=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= This message was forwarded through the Red Rock Eater News Service (RRE). You are welcome to send the message along to others but please do not use the "redirect" option. For information about RRE, including instructions for (un)subscribing, see http://dlis.gseis.ucla.edu/people/pagre/rre.html =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Institutional Analysis for Design Phil Agre http://dlis.gseis.ucla.edu/pagre/ This is a draft. Please do not quote from it. Version of 27 December 2001. 7300 words. //1 Introduction I want to talk about two different methods of analyzing a problem for purposes of design: the device-centered method and the institutional method. The device-centered method talks about users -- and thus may present itself as being "user-centered" -- but it talks about users using concepts drawn from the attributes of the device, or from the design space of possible devices. The institutional method, by contrast, talks about users in social terms. The device-centered method is by far the most common in the computer world today, but its limitations increasingly argue in favor of the institutional method. Having been trained as a computer person, I expect that my argument will seem foreign to many designers. So before launching in, I want to explain briefly where this exotic concern with sociology is coming from. Back in the old days when computers were large objects locked in air-conditioned rooms, designers had enough problems getting the computers to work at all. Later their job became fitting the computers into an organization's existing work practices, and later still they became concerned with the convenience of the isolated user (see Andrew L. Friedman, Computer Systems Development: History, Organization and Implementation, Wiley, 1989). At each step, the computer has moved further out of the closet and become more entwined with the lives of the people who use it. And those people live their lives in the social world. We can look at the social nature of computing from at least three perspectives: (1) Design is a social process, with a variety of players and issues, and the design process is becoming more complicated as more considerations are brought to bear on designers' choices. (2) Computer use is a social process, and the process of computer use is becoming more complicated as security problems proliferate and users form themselves into advanced communities. (3) Computers mediate social relationships, and Web-based tools are capturing and supporting those relationships in more detailed ways. In these ways and more, system designers are already sociologists; it is just a question of becoming better sociologists by drawing the social content of computers and their design and use into the open. Several research movements have arisen to serve this need, such as social informatics, participatory design, computer supported cooperative work, and economic and legal analysis. To speak of "institutional analysis" is partly to reconstruct these diverse approaches on top of a common theoretical framework. Institutional analysis of computing has already been under way for a quarter- century, so I am not claiming to have invented it. Instead, I am trying to draw in a broader range of concepts from the various literatures on institutions in order to provide the field with a broader range of intellectual resources. Here, then, is the problem that I would like to use to illustrate the difference between institutional and device-centered analysis. To begin with, imagine a world of ubiquitous computing. Individuals carry around their own portable and wearable devices, all of which are wirelessly networked to one another and to the general public network. Places such as cafes, offices, cars, and night clubs are equipped with their own devices, all of them also networked to one another and to the public network. Individuals' devices are capable of interacting with any other device in the world, including devices that become relevant through their physical proximity. The general idea is that the individuals' devices are extensions of themselves, and support the full range of activities and involvements that the individual engages in. Using these devices, individuals will become both more embedded in their local surroundings -- through the connections that the devices establish (either spontaneously or by command) with devices in the immediate environment -- and less embedded in those surroundings -- through the connections that the same devices establish (likewise) with an unbounded range of devices elsewhere in the network. We want to design devices for this world, but we understand from the start that these devices will not stand alone. Rather, the devices will all be built atop a common architecture. This architecture starts with basic networking protocols like the 802.11 family, the Ethernet, and the Internet, all layered in a hopefully rational way. The guts of the architecture, though, lies in higher layers -- the middleware that provides generic services like file service, transaction processing, encryption, document management, digital libraries, and cross-media communication channels. It is easy -- far too easy -- to design this middleware architecture in a way that excludes a priori whole categories of potential applications. As a result, the design process will be doomed from the start unless it can characterize the design space. //2 The device-centered approach Unfortunately, the design space is extremely hard to characterize because it is so large. And this is where the distinction between the institutional and device-centered approaches becomes important. Let us first consider the matter from a device-centered perspective. Starting