role within western society, one of enforcing certain categories of classification of human subjects and of the biological explanation of phenomena which definition is by contrast rooted in the cultural, historical and political context within which they are produced. It could therefore be argued that, being a behaviour initially rooted in the reaction of the human central nervous system to particular psychoactive substances has become the perfect target for the use of very similar substances, but this time to ‘cure’ the subject of certain types of behaviour (or subjective conditions, such as depression) considered as pathological (Keane and Hamill, 2010). For instance, as illustrated by Acker (2002), it could be argued that the neurophysiological-behaviouristic orientated discourses about addiction participated in the construction of the ‘heroin junkie’.

Thus, the knowledge produced by neuroscientists has a strong social and societal impact but is interpreted differently by people holding very different and sometimes incommensurable views of the world, as they view the world with their own different sets of value, which is dependent on their social, historical and cultural context. That way, as a consequence not dissimilar to what Barthes called the “death of the author” (1977), the interpretation of the neuroscientific accounts of addiction has a very different impact on researchers in the field as opposed to members of the general public, and on policy makers.
The use of psychoactive substances seems therefore to be regulated along two axes:

A legal, medicalised channel through which access to psychoactive substances is regulated by professionals, including doctors, pharmacists, pharmaceutical companies financing the research producing the neurophysiological-behaviourist accounts of addiction, and policy makers which formulate policies on the basis of these accounts.
A discourse according to which addiction is constructed as a disorder of physiological origins, and drug addicts as the alienated victims of ‘substances of abuse’, finding its expression for example in the ‘war on drugs’ policies and ‘addiction as a brain disease’ paradigms in the neurosciences.

These two axes share a large number of similarities. Modes of consumption are in the same time different and share some commonalities. In these two different contexts, psychoactive substance can form the object of a structured market of distribution, and generate immense profits for those that are on top of the chain. The behaviour of ‘addicted’ drug users is problematised on the basis of a vocabulary relying on the notions of craving, compulsion and relapse, and informs repressive policies based on the idea that ‘access creates the addict’. On the other hand, the prescription and use of psychoactive substances by people suffering from an increasing number of disorders such as depression, anxiety, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder and even period pains (Connor, 2010), which themselves could be seen as dependent to a certain extent to the social context within which they are defined, is regulated through channels of distribution legitimated by institutional neuroscientific discourse.

Conclusion
Neurosciences have proven the mode of action of most drugs of abuse, and their effect on brain structures. However, as we have seen, the problem of the definition (and to a greater extent of the treatment) of addiction is complex, as by nature this notion could be considered as socially constructed. Thus, we have tried to argue in this essay that using a strictly objectivist, empirical, experimental framework to gain insight into the causes of such a behaviour could be considered as insufficient, as it does not account for the constructed nature of the definitions used in the framework of such research. Indeed, neuroscientific accounts of addiction could be seen as almost ‘erasing’ the subject, or at least the subjective, reflexive account of one’s own behaviour and considers it as an epiphenomenon which has no impact on addictive behaviour.

In that sense, the notion of compulsion adopted by neuroscientist approaches the proverbial ‘irrational act’ and borders on folk psychology. The neuroscientific view of society as only the sum of the human subjects in comprises, could be seen as a by-product of the reductionist approach and is insufficient to get to analyse a phenomenon whose roots are themselves cultural, historical and more crucially political. In contrast to the purely objectivist, empiricist and reductionist accounts of addiction produced by neuroscientist, a discursive approach to the problem of addiction would therefore put a strong emphasis on the notion of cultural, historical, and even political context as deeply involved in the causes of ‘addictive behaviour’.

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LinkedIn, Facebook and Social Identity Theory

Pascal Belouin — Wed, 11 May 2011 22:18:54 +0000

LinkedIn recently went public. Its success makes it, with Twitter and Facebook, one of the three most popular social networking platforms.

A particular strand of Social Identity Theory, and particularly the work performed on this subject by thinkers such as Marcel Mauss and Max Weber seem to provide an interesting way to analyse the emergence and evolution of these tools. The point of departure of this reflection on what constitutes the ‘self’ could be found in Mauss’ essay “A Category of the Human Mind: the notion of person; the notion of self” (1938). In this essay, Mauss argues that what we call the ‘subject’, or the ‘self’, far from being a stable, essential deus ex machina core of our identity is actually the historical product of the interplay of cultural institutions.

