Together designed, an actor network approach to the design of websites
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The document discusses an actor-network approach to website design. It argues that user experience with a website, like the Australian Asbestos Network site, should be viewed as a collective, distributed phenomenon rather than something solely subjective. The website and its elements, like content, interface design, and user submissions, form a heterogeneous network of human and non-human actors that shape user perceptions and experiences through inscription, formatting, and by prescribing frameworks for interaction. On this view, aesthetic experience with a website emerges from relations throughout the network, not just from within the individual user.
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Together designed, an actor network approach to the design of websites
- 1. Together Designed: an actor- network approach to the design of websites Dr Mark Cypher Murdoch University 1 ( Please read the notes in Slideshare )
- 2. The Australian Asbestos Network- website http://www.australianasbestosnetwork.org.au/ 2
- 3. http://www.stephenthomas.com/about/index.php - neo‐classical economic model which assumes there is value in individual action and independent components - aesthetic experience as bodily and singularly subjective - “focuses on the interplay of these constituents of the totality of a person acting, sensing, thinking, feeling, and meaning making in a setting, including his/her perception and sensation of his/her own actions”. (Wright, P., Wallace, J., and McCarthy, J. 2008. Aesthetics and experience-centered design.) User Experience Design is the process of evaluating all the components of an application to make the whole worth more than the sum of its parts 3
- 4. • Dewey’s description of experience: • “ [W]hat men do and suffer, what they strive for, love, believe and endure…—in short, processes of experiencing. . . . is ‘double barrelled’ in that it recognizes in its primary integrity no division between act and material, subject and object, but contains them both in an unanalyzed totality 4
- 5. Actor-Network Theory /Method (ANT) Basic concepts Actor Symmetry -human and non-human, can and should be described in the same terms-actors/actants , • differences between them are generated in the network of relations • actors for the most part act ‘in relation’ as part of a collective Network----designates a mode of inquiry not a thing • A heterogeneous network of aligned interests or how organisations/ things mobilise, juxtapose and hold together the bits and pieces out of which they are composed . • —replaces, society, subjectivity, action, power 5
- 6. • Part of an ANT method 1. - first look at the associations that make up a thing like the AAN website 2. - later look at how these relations shape it 1. Associations that make up a thing like the AAN website • EG, Australian Asbestos Network website is a heterogeneous collective - embedded in a hard drive in a server in Melbourne, coded in HTML, CSS and ASP.NET, with various social software, computers, journalists, communities of interest, content writers, programmers, designers, portions of the text itself and users - Each actor • acts on others, ‘mediate’ one another, modify, translate and delegate their various interests • is relatively indispensible, • provides affordance for the next actor in a chain • each is co-ordinated and ordered in a specific sequence, thus defined by their association 6
- 7. 2. How do relations shape the website - practices include a whole range of actors that extends far beyond people. • Website as an inscription device –excellent means of gathering disseminating and accumulating inscriptions (content, writings, documents, illustrations, and objects) • allow people to see a distant thing and then travel back to the source and bring back more such resources • cycle of accumulation, format inscriptions into a centre that creates influence, knowledge, power, enrols others (becoming more valuable) • Valuable knowledge is underwritten and can be described by considering this collective cycle of the accumulation of inscription 7
- 8. Inscriptions are also scripts • Akrich - inscriptions act “like a film script, technical objects define a framework of action together with the actors and the space in which they are supposed to act” • visual, technical and material inscriptions force my eye, hand, and intention around the page and thus guides me and contributes to the task at hand • Users following prescribed scripts (computers require scripts, websites require interfaces with scripts, visual composition) actors are prescribed and do what is expected • Users are caught up in contested ‘modes of ordering’ or ‘patterning’ – thus actions are in part collectively coordinated by inscription 8
- 9. Human experience embedded in the object world On submission stories themselves are also shaped, formatted, becoming artifacts with a network of connotations Users stories become an artefact with a network of connotations – that have been attached to it through all the intervening translations Interface, story and the experience is an outcome of such constant and never ending sociotechnical collective shaping 9
- 10. Aesthetic experience as distributed and collective - assumption- that aesthetic experience is singularly subjective (KANT- 1784) Porter (2009) sensations are not direct empirical imprints of some outer material reality • Language of affect and aesthetics acquired as a prerequisite to social life, sensations are learned thought structures • Hennion (2007) -aesthetic taste “is a collective technique, whose analysis helps us to understand the ways we make ourselves sensitized, to things, • Hutchins (1995) - cognitive anthropologist -“One cannot perform the computations without constructing the setting; thus, in some sense, constructing the setting is part of the computation” • Aesthetic experience with the AAN website is always made in relation , ordered , framed by a setting- or other things. Therefore aesthetic experience is distributed throughout the collective 10
- 11. 11 Users perceptions and experiences are translated through the methods of instruction the visual and technical composition of actors provides
