New Project: Speculative Usability

Lars Söderlund and I have been working on what we are currently calling speculative usability. Combining Bruno Latour's work on ANT and his Heideggerian reading of the thing and work in speculative realism (e.g., Ian Bogost), we want to carve out a space in usability testing for more inventive, less normative approaches. That is, we want to treat usability as a thing that is always at stake in usability testing.

Abstract:

Speculative Usability calls us to attend more rigorously to the individual existences of objects, and as such it allows us to ask usability questions less exclusively wedded to the user than those posed in most usability tests. Rather than “Is the user able to quickly work this object as the designer intended?” or “Does the composition of this object satisfy the user?” we can ask, “How does this object work given its own particular set of relations?” and “How, then, might this object work otherwise?” This involves not only decentering the user as our focus, but also opening ourselves to non-normative evaluations of objects. Our goal is no longer to measure the distance between an object’s use and acceptable levels of efficiency, but to notice an object as it interacts with other objects (including the user).

A Saturday Morning Juxtaposition: Bruno Latour and Phillip K. Dick

Phillip K. Dick, Ubik

Back in the kitchen he fished in his various pockets for a dime, and, with it, started up the coffeepot. Sniffing the - to him - very unusual smell, he again consulted his watch, saw that fifteen minutes had passed; he therefore vigorously strode to the apt door, turned the knob and pulled on the release bolt.

The door refused to open. It said, “Five cents, please.”

He searched his pockets. No more coins; nothing. “I’ll pay you tomorrow,” he told the door. Again he tried the knob. Again it remained locked tight. “What I pay you,” he informed it, “is in the nature of a gratuity; I don’t have to pay you.”

“I think otherwise,” the door said. “Look in the purchase contract you signed when you bought this conapt.”

In his desk drawer he found the contract; since signing it he had found it necessary to refer to the document many times. Sure enough; payment to his door for opening and shutting constituted a mandatory fee. Not a tip.

“You discover I’m right,” the door said. It sounded smug.

From the drawer beside the sink Joe Chip got a stainless steel knife; with it he began systematically to unscrew the bolt assembly of his apt’s money-gulping door.

“I’ll sue you,” the door said as the first screw fell out.

Joe Chip said, “I’ve never been sued by a door. But I guess I can live through it.”

Bruno Latour (Jim Johnson), "Mixing Humans and Nonhumans Together: The Sociology of a Door-Closer"

On a freezing day in February, posted on the door of the Sociology Department at Walla Walla University, Washington, could be seen a small hand-written notice: "The door-closer is on strike, for God's sake, keep the door closed." This fusion of labor relations, religion, advertisement, semiotics, and technique in one single insignificant fact is exactly the sort of thing I want to help describe.

Speculative Usability

Streaming Brainstorm:

Melting

I am awake. It's about 4:00a.m. The rain and wind have me worried about the roof again. There are a few water stains on my office ceiling and sometimes a trickle down the inside of a window. My son's room has another spot. I think the flashing around the chimney may need some work. I am anxious, and I am awake. And behind the worry about the roof, come all the others. This is pretty normal. The anxiety a routine.

Will is awake. It's a little after 4:30a.m. He has a cold and a bad cough. It wakes him up, and so he makes his way over to our room. He is remarkably chipper, and he politely requests cough medicine. My wife obliges. I use his interruption and the light from the bathroom to check the ceilings. No new stains in either room. No trickle down the inside of the window.

Cough medicine distributed. Potty breaks all around. Will scampers to our bed toward the promise of a snuggle. We are all awake. Will talks for a spell about something I cannot remember. I am already trying to doze off. He falls silent and begins gently rubbing my cheeks. He combs the hair away from my forehead. These gestures we have performed a thousand times. And then he grabs my nose, just as gently. This, I think, is pure joy. I am melting.

And then he falls asleep, and so do I.

ATTW 2013

Here is my 2013 Association of Teachers of Technical Writing Conference presentation. It ends abruptly as I moved to discuss student samples. These can be found at newmediasciencewriting.blogspot.com. The slides, with partial script and notes, are embedded below. Enjoy!

