Introduction to the creative projects: the mode of praxis
In the following chapters I explore and problematise the notion of set categories of trust evidence. I describe the undertaking of practical projects that attempt to apply trust theory to practice. I find it impossible to meaningfully disengage an understanding of trust from its context. This means that I believe that it is not appropriate to pre-empt trust as trust is a concept that can only be understood in situ by those participating in the interaction. There are certain implications from insights gathered from the practical projects here for the design of trust-enabling digital environments. Rather than presenting the user with pre-determined, de- limited trust evidence to work with, a preferred strategy is to hand the interpretation of the construction of trust to the user. This design concept is pursued in part 3.
Part 2 describes five data-gathering projects that explore how trust works across different contexts. The series of projects reflect the iterative nature of the development of this research. The findings of one project informed the design of the next project. The research investigation was continually re-framed to explore the elusive relationship between context and trust, and I found that the two are inseparable. The purpose of this exploration is to identify the degree to which ‘trust’ has different features across these different scenarios. The first project, described in Chapter 4, is an initial exploration into how trust is perceived in the workplace. The methodology used was interviews and I found that the interviewees’ comments, as they reflected back on their experience, neatly reinforced notions about trust that are common in the literature. In contrast, the subsequent projects seek to explore what happens when theory about trust is applied to a practical design situation. The second project, described in Chapter 5, is a game project that explores what happens when trust information provided to a participant is stripped back to a minimum. This gives us the opportunity to see how participants orient to issues of ‘trust’ and familiarity in situations where information is at a minimum. Chapter 6 documents a third project that also
investigates familiarity. It explores the type of information categories participants seek to create context and trust. A fourth project, featured in Chapter 7, re-visits the workplace and explores how a group of professionals construct trust as part of their daily work. Finally in Chapter 8, a project that explores trust in a highly emotive context is described and discussed. The context here is the creation of a documentary about road accident trauma. Five projects were chosen to gain a sense of how trust works across a range of situations in order to explore the similarities and differences that arise.
All of the above mentioned projects are linked by a common approach to interaction design driven by praxis. Praxis is a term in the literature commonly used to describe the intersection of theory and practice. Originating with Aristotle but most commonly associated with Karl Marx, the term has undergone a number of transformations. For Aristotle, it was to be contrasted with ‘theoria’ and ‘poeisis’ that referred respectively to the pursuit of truth and to knowledge associated with production. ‘Praxis’ was reserved for practical action that could include ethical and political matters (Knight 2007). For Marx, famously, it became the means to contrast the theoretical knowledge of philosophers with the need for engagement. Hence, in one of his most famous statements, ‘philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it’ (Marx 1845). For Freire (1970, p. 36), this became ‘reflection and action upon the world in order to transform it’ and it is this meaning which associates most closely with the modest proposals of this thesis, where ‘changing the world’ simply means intervention and engagement through the design of technical applications.
More recently, others have explored the term, including Deming (1986), who explains how theory and practice interlink: ‘Experience will answer a question, and a question comes from theory’. Martin and Booth (2006) argue, in a defence of such commitments, that experience and/or ‘reflexive’ practice-based work is appropriate in a context where the distinction between the supposedly ‘objective’ and the apparent subjectivities of ‘experience’ is becoming increasingly blurred. This is particularly relevant to the area of design, which is a form of intervention by definition. Design can be loosely thought of as an activity offering a solution that may change the conditions of others in the future
(Zimmerman 2009). Thus design is not an isolated act. As mentioned above, interactive design is centrally concerned with the application of theory to practice and vice versa; thus this mode of research is particularly appropriate.
By theorising a practical activity such as design, a practitioner is able to move from understanding aspects of isolated case studies or incidents, towards ‘broad explanatory principles’ and the prediction of problems and solutions (Friedman 2003). Friedman points out that the area of socio-technical design has problematised the distinctions between process and outcome, participant and designer, and service and product, and therefore requires new hybrid forms of understanding. Some of the aims of praxis should be, according to Zuber-Skerritt (2001), to communicate concepts in a fashion that everyone can understand, transform theory into practical accomplishments, and understand a problem from a holistic perspective that can embody historical and societal dimensions.
Central to the programme of praxis is the relationship between researcher and participant, writer and reader, or designer and user. In whose interests is a researcher working? And how much does a researcher care about the interests and enablement of those they are working with? How much negotiation of approaches and ideas is possible (Surma 2005)? These are issues central to the design of trust- enablement and other design projects that problematise traditional power relationships between producers and users. Here, creative work is used as a vehicle to explore how ideas in theory might work as implementation in a practical setting. This process allows lateral exploration of what an idea might mean, perhaps providing different insights to those gathered from a written pursuit of an argument. Different points of emphasis of how an idea works in a practical project might arise. Problems that occur in the execution of an idea have a chance to be identified. By developing an idea, even as far as a sketch, it is possible to discover whether the concept might work or not.
As this is a design-related thesis, the way these contexts were examined is based on certain kinds of intervention rather than any attempt at ‘fly on the wall’ observation. The perspective of design attempts to understand how interventions can provoke certain types of communication or response from participants, so exploration via intervention is a logical starting point. Some forms of intervention
also allow for a closer examination of the processes that participants use to create trust than the act of observation might facilitate. It is the process of trust that I am most concerned with in this study. As mentioned in chapter 3, cultural probes are an established form of data-gathering intervention that allow the participant to create his/her own sense of meaning and also allow the designer to gain insights into how a context works from the perspective of the participant. The projects discussed in this part are modelled on the form of the cultural probe.
The aim of undertaking creative projects is to explore how trust-enablement is achieved in a practical setting, when theory is applied to practice. The exercise is an exploration into how theory works in practice and also the pragmatics involved when a design concept is converted into a project with which others interact. The process of planning, executing, and collating these projects and reflecting on the practices of those engaged in them also allowed an examination of the micro-detail of trust: that is, the details and nuances that occur around it.
Outline of Part Two
Each chapter in part two describes a project exploring trust, including the context that the project explores, the means to gather data, the task the project participant is asked to undertake, and the type of information the participant was given. Insights gained into trust as a practical accomplishment conclude each chapter. I then provide a summary of the knowledge gained from undertaking the practical design projects, and explore the similarities and differences of how trust and context were created by participants. Part 2 closes with indications into how this knowledge will be used in part 3, when the insights are applied to create design affordances.