- 12. 12
Editor's Notes
- This was a presentation given at the ANZCA 2013 conference in Fremantle, Western Australia. (Publication Forthcoming)ABSTRACTUsually the visual design of websites is one of the core values for users. What is not so well considered is the way a greater intangible and often elusive network of actors supports the enterprise as a whole, and as such also creates value. Rather than focusing on the design process as the sole domain of humans that grant a website symbolic and interpretive value. This paper uses an actor-network theory (ANT) approach to describe how the Australian Asbestos Network (AAN) website is not only a continuously generated effect of the relations within which it is located. But that the value and credibility the website gains is a negotiated effect of these same relations. Far from a static object a website is a thing whose shape and ontological constitution is manipulated by a whole range of mediating actors. Following Bruno Latour, a thing is much more than a euphemism for a docile object. Rather a thing is a gathering, an assembly and entirely collective. To better understand the heterogeneous makeup of things, like websites, requires taking into account both human and nonhumans and how they come to be assembled together in order to get something done. Therefore things like users, objects and websites, achieve their goals not as singular actors but through a coordinated and sequential series of relations- as a collective. Therefore, this paper pays more attention to what circulates between and through different actors, that then compels them to act together. In keeping with the ANT method requires that we must first look at the relations and only later look at how these associations shape some-thing like the AAN website. The goals of the AAN website are to disseminate credible medical and historical information about asbestos and allow others to express their involvement with the asbestos industry in Australia. In part it achieves this effect through the most mundane yet important ability to render events, places and people mobile. In turn this allows traces, experiences and stories to be accumulated and brought forth for others. That the AAN website becomes a collection point, or what Latour calls a centre of calculation is a testament to the websites collective ability to radiate out to collect and then accumulate more stories. The effect is that the accumulation of these narratives enrols and translates other actors. This in turn creates a larger circumference of influence. Thus the flow of more actors and traces is subject to a kind of funnelling, which reframes and mediates the content and indeed the concerns of the production team. That the content appears credible and trustworthy enough for several organisations around the world to use the AAN site as a test case. Is a testament to the value that a stable and coherent network of actors grants to the content of the website. Similarly the representations, credible content and the aesthetic experiences they invoke, on the AAN website is also considered to be the coordinated effect of chains of actors. In contrast Robins and Holmes recent research states that within the first few seconds in which a website is seen, users are more likely to consider the content credible if it is given a greater level of aesthetic treatment. Alternatively, this paper argues that aesthetics are not the domain of a singular subject. Nor can aesthetic judgements be seen as an unmediated reaction to visual phenomena. Rather aesthetics is a collective means of learning to be sensitised to other things, events and situations. Thus how these relations are managed (in real time) must also ameliorate the aesthetic experience. Therefore, what we may consider as a connection between aesthetic treatment and credibility in websites is an outcome of heterogeneous and sociotechnically shaped actor-networks; not just the visual design.
- SLIDE2This paper is about an actor network case study done on the The Australian Asbestos Network- website. Not exactly the prettiest website in the world, but when I first came across this site it was deeply affecting (mainly because I have renovated lots of houses that contained asbestos) and really I wanted to know how the site implicated me in its affects. It has obviously affected lots of other people in the same way because the gets site several thousand hits a week.The website describes itself as-bringing together historical, public health and medical information about asbestos in Australia. The site has been put together by a team of journalists and historians working with experts in the medical and public health fields, advocates and legal practitioners, as well as those directly affected – workers, families and carers. Supported by a National Health and Medical Research (NHMRC) grant, the project aim has been to assemble authoritative information authenticated by experts and independent of any commercial interest. By telling the story of asbestos in Australia, we hope to increase community understanding of asbestos and its legacy, and to provide information to try to reduce future risk. (NEXT SLIDE)
- SLIDE3So as an aside I want to quickly talk about user experience design which is often described along these lines It is the process of evaluating all the components of an application to make the whole worth more than the sum of its partsSo user experience designers assume that the elements that make a users experience can be separated out and that these elements will take into account the sum of these partsWhen we look at Stephen Thomas’s image it clearly shows that the experience can be broken down and filtered into a user’s experience, or everything about the experience can be constituted out of these independent components.OF course this model off user experience fits nicely with an economic model of individual action It also assumes the users experience is singular Wright Wallace and McCarthy hammer this anthropocentric point home when they define the user experience as “focusing on the interplay of these constituents of the totality of a person acting, sensing, thinking, feeling, and meaning making in a setting, including his/her perception and sensation of his/her own actions”.