from the attributes of the devices -- and from attributes of the user that follow from them -- we can start naming issues and drawing distinctions: (1) If an individual is alone in a place, then the place can adapt itself to the individual -- displaying certain information on its devices, setting itself to engage in certain kinds of interaction, loading a user's preferences for the behavior of various features, cueing certain content, directing sensors to measure some aspects of the environment and not others, adjusting lights and environmental controls, and even configuring motorized furniture and architectural elements such as partitions. If several individuals occupy the same place, however, whether stably or in a shifting population, then the place somehow needs to configure itself to the needs of the whole population, and it will matter whether everyone is present for the same purpose or different purposes, whether they need to allocate access to devices, whether the space needs to be subdivided in one sense or another, and so on. (2) The network knows who you are, or at least it has an identifier that tracks you from one place to the next, even if it cannot connect that identifier to other identifiers in other databases. In fact, it's not the network that tracks you but various entities that you relate with through the network. At any given moment, you maintain relationships to all of those entities, and in principle many of them are capable of influencing the behavior of devices on you and around you, whether through their initiative or yours or someone or something else's. But interaction in this world need not be competely personalized. Complete personalization is only one corner of the design space. The ways in which different devices interact with you might depend on many different kinds of information: attributes that you have (e.g., groups that you are a member of), statistical inferences (e.g., gathered through the history of interaction with other individuals about whom the entities in question might have partial information), individuals' policies and situated choices about what actions to take and what information to reveal (e.g., making some documents public as on the Web), and so on. (3) Privacy will be a concern, including the privacy of the various people in a space vis-a-vis one another. At one extreme, all of their personal devices will be open to one another, forming a single pooled data space. At another extreme, the goal will be to create completely disjoint activity-spaces in both a physical and an electronic sense for each individual. In the middle ground, rules and commands will be needed to govern the movement of information between the different users' personal data spaces. Privacy will also be a concern between the individual and whoever is in charge of the space. For example, in a market environment the interactions between people and place might be governed by the protocols of a type of transaction, so that no information needs to be transferred except what's defined within those rules. In a work environment, rules will need to be established for the kinds of access that an employer might have to the states of the employees' devices, which presumably record fine details of their work activities. (4) The spaces in question might support a simulation, for example in an entertainment or training context. Computational objects will need to be created somewhere on the network, according to ancient custom, to represent the objects in the simulated world. Then the devices' interfaces will all be configured to simulate the setting being simulated, and computational resources will be brought online to generate the needed animation, compute and display consequences of simulated actions, and so on. Simulation spaces can be more or less encompassing, from the decorations of a theme bar to the total immersion of a military training exercise. (5) Interfaces in this world might be organized according to various metaphors, by analogy to the famous (if inconsistent and half-baked) desktop metaphor in personal computing. One metaphor might be the "backpack" in which individuals carry around the virtual documents and devices that they use in various environments. We can easily imagine someone sitting down in a cafe and spreading their paperwork on the table, whether for their own use or to share with someone else, such as a customer. The objects in the backpack would interact with whatever devices they find in the vicinity, converting formats where necessary or providing the user with options about which nearby devices should be recruited for which purposes. The backpack metaphor suggests an obvious set of operations: adding things to the backpack, cleaning it up, securing it against theft, having it searched by the security people, and so on, some of which will make sense for a given application and some of which will not. (On the foundations of the backpack metaphor, see the "Placeless Documents" project at Xerox. On documents generally see David M. Levy, Scrolling Forward: Making Sense of Documents in the Digital Age, Arcade, 2001.) (6) Labor must be divided between personal devices and devices that are embedded in places. Many issues arise: what devices people are willing and able to carry (e.g., weight, hands-free, headsets, batteries, etc), cost (e.g., people might pay to get temporary access to an expensive device in a copy shop or cafe), sensor practicalities (e.g., it's hard for a room microphone to tell who's talking), natural divisions of computational effort (e.g., subprocesses that require intensive real-time data exchange should ideally be close together in latency space), security (e.g., you don't want to put the only copy of a valuable document in a device that is easily stolen