Mauss therefore introduces a crucial distinction between the notions of individual, person, and subject. In this context, what Mauss calls the individual could be defined as the biological and psychological substrate which forms the ‘raw’ human being on which persons relies. In Mauss’ terms, persons are thus defined as delimited sets of statutes and attributes which provide individuals with means of conducting their relations to others. It is interesting to note that in this framework, throughout history and cultures, different forms of personhood have emerged and died, and that the ratio between persons and individuals have varied. An illustration of this could be found for example in the western legal system with the notion of ‘moral person’, attributed to companies.

According to Mauss, the notion of self is therefore a historically contingent type of person which has evolved in the particular context of western societies. Weber and interprets of his thought such as David Saunders have further illustrated how the emergence of particular types of personhood can be traced back to the historical and cultural context within which they appear. Indeed, Weber put forward the idea that the various ‘life orders’ within which we evolve entail the formation of the different persons we assume (this concept could be seen as close to the Bourdieusian notions of field and habitus). But what does this has to do with social media applications such as LinkedIn or Facebook?

The first step in joining a social network platform is creating an account. If we imagine that, in effect, creating an account is in a sense starting to ‘represent’ one of our ‘persons’ within the system, how can we analyse the difference between a Facebook account and a LinkedIn one? First, we can start by looking at how these two networks are defined by their creators. While LinkedIn is the “world’s largest professional network”, Facebook describes itself (in its “description” metatag) as “a social utility that connects people with friends and others who work, study and live around them”. Thus, although Facebook seem to be larger-encompassing than LinkedIn, the core meanings of the relationships it represents can be thought of as being on a “personal” or “familiar” level as opposed to professional. The same contrast appears with the type of attributes or metadata that are attached to an account in each system. So what does this all mean?

The various life orders (or fields) in which we evolve make us assume a certain number of personas. We create an avatar for our professional persona on LinkedIn, and one on Facebook for our social (for lack of a better word) persona. Companies create social personas on Facebook to interact with other social agents, and Facebooks apps are created to give new meanings to relationships, which might be relevant to a particular life order. Thus, it appears that concepts first introduced by Mauss and Weber seem to provide us with a tool for understanding the evolution of “social networking” applications as systems allowing users to represent personas and relationships which are meaningful within the framework of a relatively well delimited life order. It also suggests that it might be difficult or even impossible to create a ‘one size fits all’ social networking application, as certain life orders each obey different rules which can sometimes be incompatible: some people say it can be a very bad idea to have your boss as a friend on Facebook!

Reductionism and Software Engineering: Understanding the gap between interactive systems users and designers

Pascal Belouin — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 11:10:34 +0000

Reductionism could be viewed as an essential theoretical component of modern natural sciences such as biology or genetics. Although reductionist approaches work very well as long as “natural” phenomena are studied, things become more difficult when human beings are involved as the object of study. Let us try and see how this notion of reductionism could be briefly defined, and then try to apply this definition to software engineering.

Reductionism could be understood as the process through which the observed behaviour of a complex system is defined and explained as the product of the operation (or interaction) of its identified components. In neurobiology for instance, a nice example could be the way the notion of “addiction” is tackled from a neurobiological/behaviouristic point of view. A particular behaviour or phenomenon, such as for example the act of taking drugs, is observed and defined, and explanations to this phenomenon are sought on a psychological (cognitive, behaviouristic) level, and further down on a neurological level and a molecular level. Technological advances such as fMRI, or PET scan now allow us to be able to observe changes in the brain as they happen during the display of a particular behaviour, allowing researchers to establish causal relationships between the observation of a particular behaviour and what happens in the brain of the person being observed.

However, the problem with such an approach is the fact that things can get quite complicated as soon as a human observes the behaviour of another human. Poststructuralist theory for example emphasises the multiplicity and historical, cultural and social contingency of human perspectives: As the way we make sense of the world is shaped by culture and our own set of values, the meaning of notions such as for instance “addiction” becomes slippery.