- SLIDE4Interestingly Wright ,Wallace and McCarthy also pin point the American pragmatist Dewey as being the founding father of experience and indeed user experience design , when they use this quote from Dewey about experience “ [W]hat men do and suffer, what they strive for, love, believe and endure…—in short, processes of experiencing. . . . is ‘double barrelled’ in that it recognizes in its primary integrity no division between act and material, subject and object, but contains them both in an unanalyzed totalityWhat Wright Wallace and McCarthy fail to mention here is that Dewey did not define any singular components and infact makes no distinction between subjects and objects. But rather experience contains all these elements in some kind of collective unanalyzed totality. (NEXT SLIDE)
- SLIDE5So this is where Actor Network theory/ method or ANT comes in, its very good at providing descriptions of collective backboxes- or what Dewey describes as an unanalyzed totalityThere are many concepts that make up ANT but given the time we will stick to the basics, This includes ActorsWhich are both human and non-human, they are usually described in the same terms ( this word actors or actant is used to avoid the subject/object binary)Actors are constructed or generated out of the relations they find themselves in Actors can only act in relation as part of a collective OF course the other half of the equation is theNetwork – this describes more a mode of inquiry than a thing – is not a technical networkNetwork describes how chains of actors hold themselves together to get something done, like make meaning. The term Network is used to replace assumptions about society, subjectivity, action, powerNEXT SLIDE
- SLIDE6Rather than looking at how individuals work to construct the site ---from an ANT viewpoint we need to look at the different coordinated effect of such relationsThis means we 1. - first look at the associations that make up a thing like the AAN website 2. - later look at how these relations shape it So the AAN website is made of lots of different actors embedded in a hard drive in a server in Melbourne, coded in HTML, CSS and ASP.NET, computers, journalists, communities of interest, content writers, designers, portions of the text itself and users Each of these is an actor because eachacts on and mediates others – when I code a webdesign into html and CSS I am limited and influenced by the limitation of such primitive codeIS relatively indispensable, you can’t have website without a computerProvides affordance for the next actor in a chain of relations- you won’t have much of a website without a server, internet service provider or a computer, etc, etcEach actor is ordered into a specific sequence, if the sequence is broken then the whole association falls apartNEXT SLIDE
- SLIDE7So this brings us to how do relations shape the website and as such (co-constitute others in its enactment)For a start we already know that that the practices of the AAN site extends far beyond people.Websites are very good at accumulating (content, in the form of writings, documents, illustrations, and objects) these are considered inscriptions The beautiful thing about inscriptions is that they enable me to see Wittenoom and experience some of its after affects of asbestos without going there and being personally affectedThese stories, illustrations and photographs are then subject to formatting, via digitization, journalistic convention, historical record keeping, and web designer placement, thus these inscriptions become more valuable through this cycle of accumulation and as these inscriptions become more valuable from these relations they form a sort of centre like a centre of accumulation, with all the power and authority this collective provides There is nothing new about this cycle of accumulation, universities, governments, mapmakers and institutions having been doing it for ages. But this cycle of accumulation process does suggest that the generation of content is not beholden to one person or professional skill set. Rather how that content and knowledge is made possible and thus valuable in relation, by a collective that enables its construction, and conversion into something mobile, increases its sphere of influence thus enrolling others, thus creating greater value.NEXT SLIDE
- SLIDE8Inscriptions are also scripts, that according to Madeline Akrich act “like a film script, technical objects define a framework of action together with the actors and the space in which they are supposed to act”So when I go to the AAN website there are several scripts built into the interface, that direct my eye and my hand around – thus these scripts contributes to the task at hand Users are also subject to embodied scripts in that they are prescribed to perform certain tasks, just like computers who are also prescribed to do what is expected. Having said all this none of these scripts means that users and computers will do as you would expect- quite the contrary. Non the less users are caught up in contested ‘modes of ordering’ or ‘patterning’ – thus actions, are in part collectively coordinated by inscriptionNEXT SLIDE