by a pickpocket), privacy (e.g., you want computations involving personally sensitive information to happen on devices that you own or at least trust), and so on. (7) The activities that the devices will support will have a physical form that can be supported in various ways. Users might be stationary or moving around, seated or standing, spreading work materials around them, driving or being driven, sharing a space with others (e.g., family home, airplane cabin, theater, cubicles), focusing individual or group attention on a physical object (e.g., eating dinner, drawing a diagram, repairing an engine), or representing themselves to others (e.g., giving a performance, updating an article, controlling what aspects of an ongoing activity others can be aware of). The physical and digital environment might support these activities in many ways, including the kinds of dynamic adaptation that I mentioned above. //3 The institutional approach That, then, is the beginnings of a device-centered list of dimensions of the design space. Ideally one would use these issues to interview people who know about various application domains, gather scenarios from them, compare and contrast various scenarios to generate further issues, and iterate until the list becomes unmanageable. I am not saying that this type of device-centered analysis is wrong. It is one level of analysis. But I do think that it is a mistake to work exclusively on the device-centered level, and I also think that it is a mistake to develop the device-centered analysis too far before analyzing the problems on other, more abstract levels. Design should start by analyzing situations in the ways that they are meaningful to the people involved, and those meanings start with the institutional context within which the situation is organized. Institutions -- medicine, education, markets, law, politics, family, religion, traffic, diplomacy, open-source software development, and so on -- thoroughly define the social situations that take place within them: they define social roles for the participants (representative and constituent, buyer and seller, doctor and patient, parent and child, driver and passenger), they define physical and abstract objects in terms of the roles they play in the activity (bank account, boundary marker, case record, court verdict, agreements and contracts, rights and responsibilities), and they define terrains upon which people strategize their activities (career paths, social networks, market opportunities, public identities). Institutions can organize activities in very different ways, and without a theory of them it is easy to overgeneralize from particular cases. That is why design requires institutional analysis: by considering the differences and analogies among institutions, it is possible to map the extent of the design space, as well as the anatomy and physiology of particular institutionally organized situations within which the designed devices might be used. Although it has not been systematized into a textbook of design, a great deal of experience has accumulated with institutional analysis anyway, enough to suggest some guidelines. Most of these guidelines are heuristic, meaning that they suggest what you should look for and what you are likely to find, and analytical, meaning that they suggest what types of concepts are likely to be useful and what types of conceptual confusion are likely to arise unless you are careful. The analytical suggestions, in other words, are not meant as strong empirical generalizations but as warnings to ensure that the analyst is choosing concepts in a conscious way. Here are some of the guidelines: (1) The activity you are designing new devices to support already occurs on some scale with existing media. If you try to design a completely new activity from scratch then you will probably fail, because it is not going to fit into a web of existing practices that is more complicated than you are ever likely to know. So take the trouble to understand the current practices before you go around reinventing them. (2) The activity in question is a unified phenomenon that happens to employ a wide range of media, including face-to-face interaction and paper, as well as old and new digital media. If you have defined the activity in terms of a particular medium then you have probably defined it wrong. (3) The people who use your device are unlikely to invent a new institutional order; more likely they will translate the practices of an existing institutional order into the terms of the new technology. Activities do obviously change to some degree when they are performed through the mediation of a new technology (e.g., electronic mail vs. face-to-face), but they must still fit with the same complex of social roles, the same ontology and strategic terrain, the same incentives, and so on. Attempts to give people new media might succeed; attempts to give people new goals probably won't. If you want to change the world, give new media to people with positive goals. (4) Most types of human interaction are intrinsically difficult at some level, and technology doesn't change that. A new technology might transform people's interactional troubles in some way, or it might provide them with resources to renegotiate their troubles. But if the people using the technology have problems, that is not necessarily a problem with the technology. Perhaps the technology works best when it gets out of the way and lets people get on with their problems. (5) Relationships are analytically prior to technologies. So, for example, it is a mistake to speak in terms of "online communities". There are communities, whatever that means, and communities almost always transact their business in several media, some of which might be "online". Media have a limited ability to shape the activities that go on within them; it is relationships, which are organized by institutions, that do most of the shaping. A good symbol of this might be an acting exercise that Peter Brook describes in "The Empty Space". He has two actors turn to backs from one another and refrain from making any noise, and then he instructs them to establish communication with one another. Because they cannot see or hear one another, they flail around for a while until they start to pick up and synthesize enough subliminal cues (shadows on the wall, vibrations in the floor, who knows), whereupon they become able to communicate and interact quite fluently. This is the situation with electronic media as well: no matter how structured or unstructured they might be, or how rich or impoverished, in the end they are just channels that do not understand the great majority of the multi-layered communication that takes place through them. This is also what Paul Dourish is talking about in his book "Where the Action Is". (6) Relationships are organized by institutions, and as remarked above we need to distinguish among the diverse cases without overgeneralizing (or, for that matter, undergeneralizing). So, for example, if we were to confine our analysis to hobbyist groups then we would probably fail to analyze the more competitive aspects of activity that are prominent in work or market settings -- aspects that are found in the hobbyist groups, too, if we know where to look. As a general rule, analytical categories that are useful in particular institutions also "pick out" real phenomena in other institutions as well. Contrarily, categories that seem useful only in the analysis of particular institutions are probably not framed in a general enough way. Institutional analysis is valuable largely because of the cross-pollination that takes place between analyses in different institutional domains; phenomena that are noticed in one institution can be systematically carried over to suggest lines of observation and analysis in others. (7) In analyzing or prescribing people's relations to one another, we mustn't presuppose that everyone has total privacy or that nobody has any privacy at all. We need to be open to the diverse ways in which personhood might be negotiated in each domain, for example in terms of concepts of personal boundaries. A given institution might be found to provide individuals with ways of admitting particular others into wider or narrower circles of their lives. An institution might also be found to conceptualize these relations of nearness and farness in different ways, and the prevailing conceptualizations may or may not describe the actual practices. Whatever the case, new media tend to disrupt these issues of interpersonal distance more drastically than any other aspect of people's lives together, and so it is particularly important to understand the existing practices and their stakes. (8) For design purposes it is tempting to build conceptual castles that supposedly describe the fixed structures of people's lives. The reality, however, is that people construct social reality cooperatively in real time by animating and inhabiting a repertoire of forms that their shared culture makes reflexively available as resources. The word "reflexively" here means that everyone knows that everyone else knows what actions and states of affairs are possible. In a meeting, for example, everybody knows that the rules of order provide for an agenda and for motions to move along to the next topic. That makes it easy to offer such a motion, since the offerer need only distinguish their action of offering a motion from other possible meeting-motions. What is more, the very fact that a meeting is happening is itself something that the participants sustain cooperatively from moment to moment, for example by the way they visibly detach from the meeting if they have to deal with a distraction, or else apologize if their detachment proves not visible enough. The range of means by which people display these sorts of social "moves" to one another is alarmingly unbounded, and it would be good for the designer to understand some of them. The designer should not assume that the social world gets made automatically or through the kinds of simple, discrete, overt signals that are normally reified as command sets on computers. The point is important because not every category that we use in our institutional analysis will reappear as the name of a datastructure in our technical design; such conflations between analysis and specification is central to the device-centered approach, and it is calamitous. (9) People's interests, knowledge, backgrounds, goals, and situational understandings overlap. People are neither wholly coincident with one another nor wholly separate from one another. People are different, but they are not totally different, and indeed the act of defining a difference already presupposes a shared background of meanings against which any sort of definition could take place. Overlap is a crucial resource for negotiating relationships -- conversations commonly take the form of establishing commonalities and using these as a point of departure for exploring differences -- and they are also fundamental to the life of many institutions -- no individual can possibly know or do everything, so knowledge and skill is subdivided into overlapping regions that cover the whole territory while still allowing people to inform and evaluate one another, provide competent third parties for disputes, shake up assumptions, and so on. (10) The institutions that organize activities do not wholly constrain them. One common metaphor likens institutions to the rules of a game, which define the ontology of the