So let us try to apply all this to software engineering. What happens if we now take interactive systems as our object of study? To be quick, an interactive system could be described as made up of a combination of software and hardware, both of which can perform a number of basic operations. These operations are combined in a certain way so as to provide particular functionalities to the system’s users. Can these functionalities be purely described as the particular combination of these basic operations? As I’ve tried to argue in previous posts, it could be useful to consider the meaning of the behaviour of an interactive system as emerging in the framework of its interaction with its users. It is therefore not fixed in the particular combination of its ‘logical’ elements, but is dynamically created through the actual use of the system by its users. This is where a rift between the meaning of the system for its designers, who focus on the combination of the logical elements composing the system and this meaning for the user, which is dependant on his or her own system of representations. Can reductionism therefore provide a conceptual tool for better understanding the gap that exists between system designers and their users?

The Emergence of Meaning Through System Use: The central role of interaction and its implications in terms of design methodology

Pascal Belouin — Sun, 09 May 2010 17:10:29 +0000

I have tried to show in previous posts how certain aspects of an interactive system such as how it works, what it does, or what it represents, could be seen as emerging in the framework of its actual use. Furthermore, I have tried to provide a theoretical grounding to such an approach by borrowing from social theory and more precisely certain forms of discourse analysis. I would like to continue to unpack this notion and see what impact it could have in terms of development methodology, and how we could use such a standpoint to evaluate the several software development methodologies currently available to interactive systems designers and developers (if such a distinction holds water).

The evolution of the software development field and the apparition of disciplines such as interaction design seem to suggest an shift in the conceptualisation of interactive systems from a set of inert processes taking place within the ‘black box’ of a computer to dynamic interactions sometimes involving several users as well as numerous other systems or services.

Thus, what we could ask ourselves is: what would be the impact of such a focus on the emergent nature of interactions on software development methodology? As one could argue, the apparition of agile development methods seem to be an encouraging sign of an (unconscious?) acknowledgement of the importance of considering interactive systems as sets of interactions. This evolution can not only be seen in terms of methodology, but also in the actual development tools now used in web development projects. In a few word, we could thus argue that the problem with linear, first generation software development methodologies was primarily the fact that they viewed software as an inert technical entity and not as a particular type of discourse embodying the practice of its users.

User-centered development approaches, which try and elicit a conceptual model of the system being built by communicating with its stakeholder seems therefore to make sense. The idea of building a model of the system first and building it once it is considered as complete (sometimes called the Big Design Up Front approach) seem to show its weaknesses if we start considering system meaning as emergent in the framework of user interaction. Indeed, it appears crucial to be able to observe what sorts of new meanings emerge from their interaction with the system being built: prototyping becomes a central problem, and iterative development the only sensible solution.

We could even push this notion forward by arguing that an outside-in approach, focussing first on the type of interfaces that will be provided to users (and therefore which objects will be presented to them by the system) seem to make the most sense if one is to adopt this approach. Simple, static interface prototypes can be provided to test users and refined independently of the more work-intensive business logic required to perform the actual operations that users which to perform on the objects represented by the system. Interaction with the systems entails the generation of new concepts, new processes and new practice.

These new practices are built upon and integrated as the system gets developed: the system is developed on the basis of the users’ practice, but influences it in a constant feedback loop until a certain point of equilibrium is achieved where user practice and the tools provided by the system complete each other in an optimal fashion. We could thus use this idea as a way to criticise approaches such as Behaviour Driven Development, which focus on coming up with sets of stories representing the behaviour required of the system on the basis of sessions with potential users of the system (in an ideal world). Considering the constant feedback loop between user practice and system features presented above, it seems uncertain that such stories can provide a fixed point of reference for evaluating the system’s fitness for purpose.

I have clumsily and very roughly tried to provide a theoretical grounding upon which development methodologies and tools can be appraised based on social theory literature. My aim is to reconcile disciplines such as interaction design and software development methodologies such as agile, and more particularly feature driven development, test-driven and behaviour-driven development. I think that although these have a lot of qualities in providing a solution to particular software development problems, it may be possible to create an integrated methodology taking the best of these approaches to provide a coherent software development framework. I would also like to add that such an approach would not be intended to provide an answer to the development of any software system: my main focus and area of expertise is web-based or mobile enterprise applications. I will try to give more flesh to this approach in future posts, and welcome comments in the meanwhile!

Intertextuality and User interfaces as Relational Systems of Representations

Pascal Belouin — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 21:59:03 +0000

Since I had a bit of success with my article about adopting a poststructuralist perspective towards user experience (Indeed, 2 people commented! amazing: Thank you Kshitiz and mc), I thought it would be nice to go a bit deeper in the subject, by briefly evoking some of the main notions behind poststructuralist theory and by trying to see how this particular tradition can be applied to interaction design.

