Chapter 7: Trust in the context of professional judgment, in the area of film curatorship
7.3. e Trust evolves in relatively structured ways How can a design cater for this?
While trust is complicated and highly idiosyncratic, this project demonstrates that it can evolve in relatively structured ways, with the final analysis left to the discretion and idiosyncrasies of the trustee. The participants approached the activity of finding trust with similar processes; they just had different interpretations, perspectives and preferences that determined their trust perception. All participants differentiated between facts and the presentation of facts. They read ‘in between the lines’ of what the presentation was saying about the authenticity of the material and also the motivation of the material’s writer.
However, while using certain processes, participants placed emphasis and importance on different values. For instance, the manager of the film unit quoted above operated from the perspective of how general public audiences might perceive the material, and what the ‘grabber’ might be for a potential viewer. He is imagining the way in which a potential audience might understand how a film is represented, what one might expect of the material offered in a film, and whether these expectations will be fulfilled. On the other hand, one participant, a film curator in this case, was also looking at the effect of the words, but with a different view. Her perspective was based on whether a film was properly represented. She described it as ‘cruel’ when people missed out on seeing a good film because the synopsis was not appropriate, perhaps because it is not convincing enough. However, another participant also examined the interplay between, on the one hand facts, and on the other, evocative and convincing writing. But in this case, the participant was suspicious of claims and did not want
to be convinced. She said, ‘I need to be able to see or judge for myself. A qualifier has been made that I don’t need’.
This project demonstrates that trust evolves in relatively structured ways. All participants attended to the interplay between facts and how they are presented. The participants had different preferences and priorities about how they arrived at trust or distrust. How can we leverage off this function of trust to build on how trust evolves in relatively structured ways? A solution is to create digital environments within which individuals can apply their idiosyncratic perceptions to a set of processes. Thus the design of the digital environment can assist trust- enablement by facilitating the processes used by participants to arrive at trust (or distrust). This issue is pursued further in chapter 10.
7.4 Conclusion to chapter 7
How trust works in the domain of professional judgment in the area of film exhibition and curating was the subject of this project. A group of film professionals were asked to undertake a cultural probe. The participants chose a document that they used in their everyday work and marked on it the points in the text where questions of trust and distrust was an issue for them. Trust, as broadly defined by the participants, is how to weigh the value of information as represented in written documents by other film professionals. Credibility and authenticity play an important role. In the next chapter, I build on the insights from the design of this project to explore trust in a highly emotional context in order to investigate what types of negotiations participants regard as important.
The project in this chapter suggests that there are some commonsense strategies that can inform the design of trust-enabling environments. For instance, the provision of factual information in a film guide, which is time-consuming to source, expresses collegiality towards other film professionals. Once explorations move past these more obvious aspects of trust, trust becomes complex and idiosyncratic. Professionals have a set of techniques to comprehend trust that are part of personal professional development. For instance, the manager of the film unit analyses the interplay between text and image and how this will attract audiences. There is interplay between the facts in a document and their
representation that is filtered by a professional to reach a judgment. Attention is given to how the words are used to convince or inform. Often the synopsis of a film comes under most scrutiny because this is where the use of text is the most complex. Some readers are dissuaded if the writer of a document is trying too hard to persuade or makes overly ambitious claims. One participant outlined a style of information presentation that he finds trustworthy, stating that the combination of personal and professional argument in a text can help explain the writer’s perspective to the reader. For these reasons, it seems that trust evolves in relatively structured ways. However, professionals differ in how they prioritise different values and interpret the intricacies of trust. While different participants had a range of perspectives and priorities when considering trust, they used fairly similar processes to arrive at trust judgments. These processes can be designed into digital environments to help enable trust, and can be a feature of the agenda of shared context raised in this chapter and pursued further in chapter 10.