game while leaving players free to choose their strategies for playing it. That metaphor makes the dividing line between fixed rules and variable strategies seem clearer than it usually is, and it also suggests an intrinsic fairness that real institutions usually lack, but it is certainly an improvement on theories that portray society as a prison that totally specifies its powerless inmates' actions. Analyses of particular institutional settings should take seriously the very hard problem of what "freedom" means, and who has it, and to what extents, and under what conditions. //4 The personal sphere Those are some guidelines for an institutional analysis of a design problem. They obviously don't substitute for an analysis of an actual case, but at least they will fend off some mistakes. Applying these guidelines to the case at hand -- characterizing the design space of networked personal and site-specific devices -- will not be easy, simply because we are asking an extremely abstract question. We are characterizing a large design space that encompasses activities in dozens of institutions, and not designing a particular system for a particular setting, and so we will need to proceed on an appropriately abstract level. Let us begin with the person. Whereas "individual" is meant as a neutral term for a human being, the "person" is an individual as defined by a society and its institutions. The "self" is a person's own subjective experience and understanding of himself or herself, and a "persona" comprises the representations of himself or herself that a person projects to a given segment of the world. Let us say that every person carries around a "sphere" of social involvements. This includes (roughly speaking) the person's property, social relationships, the media channels they monitor, and (as communication scholars say) the "messages" that they are exposed to through various routes. The phrase "personal sphere" sets up a contrast with "private sphere", which has historically meant the family home, and "public sphere", which means the realm of public culture and debate. In defining such a term, I am obviously headed toward design: ubiquitous computing makes it much easier to carry your personal sphere with you. You can carry virtual documents and devices in the sort of "knapsack" that I mentioned above, you can maintain mutual awareness and communications with everyone you know, you can use portable media devices to keep your personal media environment running wherever you go, and you are obviously bombarded with messages most of the whole time. Your personal sphere, however, is analytically distinct from the aspects of it that happen to be supported by a particular technology. No technology that we design will ever mediate the entirety of most of a person's relationships, whether with friends, family members, coworkers, or celebrities. The "extended individual" of person-plus-sphere already exists -- by means, for example, of a magazine, Walkman, paper letter, or cell phone -- prior to anything that we might design, and is more complex than we as designers will ever know about. We are merely amplifying something that is already going on. Defining the individual's own sphere is easy enough; what is harder is analyzing what happens in the relationships and interactions among people. Those spheres are somehow brought together. This is a topic that is very hard to think about without institutional ideas. Let us draw on two concepts, one institutional and one not. I've mentioned both before. Barry Wellman talks about the "networked individualism" that new communication technologies bring about. We have always had social networks, but new technologies allow us to be in much more continual touch with everyone in our networks. We become like air traffic controllers who keep track of all of the planes in their airspace. The point is not that we are literally aware of the whereabouts and current activities of everybody that we know, only that we have been pushed much further in that direction. Even though networked individualism is a compelling idea, however, I am always uncomfortable with theoretical constructs that declare qualitatively new conditions to have arisen just because technology has helped us do more of the things we already did before. As a result, I prefer to think of networked individualism as a permanent condition, one that already held during the Stone Age and that has become more intense in fits and starts throughout history. On this conception, networked individualism is independent of particular technologies; the concept encourages us to go looking for the diverse means by which people maintain an ongoing awareness of one another -- visits, parties, rumors, letters, phone calls, Web pages, and so on, all of them embedded in the society's larger workings in various ways. One weakness of the concept of networked individualism is that the concept of a social network does not distinguish between different kinds of relationships. Your doctor is part of your social network, but you probably have a different kind of relationship to your doctor than you have to your parents, your UPS driver, or the people you went to school with. So let us complicate the concept of a social network somewhat; let us label every link in the social network -- that is, every relationship between individuals -- with the institution that organizes it. Some relationships are organized by the medical system, others by the political system, and so on. To really make the concept work for design, we need to add in artificial individuals such as corporations that present a more or less unified persona to each of their customers, but we can omit that detail for purposes of suggesting how the analysis might work. The idea, now, is that