978-1-4244-2086-5/08/$25.00 ©2008 IEEE
Diagramming with Actor Network Theory:
A Method for Modeling Holistic Experience
Liza Potts
Electronic Ink
[email protected]
Abstract
Traditional software design methodologies focus on diagramming the process flows and system states for specific tasks and technologies. Because the design of social software tools must take into consideration the many technologies, people, and organizations involved in these ecologies, this paper illustrates a new method for diagramming these participants based on Actor Network Theory (ANT). Such diagramming can aid in the
development of these mediated systems. Examples from the events occurring online during the aftermath of the London Bombings of 7 July 2005 illustrate the
application of these diagrams. Keyword s: user centered design, human computer interaction, social software, actor network theory, systems design, disaster communication, diagramming.
Introduction
This paper proposes using Actor Network Theory (ANT) as a method for diagramming the technologies and people engaged in social software ecologies. By
diagramming these communities of practice, system designers – including technical communicators, software developers, graphic artists, and information architects - can understand the mediascape in which t heir users approach these systems. Beginning with a discussion concerning traditional diagramming methods employed by software designers, I then explore ANT as a method for diagramming these ecologies. In this paper, I posit that ANT should be the first st ep in understanding any given communication system by documenting all the relevant participants, while traditional methods such as the Unified Modeling Language (UML), should be used to document the actions that take place within such systems. Combined, th ese two diagramming methods can help designers of mediated systems such as those referred to as “Web 2.0 technologies” including blogs, wikis, media sharing sites, social bookmarking systems, and others.
Today’s social software systems, as well as many modern knowledge worker applications are used by participants who want to see more unified, holistic experiences that will support collaboration, knowledge sharing, and information validation by participants across
multiple systems and mediascapes. ANT helps track such traces and associations across communities, regardless of how temporarily such connections may exist between community members. Examining social software use during the London Bombings of 7 July 2005 illustrates the many technologies and human participants interacting across multiple systems. The London Bombings are a strong example of how early adopters and experienced participants communicate within multiple systems, technologies, and mediascapes. This case of "disaster communication" provides an opportunity to rethink the design of software, given that it shows how people make due with the tools they are given – cellphones, blogs, media sharing sites, wikis, news articles, etc. – during a condensed time span in which they are desperate to communicate and exchange details about a catastrophe.
Traditional Software Architecture Diagrams
Briefly, the use of diagramming has a long history in the software design process. In particular, there are specific formats and templates dictated by particular methodologies, including UML. UML diagrams such as the Use Case Diagram illustrate possible operations that a system could support (Fig. 1), while an A ctivity Diagram lists a user’s workflow through a single task (Fig. 2).
While Use Case diagrams pinpoint the possibilities of system usage, Activity diagrams pinpoint the step -by-step processes that users must follow in order to interact with a system. [1]
Figure 2 UML Activity diagram.
Software engineers also use UML Sequence Diagrams to consider what processes and objects a system must support, often simultaneously, while different tasks are conducted within a given system (Fig. 3) [2].
Figure 3 UML Sequence Diagram.
UML diagrams are beneficial when considering the design of what occurs on the screen and within
technological systems. These diagrams are excellent for showing systems, states, and task processes related to these systems and states. They typically consider only what is or will be pre sent in a particular system for a particular user or technology.
While UML is a good choice for illustrating such specifics, it is not intended to be a way to understand an entire ecosystem of actors participating in ordinary activities. It is even less c apable of capturing the rapid communication at play among social software
participants. It is, however, critical for designers to examine and diagram the many people, organizations, and technologies at play in social software use if they are going to conti nue to develop such systems. In the next section, I turn to describing ANT and how, applied to diagramming mediated systems, it can create a comprehensive map of even the most temporary actor participants.
About Actor Network Theory (ANT)
Actor Network T heory (ANT) originates in the work of Bruno Latour [3], John Law [4], and M ichel Callon [5], and is furthered by the work of AnneMarie Mol [6]. Working in the field of Science and Technology Studies, Latour deliberately wanted to shake-up sociology theories by proposing the radical notion that agency is equally distributed amongst people and technology.