Assessing Popular Science Writing in the Classroom

How Strange To Be Anything At All

Sometimes alone in your head is a frightening place to be. This is particularly true when things go bad, and they have been going bad for us lately. As some of you may know, my wife is now 22 weeks pregnant. On September 21, the day we were supposed to find out the gender of our baby, we were informed that there were several abnormalities: the brain was not fully divided and the heart and kidneys weren't functioning properly. Even without a firm diagnosis as to why, we were told that our baby, a girl, had about a 1% chance of surviving to full term. We were devastated: what was to be a celebration became an unreal nightmare. We decided soon after to keep our baby as long as possible. Annie was our daughter, and we were past the point where we could imagine otherwise (my wife Jodi has written eloquently on our decision not to terminate the pregnancy).

We soon after learned that our baby had Trisomy 13 (an extra 13th chromosome), and that the abnormalities were critical and incompatible with life.  (I will say here that the folks at Cardinal Glennon Children's Hospital Fetal Care Institute are amazing.) At most, Annie might make it to full term and perhaps live a day or two. Most likely, she will pass in utero. We began to prepare ourselves for these eventualities, describing ourselves as actively-passive. We would work to accept what we could not control, and to live with what we had for as long as we had it. So Annie became Annie. We feel her kick. We read to her. Will (Annie's big brother) talks to her and rubs Jodi's belly (and worries about being sick himself and of not wanting to "go to heaven").

Some days are harder than others, but most days are full of the joy that is Annie's life. It takes a lot of work to carve out this kind of happiness, but it has been worth it.

It's been worth it because the universe wasn't quite done. Annie's form of Trisomy 13 (Down Syndrome is Trisomy 21) was a full translocation (which only happens in about 20% of trisomy 13 cases), which is when the extra 13th chromosome attaches to the 14th. In about 25% of these cases, this translocation is inherited. We had genetic testing done. Yesterday, we learned that my wife is a carrier. She was devastated. We were devastated. What does this mean? Can we have more children? Do we want to risk going through this again? We haven't really thought through any of this yet. We just resolved to look at our healthy and wonderfully amazing son and feel lucky as hell. Just look at him: pretty fucking amazing, right?

So, I'm in my head a lot these days. After all, as an academic I'm pretty much paid to think all day, which is not exactly a choice profession with all this on your mind. And so to get some work done, I have to start thinking about Annie in terms of my research: object-oriented rhetoric, new materialism, vibrant matter, where the lesson is over and over again the complexity of the world and the fact that everything has a kind of force. And you start to feel vulnerable. Even our genes are out to get us.

But that's rather pessimistic and counter to the actively-passive stance we had taken. Vulnerability brought us Will. Vulnerability brought my wife and I together. We are each us of affect-able, persuadable, moveable, and changeable. Because we are these things we get to be something at all in the first place. Most days I get to feel Annie kick. I have seen pictures of her: her rainbow spine and the hands that will never open all the way. And these kicks are more than signs, more than symbolic representations of life; they are her being alive. And these kicks aren't even her fighting the good fight: they are simply Annie living as Annie.

She isn't battling: we aren't battling. We are all of us vulnerable and alive because of it. All we are ever doing is being alive. I have a daughter that I will only live with for nine months, and most of that, all of it most likely, will be in utero. I celebrate that. I honor that. I grieve for that. This isn't a simple celebration or a treatise on the value of human life. This post isn't pro- anything. It is an active recognition of our permanent (and sublimely passive) vulnerability—not to a higher power, our own power, or some other life force, but a complicated jumble of other things, each as vulnerable as the next.

Vulnerability is the chance to be anything at all and often times for only a moment. We can only ever be actively passive in the face of this, in the face of others, in the face of a world we are thrown into, kicking and screaming.

Science Writing as Articulation

A short video outlining the theory informing ENGL 401: New Media Science Writing (Fall 2012 at St. Louis University). The short video is part of a larger, collaborative, and multimedia research project currently underway at SLU.

Science Writing as Articulation from Nathaniel Rivers on Vimeo.