every person maintains some degree of continual awareness of everyone to whom they are related by various kinds of institutional connection. And indeed the term "person" is appropriate because we now have the makings of a nontrivial of the architecture of the person. Every institution defines its relationships in great detail, including coincident and conflicting interests, language and things to talk about, genres and other conventions of interaction, and much else. This leads us to the second useful idea, Bill Dutton's analysis of "access" across a wide range of relationships. He uses the term more broadly than I will, starting from the familiar notion of access to information and extending it to "access" to a person. Access always has conditions, is always negotiated, and is always organized by laws, norms, and customs. When we put the two ideas together, networked individualism plus a general idea of access, we get a complicated but conceptually appealing picture of the social world. Every relationship is organized by the rules that go with its institution, and that includes the structures and practices by which people get access to one another. Personal spheres come together in the ways that institutions organize, whether through mutual secrecy, negotiated merger, or the emergence of relatively stable collective spheres for dyads, groups, or publics. //5 Citizenship in civil society How do we bring this down to earth? Past a certain point there is no substitute for the analysis of particular cases. All a conceptual framework provides is some assurance that the right questions will get asked. So consider the institutions of public debate -- the "public sphere" in contrast to the personal spheres that enter into it. Scholars argue that a healthy polity requires a developed civil society, and (in an article entitled "The Practical Republic: Social Skills and the Progress of Citizenship") I have offered a theory of what that means: practices whereby citizens can become publicly associated with issues and form themselves into a matrix of relationships among issue-advocates. This matrix has several dimensions. Thus, for example, an advocate for liberalized policies on immigrants in California will develop relationships with advocates for similar policies in other states (geographic dimension), with advocates for liberalized policies on immigration at the federal and local levels (vertical dimension), with advocates for immigrants' rights in other institutional spheres besides legislative politics, such as the university and the courts (institutional dimension), and with advocates for other forms of policy liberalization and other forms of minority rights (ideological dimension). Issues, furthermore, are living things, and for every position on every issue it has to be someone's job to track their development by noticing, absorbing, remembering, synthesizing, and interpreting all of the facts that are relevant to that issue. That means keeping track of events in the news whose significance might be disputed, identifying patterns among those events, arguing their own position, hearing about the arguments being offered by proponents of different positions, articulating responses to them, and so on. This is information work, and an conscientious issue-advocate will soon develop a network of various types of players. Each of the relationships in that network will be organized by an institution, depending on the individuals' roles; for example, issue-advocates' relationships to legislative staffers differ from their relationships to reporters, experts, newspaper editors, or program officers at foundations. Issue-advocates have cooperative and competitive relationships among themselves as well, for example in negotiating common positions when bills come before the legislature. They invest in deepening those relationships because they expect to need them in the future; trust is often required, and they understand that they might fall on opposite sides as often as on the same side. The practices of issue-advocacy, in short, are highly developed, and they are basically analogous on all levels of governance from the global to the local. From a design standpoint, the question is how those practices might be supported and their conditions further democratized. Of course, some people feel no strong sympathy with people who engage in issue-advocacy as a profession, especially the ones who advocate positions that they disagree with. But it is widely agreed that civil society is stronger when the means of issue-advocacy are widely distributed, and that is a goal to which design can aspire. The idea is not to invent new institutions of issue-advocacy, which is much more a social project than a technical one, as to democratize the institutions that exist. Observe that the problem has two levels: tools and skills. We can provide tools to people who already have the skills; unfortunately, the skills remain a secret. In fact, the process of identifying oneself with an issue and becoming inserting into the ongoing matrix of relationships among issue-advocates is crucial: until they find themselves part of such a functioning network with its personalized trust relationships and flows of information, it is entirely natural for citizens to experience themselves as powerless outsiders. So there is a barrier to overcome: not just providing the tools but providing an opening that makes the role of full-fledged citizen imaginable. This is one area where school is more important than technology; pedagogies that try to teach democracy by convening groups for deliberation actually do democracy a disservice, in my view, because communal deliberation is an advanced skill, one whose purpose and workings can only be understood by citizens who