ANT suggests that we examine human and non -human actors equally, giving neither of them pr iority [7]. Thus, technology and people are regarded as equal age nts of action. According to ANT, actors are constantly in motion, creating and leaving networks and ass ociations with other actors. Rather than attempting to pigeonhole these associations, ANT seeks to observe these traces and let the actors instruct the d esigner as to what the
connections might mean. As current diagramming does not trace these temporary connections, a new form of diagramming is necessary.
Of course human beings are the eminent actors, primarily owning and controlling their actions and environments more so than the technologies that surround them. Nonetheless, it is critically important for designers to examine the relationships and connections between the primary participant and the people and the technologies that surround them.
To create more e ffective systems, pinpoin ting the instances of sharing information and cross -referencing this information across the social software ecosystem is critical to building systems that can support this work. Locating both the participants and their exchan ges allows designers to map out the networks of technologies and people involved in the sharing and validation of this information across systems.
Software systems designers must take into account the various interactions among diverse actors such as cellphones, terrorists, victims, witnesses, software, web sites, and newspapers.
The diagrams describing these traces leads to a common understanding among designers and developers so that the relationships between people and technologies can be leveraged to i nform the eve ntual user interfaces (UIs) for these technologies, as well as the cultural structures surrounding their use. ANT can be used to engage developers by showing them a broader view of the entire network of actors involved in these experiences.
Typical design diagramming such as UML looks at individual tasks and interfaces based on one participant and one system; the way I am employing ANT
encourages designers to see a much wider spectrum of use and users. Therefore, it is necessary for User -Centered Design to work towards evolving how, given the network of potentially traceable associations enabled by an ANT structure, one could design experiences to support information exchanges that currently take place through these systems.
Stage 1: Actor Networks
ANT diagrams are an efficient tool that can reveal the people and technologies within which users of social software are embedded. Unlike current diagramming tools used in industry by designers and software
engineers, the diagramming I propose consider s multiple users and multiple systems that must first be made visible before any single interaction or task can be d esigned. By taking into consideration all of the actors participating in these systems, designers and engineers will be better informed and able to create communication tools that can support holistic experiences across systems.
Figure 4 illustrates the ANT diagram of an image taken by a victim of the London Bombings. On 7 July 2005, London’s public transport system was attacked by a series of suicide bombings that killed 52 and injured over 770 people [8]. Occurring during the morning rush hour, many of the victims were commuters toting
communication devices such as cellphones, blackberries, and laptops – tools they used during the regular cou rse of their business day. The example diagram illustrated in Figure 4 is the actor network for Adam Stacey’s image of people “trapped in the tube” [9]. This image would later be broadcast on international television news reports, reprinted in newspapers w orldwide, and posted to numerous social software sites.
Figure 4 ANT Diagram of the actors involved in relation to Adam Stacey’s uploaded image of his escape from the bomb scene.
These basic diagrams are illuminating in that they begin to map out the av ailable people, places, and things that participants may encounter in a given system. Doing this mapping first helps developers understand the available nouns that their users could leverage.
Stage 2: People, Places, and Things
To begin understanding the c ontext in which participants use these systems, designers must first understand who and what are involved in these scenarios. Mapping out all of the possible actors in any given network is an important first step in designing these systems, because it help s designers catalog all of the active participants.
The next step is to distinguish the actors by noun categories (people, places, things) pertinent to the community of practice for which developers are designing the system. Doing so is an extension of Latour’s vision for distributed agency, which allows
designers to view the available actors to support human work in a given scenario.
In order to begin a discussion about how to do such diagramming, I will return to the example of the London Bombings of 7 J uly 2005. In this case, the idea of mapping out people, events, groups, and technologies is critical to designing appropriate disaster communication systems.
Looking closer at the ANT diagram in Figure 4, there were multiple people and technologies partic ipating in this information coordin ation: cameraphones, news outlets, Adam Stacey, Alfie Dennen (the owner of the Moblog that first posted this image), terrorists, and the countless participants who helped distribute the photo and inquired as to Stacey’s w ell being. Illustrated in Figure 5 are the relevant nouns that describe these actors.