The structuralist view of language as a system of differences originated in the work of Ferdinand de Saussure at the end of the XIXth Century. It evolved in its poststructuralist form (if I could employ such a language) with the help of thinkers such as Roland Barthes or Jacques Derrida in the late 60s and in the 70s. One of the main tenets of poststructuralist views of language is the idea that the meaning of a particular text (the notion of text englobing here any sort of sign that may have a signification in a particular culture) is created through its relationship with other texts.

This notion of language (and wider symbolic codes) as a system of representations goes against the view of language as a neutral and inert transmission device entails a few important consequences:

Emergence of meaning: Both author and readers are proactively creating the meaning of a particular text. The author becomes a temporary role or position taken up by a person only when he or she is in the process of writing, or creating a text
Intertextuality: as stated earlier, a text has meaning only through its relationship with other texts
Cultural & historical situatedness of Knowledge production: Knowledge is produced only in discourse, and is therefore restricted to its cultural and historical context
Incomplete nature of meaning: Meaning is never fixed, never achieved. The meaning of objects constantly evolves and slides as they are interpreted by different voices

So how can we apply all of this to interaction design? I think one assumption we need to make straight away to be able to start is that interactive systems and the objects that compose them could be seen as texts, and could therefore be apprehended by borrowing from poststructuralist views of language.

Since the meaning of the various artifacts that make up an interface is created in the framework of both their creation by a designer and their interpretation by its users, it becomes difficult to consider it as an intrinsic quality. Instead, a new picture of the meaning of interface elements starts to emerge: one that views meaning as the product of an object’s relationship with other elements, and other interfaces that have been previously experienced by the user and designer (list to which we can add any stakeholder that has an impact on the design or the use of a particular interactive system). Shall we start viewing interfaces not as collections of interactive objects, but as a network of interrelated meaningful artifacts?

I have tried to clear the way and provide some pointers as to how we can apply poststructuralist thought to interaction design. I hope it make sense, and would love to read some comments, particularly if there is a flaw in my reasoning! I will come back to the subject in following articles, as I think this is a rich terrain for experimentation: Indeed it becomes possible to see how viewing interface artifacts as related nodes of meaning could provide concrete design guidelines!

Interactionism as a Framework for Understanding User Interaction

Pascal Belouin — Sun, 25 Apr 2010 15:18:33 +0000

Interactionism is a social scientific tradition that relies on the assumption that the “real” world is actively constructed by people: It therefore views the mind primarily as a tool for solving the “pragmatic concerns” of everyday life.

Thus, the basis of all social life can be found in all the small interactions we conduct every day. Meaning can only be located in the experiential consequences it produces. William James introduced a distinction between practical knowledge ,built on a trial-and-errors basis (knowledge of), and “textbook” knowledge, made up of the abstract concepts we learn through our immersion within culture (knowledge about).

As we can see, this focus on interaction emphasise the importance of tacit, practical knowledge and distinguishes it from what it calls textbook knowledge. What is pretty interesting in this approach is the fact that it views the mind as going through a continuously developing thinking process:

Defines objects and their context
Identifies a sensible course of action (or mode of conduct)
Imagines the consequences of this choice
Select course of action

So how can we apply this to software design? A first point could be this distinction between practical and theoretical knowledge: If we take a user’s interaction with a particular system as a sort of social interaction, it then becomes important to try and focus on how we can shape and pre-empt this tacit form of knowledge to help (for instance) users to navigate more easily.

Second, what can we (as designers) do to have an influence on the series of steps presented above? Maybe by influencing the way users define the objects we present to them through an interface, by referring to our understanding of what constitutes their tacit knowledge: Interactionists’ emphasis on experience seem to suggest that this could be achieved through inquiring into the previous experiences of our users.
Finally, the notion of learning seems to have a particularly important place in Interactionism: does this mean that more attention should be given to a system’s learnability?

I have only scraped the surface of how Interactionism could be applied to software design, and I guess the subject would need a lot more work! What seems interesting is the similarities of the suggestions presented above and current UX practice. I hope this is not due to bias from my part, but shows the natural evolution of software design towards social theory!