have inserted themselves into the matrix of civil society. Much better to start with the skills of issue-advocacy, one of which is sitting down with other issue-advocates to hold a very structured discussion about potential common ground over an emerging issue. Some of the other skills of advocacy, such as writing opinion columns or speaking in public, are also more about school than technology. Technology makes some of them easier to teach -- many students find it motivating to send their columns to distant readers, and watching yourself on video makes it much easier to learn public speaking. But simple tools go a long way in that kind of teaching, and the hardest design problems pertain to curriculum and lesson plans rather than to the technology as such. Let us assume that things decompose so neatly, then, and that the skills can be taught in a controlled environment in school without specialized technology. (This is one of the advantages of approaching the design problem on the assumption that you are amplifying existing practices rather than inventing new ones, which would require you to diffuse the technology and the skills at the same time.) Teaching the skills of issue-advocacy is probably not enough to bring a robust civil society into existence, and technology probably has a role to play in enabling people to get into the game despite everything else they have going on in their lives. To explore how, we need merely walk through the various relationships that the institutions of civil society define. To start with, civil society requires that people become publicly identified with issues. The obvious approach is to let everyone build a Web site about their issue, and that is surely part of it. It is still too hard for ordinary people to build their own Web sites, and there is reason to believe that ISP's -- wanting to minimize traffic and simplify their lives -- are happy that way. But even if we solve that problem, a Web page is only one part of a larger system. Putting something on the Web only makes it "public" in a narrow sense. What matters is whether the individual becomes associated with their issue in the minds of relevant parties in the process: the other issue-advocates, editors and other gatekeepers, citizens with particular interests in the issue, and so on, and for that purpose it is necessary to equip citizens with the capacity to make noise. Internet campaigns are good for this purpose; they may not reach "the public", but they reach the citizens who are already integrated into the matrix of civil society. Much experience has accumulated with this process, and institutional analysis for design should be continuous with a larger culture of best-practices transfer. (On the importance of best-practices transfer for civic life, see Carmen Sirianni and Lewis Friedland, Civic Innovation in America: Community Empowerment, Public Policy, and the Movement for Civic Renewal, University of California Press, 2001.) The Internet also lowers the barriers for ordinary citizens to become issue-advocates by providing online access to research sources and the buzz of backchannel information-sharing and discussion that lies at the foundation of networked individualism among advocates, and best-practices study in this context would also facilitate both social learning and technical design. But because my focus here is on mobility and physical environments, however, let us consider the aspects of day-to-day political work that happen away from the desktop computer terminal. The accelerating time-frames of political work, particularly when relevant bills are moving in a legislature, do often require real-time engagement among issue-advocates who are working the same side, and it would be very helpful if an issue-advocate could stay involved in the action while riding on the commuter train or waiting in the doctor's office. One dimension of the advocate's personal sphere is a sophisticated media environment, and it is easy to imagine tools based on heuristic content analysis and digital libraries that monitor, organize, and present the media from the point of view of a given issue. Several specialized news services already exist to serve this purpose, and new tools could clear the ground for more. The issue-advocate is an excellent example of networked individualism, and new tools for supporting a continual immersion in the matrix of civil society would be helpful as well. Cell phones are part of the story, but it would be extremely useful to have general-purpose tools for managing a portfolio of relationships, including functionalities like a call log, surveillance of the public statements of the relevant players, and ready access to the documents that are related to current projects with a given individual. If the fine structure of these relationships can be analyzed in detail, then it should become easy (for example) for an issue-advocate to receive an item of information from a network contact and make it available on their own Web site with a few simple commands. The idea is to break the process of managing the constellation of real-time details into simple units, starting with the air traffic controller metaphor but moving it out of the control tower and onto the street. Clearly, then, the issue-advocate -- whether professional or ordinary citizen -- needs a complex informational window on the world. This window can be provided by a conventional portable computer, but other forms are easy to imagine. In a world of cheap display screens, for example, it should be easy enough for public and private spaces of many kinds to be equipped with large screens as a matter of course, so that anybody who happens to be in the vicinity can grab one of them wirelessly to give their personal sphere more room. This