Figure 5 ANT Diagram illustrating relevant nouns for the London Bombings.
Cataloging the people, places, and things that are active participants in this actor network c an help developers of these social software sites to begin to understand what sort of structures must be in place to allow for the mediation of information across these systems (Figure 6).
Figure 6 Adding relevant shapes to ANT diagrams. Creating a set of relevant objects for these nouns is a helpful visual cue, aiding developers and designers in building these diagrams. For this example, I have used this series of shapes to inform system developers of the events, people, organizations, technologies, and physical locations involved in the London Bombings (Figure 7).
Figure 7 ANT Diagram of the actors’ shapes in relation to Adam Stacey’s uploaded image of his escape from the bomb scene.
While by no means comprehensive, this selection of shapes can aid de signers and developers in creating diagrams for other scenarios, whether they are for business systems or web applications. Mapping out these
nouns helps to create a common understanding of the available people, organizations, technologies, and locations i n which people are active participants within these mediated systems.
Stage 3: Temporary Relationships
The final key element in this diagramming
methodology is the concept of temporary relationships. Unlike typical online communities, disaster communities tend to engage each other to communicate information and then disengage to find information elsewhere. This is not to say that communities cannot be formed around disaster topics; however, people tend to stick to their current online associations, leaving their groups primarily to locate and validate information.
Looking at the temporary relationships that are created during these disasters tells designers how information flows across these actor networks so that these mediated systems can provide the appro priate level of information in a timely, relevant manner.
The resulting diagramming is based on the notion of tracing temporary connections and accepting how people join and leave communities as necessary to complete tasks; tracing these connections acros s wide ecosystems of people and technologies to understand all of the major variables a ffecting these events and people; and embedding designers within communities of practice so that they are participants who can then design for the scenarios in which the y themselves are involved (Figure 8).
Figure 8 Illustrating temporary relationships within this object’s actor network.
With regards to the London Bombings, the initial online postings came from an already established group of people that first surface d rather than a new group of participants connecting during this event. As information was distri buted about the photo of Adam Stacey, new participants arrived to form new connections, add supporting information, and post this information to other websites (Figure 9).
Figure 9 ANT Diagram of the actors’ temporary relationships in relation to Adam Stacey’s uploaded image of his escape from the bomb scene.
Tracing these fragments to see how they form such temporary connections by creating temporary associations aids systems designer in u nderstanding how participants create the entire ecosystem. Understanding these
connections would allow a designer to create tools to improve communication between these participants, such as aggregators, dashboards, widgets, and web services.
Conclusion
Although the diagramming system proposed in this paper was initially created to support the design of social software systems, it can also be applied to the design of any system that needs to take into consideration the many technologies, people, and organizations involved in any workflow process. It was created out of a need to understand all of the people, systems, locations, tools, technologies, and organizations involved in locating and validating information during times of disaster. However, it became clear as this project progressed that such a diagramming tool could be easily applied to the design of other complex systems. Because this diagramming system is still evolving, I plan on conducting further research into
developing design diagrams to support the design of mediated systems.
References
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[5] Callon, M. Some elements of a sociology of translation: Domestication of the scallops and the fishermen of St Brieuc Bay. In John Law (Ed.), Power, Action. & Belief. A New Sociology of Knowledge? (196-229). London: Routledge. 1986.
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[8] BBC News. 7 July Bombings: What Happened Overview. BBC News.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/spl/hi/uk/05/london_blasts/what_ happened/html/default.stm.
[9] Dennen, A. London Underground bombing, trapped. Alfie’s Moblog. http://moblog.co.uk/view.php?id=77571. 2005.
About the Author
Liza Potts is the Director of De sign Research at Electronic Ink . She recently graduated from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where she received her PhD in Communication and Rhetoric. Her industry career spans 14 years, including positions as a consultant, manager, user experience architect, usability engineer, and technical communicator in the software and internet industries. Her research informs the design of systems to support communication during disasters.