HCI and more generally, research methods, or for someone who simply wants to learn more about research in the wild. It covers RITW by charting and critiquing the what, when, where, why and how questions. In subsequent parts of the book, it examines the tools, methods, and platforms that have been imported, adapted and developed to study user-interactions in the wild, and how researchers have grounded concerns, problems, and new opportunities through their framing. It also outlines the benefits, limitations, impacts, and advances that have resulted from research in the wild.
1.6 SUMMARY
One of the motivations for conducting research in the wild is to demonstrate how a technology intervention can engage a community in a participatory manner. Underlying motivations include enabling people to collaborate, connect with each other or join forces in order to raise awareness, and act upon an issue. Another rationale for conducting RITW is to deploy novel technologies in a setting in order to provoke a response (e.g., getting people to comment on a new display in a street), a new kind of interaction (exploring how one looks in an augmented public mirror) or social engagement (e.g., encouraging strangers to talk with one another in a public place). A further reason is to develop new understandings and theorizing about how people use technology in their everyday lives—based on the body of empirical work that demonstrates how behavior differs or is the same as when using “older” and other kinds of technologies. In summary, RITW is becoming more widely accepted as a de facto way of conducting research for HCI, complimenting but also questioning the validity of traditional lab-based research approaches.
CHAPTER 2
Moving Into The Wild: From Situated Cognition to Embodied Interaction
2.1 INTRODUCTION
The phrase “in the wild” first came to the forefront, in the late 1980s and early 1990s when anthropologists Lucy Suchman (1987), Jean Lave (1988), and Ed Hutchins (1995) began writing about cognition in the wild. Collectively, they critiqued the fledgling field of cognitive science, which was concerned with how the mind worked. The accepted theorizing at the time focused on information processing in the head, and the construction of rational models of behavior as the execution of plans. In sharp contrast to this classical view, they explain cognition—as observed in everyday practice—being distributed and situated in the moment. Moreover, in their respective books (see Figure 2.1), they cogently argue that cognition can only be studied in the wild. Their approach was to present a social anthropology of cognition and cognition in practice, respectively.
Figure 2.1: Suchman’s, Lave’s, and Hutchins’ classic “In the Wild” books.
2.2 PLANS AND SITUATED ACTION
The first in the wild classic was Lucy Suchman’s (1987) Plans and Situated Actions book. It took the fields of HCI and computer science by storm—and its insights were quickly adopted by a new generation of researchers and students. For many, it resonated with their discontent and worries about the limitations of traditional cognitive models. For others, it opened their eyes to new ways of thinking about human-machine interactions. The accepted view at the time was that scientific models were needed to explain how the mind works and that these should form the basis of user models used in machine-human dialogues. Folk theories or common sense explanations were dismissed as inadequate. Suchman, however, argued the opposite: common sense notions of planning should not be viewed as inadequate versions of scientific models of action, but taken as resources people use in their practical deliberations. To support her contrarian view of how to conceptualize and understand human behavior, she described how people use these resources along with various constraints in the environment in their everyday planning and action. Instead of developing so called scientific models to develop human-computer interfaces, developers should draw from accounts of how people act and react in their everyday lives.
Much of Suchman’s early research was to provide detailed situated accounts of the relations among people and between people and technology. One of her most cited examples is of a study she conducted of pairs of users trying to fathom out how to use a Xerox photocopier. While not an in the wild study (since it was conducted in a Xerox Research lab), she noted how its complicated help system did not match the way the pairs understood how it worked or what to do when it did not work in the way they thought it should. The outcome of her detailed analyses of the mismatched photocopier-user interactions led many programmers and developers to rethink how they should structure and what to include in their human-computer models, replacing the simplified process models, that followed sets of rules, such as “if x then y” with alternative kinds of situated models of action (Dourish, 2001).
An analogy that she used in her book to illustrate what she meant by situated action is a description of what it is like to ride the rapids in a canoe. She notes how a great deal of deliberation and reconstruction goes into a canoeist’s plan both before they begin and in their account of what happened after the event, but from then how they actually navigate the rapids, depends on embodied skills in responding to whatever comes their way. This powerful image resonated with many as to why models of plans as a control structure that specify behavior were inadequate when designing user interfaces. Despite its impact on a generation of researchers, however, this example, itself, has been somewhat parodied and often misunderstood. Many took it to mean plans are irrelevant to how we act. Suchman never claimed this (and goes to great length to explain what she meant in her later revised version of the book), arguing that what happens in practice is the interaction of both the contingencies and the projected course of action. A legacy from her pioneering work is the commonly accepted view that users don’t follow instructions and plans as simply as had been assumed.
2.3 COGNITION IN PRACTICE
Jean Lave’s (1988) book Cognition in Practice, published a year later, was primarily concerned with debunking the academic snobbery associated with “common sense explanations and real-world contexts.” Similar to Suchman’s critique of cognitive science models of everyday planning, she went to great lengths to explain how experimental lab research wasn’t superior to everyday people’s accounts of what they do in their lives. Moreover, her program of research showed how it was more valuable and legitimate to study people’s cognitive behavior in everyday contexts, which she described as “cognition in the wild.” To demonstrate how her approach could provide new understandings, she studied adults practicing math in a variety of real-world contexts. Some of the examples she described in her book, which are most illuminating, are of people working out the best price for groceries when shopping in the supermarket and for how dieters measure unusual quantities of ingredients when making a dish at home while following a recipe. Similar to Suchman’s book, she compellingly demonstrates, through her detailed case studies, how people often use opportunistic structures in the real world in their everyday cognition.
The legacy of Lave’s work was to show how it was possible and necessary to move one particular form of cognitive activity—arithmetic problem-solving—out of the laboratory back into the realm of everyday life. In so doing, she showed how mathematics in the real world is the same for all kinds of thinking, shaped by the reflexive encounter between human minds and the context people find themselves in. A salient example that has been much cited—as illustrative of doing math in practice—is the “cottage cheese” problem; a male dieter, preparing a meal, was faced with having to measure out 3/4 of 2/3 of a cup of cottage cheese that was stipulated in the recipe he was using. How did he work it out? Not by multiplying 3 × 2 and dividing that by 4 × 3, resulting in ½, as would be expected if using algebra in school, but instead by using the available structures in the environment in a situated way. He first measured out 2/3 of a cup, and then spread it on a chopping board in the shape of a circle. Next, he divided the circle into 4 quarters,