would be the electronic version of spreading out one's papers to work, except that the papers can now include embedded video feeds and the like. The transition among various physical forms of the personal sphere, for example spreading out from handheld device to different combinations of public display screens and back, is an interesting interface design problem, and the needs of an issue-advocate with a highly organized personal sphere should make an excellent case study for it. Even though it prepares its ground years in advance, issue-advocacy is ultimately focused on the legislature, and few institutions require electronic modernizing more urgently. For legislatures throughout the industrial world, the central question is whether legislators should be able to vote from their home districts or whether they should still be required to appear in person on the floor. It is easy to see both sides of the argument: legislators have a responsibility to immerse themselves in the lives and views of the constituents, and they also have a responsibility to deliberate together in the depth that only face-to-face interaction currently affords. It is interesting to contrast the case of the legislators to that of the finance people in New York. They too serve as mediators between particular situations in the field -- their investments -- and their negotiations with one another. Each side exerts its force, extensive travel is unavoidable, and the real question is where they will make their home -- or as traveling professional have long said, their "base". In the case of finance, argues Saskia Sassen, the answer is increasingly that their make their base in New York or London. The reason is clear enough: their investments are too interchangeable and too spread out geographically for any other base to make much sense. Legislators, however, are stuck with constituents in a particular geographic area, and the unhappy result is that the forces from home and the capital are equally strong. Forcing them to appear on the floor to cast their votes forces them to be in town, and recent reforms in the US Congress that limit most votes to mid-week are the best simple compromise. The bigger picture, though, is that the legislature on every level of government is the focal point of an institutional circuitry that reaches through layers of issue-advocates, journalists, and others down to the level of ordinary citizens. That circuitry works badly, and the technological needs of issue-advocates provide a point of departure for imagining how it might be remade. The infrastructure of politics has been revolutionized in the last quarter-century through the membership-mobilization methods of the best-capitalized interest groups, and what's needed is a common platform that allows those sorts of infrastructures (by which we really mean organizational arrangements as well as infrastructures in any narrow sense) to be built more easily by anyone, much as the Internet provides a common platform for the low-overhead construction of distributed applications of diverse sorts. The point is not simply that legislators should be connected directed to their constituency as a whole, useful as that might be for newsletters and constituent services. The point, rather, is that the matrix of issue-advocates who mediate between legislators and citizens should have a clear line of sight to the action on the floor and strong support for their real-time activities of analysis and negotiation. The more widely accessible that infrastructure is to ordinary citizens, the better. //6 Conclusion This analysis of the informational life of the issue-advocate, however brief, provides some hint of the complexity of institutional analysis for design in a world of ubiquitous computing. The starting-point is the institution: the way that civil society, for example, organizes a person's embedding in the larger social world, the informational architecture of that embedding, and then the physical forms that the architecture of that particular form of personhood might take in an untethered technological environment. Serious design, of course, could only begin once several such institutional case-studies were worked through in detail, and not just in the sketchy armchair manner of this essay but in an empirical and participatory manner, iterating with focus groups and mockups to bring some more reality to bear on our all-too-self-confident technological imagination. At that point, once institutional analysis has taken hold, computer science as it is already constituted is reasonably comfortable with the process of abstraction and systematization that converts a series of domain analyses to proposals about middleware that could support them all. At that point it becomes appropriate to engage in the kinds of device- centered analysis that I sketched and postponed above. Ultimately, the role of institutional analysis in design should become relatively comfortable. System design is accustomed to reckoning with the structures of social life, and it is accustomed to providing tools that unconstrain the choices and strategies of a user community. The relation between institutional analysis and technical design cannot become entirely comfortable, however. Social structure and the formal structures of computing are different sorts of thing. And technical work is itself embedded in institutions and itself subject to the same sorts of forces and limits as the institutions that good designers should commit themselves to studying. Design collides with reality ever more complicatedly in the new world of socially embedded computing, but at least we can hope to approach those complications more consciously than before, and more responsibly. end
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