- SLIDE 9This then suggests that Websites employ collective mediations that inevitably involve designing arrangements of humans and objects into accounts of human experienceThat is, if humans are always already in relation with others then human experience is inevitably embedded in the object worldWhen we look at this mundane image of the ‘tell your story’ section of the AAN website requires users to email their stories in. the interface is the result of the designers running out of money and the content management system not easily allowing a forum to be built. But it is also shaped by what the designers saw as a more personal way for people to submit stories, i.e. email is to someone, forum is to anything and anyone Nonetheless when the stories are finally submitted they are edited, shaped, formatted, becoming artifacts with a network of connotations In this way the users story is no longer a users story, if it ever was, but an artefact with a network of connotations – … that have been attached to it through all the intervening translations In this way the interface, the stories and the users interactions with the “tell your story” section, are as YanevaAlbena states, relations in which "the social is not outside it, at a cosmic distance from its objects. It is in the objects 'world” and subject to sociotechnical shaping.NEXT SLIDE
- SLIDE10This then leads us to aesthetic experience – the assumption of course is that aesthetic experience is about bodily sensation, that is purely singular and subjective , this idea stems of KANT from the late 1700’s In contrast Porter in 2009 describes aesthetic sensations as not direct empirical imprints of some outer material reality, They are prismatic reflections of the languages of sensation whose acquisition is a prerequisite to social life. Such structures of thought are deeply embedded, in ways and in places that reflect some of the most urgent questions of meaning and value Hennion also describes aesthetic taste “is a collective technique, whose analysis helps us to understand the ways we make ourselves sensitized, to things, to ourselves, to situations and to moments, while simultaneously controlling how those feelings might be shared and discussed with others Edwin Hutchins - cognitive anthropologist -“One cannot perform the computations without constructing the setting; thus, in some sense, constructing the setting is part of the computation. ). Consequently how these relations are managed (in real time) must also ameliorate the aesthetic experience.In this way the aesthetic experience of the AAN site is always made in relation, and as such is ordered or framed by a setting- or other things. Indeed sitting at a computer in a comfortable chair, keyboard, mouse and screen at the correct ergonomic height means that aesthetic treatment involves the laborious and mundane and exacting effort of getting into the right frame of mind (Hennion 2001: 15). In this way aesthetic treatment is equally personal, whilst collective involving a "… receptivity to certain sates.” (Hutchins 1995: 159).NEXT SLIDE
- SLIDE11Visiting a site for the first time is pedagogical – certainly when I visit the site each time I see something new.Nevertheless when a user visits the site they must learn something new through a relation with others- that is the links in a site are usually colour coded for use, the menu bar is usually in the same spot throughout the site so we assume that the menu bar will always be there, etc , etc,Or in a Latour’s words this pedagogical relation is about being affected by the, “hitherto unrecognisable differences through the mediation of the artificially created setup” (Latour 2004: 210).Indeed seeing the video interviews and audio stories from the asbestos stories section imparts the differences in the experience of asbestos that were previously hiddenThat I first felt a sense of dread, when I visited the AAN site is close to the generative affect of the compositions of visual, material technical and social actors, manifesting in me differences that were previously unacknowledged. This sense is close to what Michael Polanyi (1966) referrers to as tacit knowing. According to Polanyi, in practice we develop extraneous knowledge of things that cannot be put into words. In relation to the AAN website this is tacit knowledge reserved for those who have been asbestos workers, renovators or family members of those effected by Asbestos. In this way viewing and interacting with the AAN website is a form of “experiential pedagogy, of constantly submitting your sensorial to new sensual worlds that sit uncomfortably within your ethos”(Highmore, 2010: 135).these pedagogical effects teach users in the most subtle of ways to be affected, that is to be influenced by the pedagogy of minute relations that cumulatively make up the composition (Latour 2004: 210). Or in ANT terms Users perceptions and experiences are translated through the methods of instruction the visual and technical composition of actors providesNEXT SLIDE
- SLIDE12So in conclusion the AAN website as a network arrangement facilitates, affords and co-constitutes the so called ‘social’ experience of engaging online information.The AAN website entangles aesthetic experience, not in relation to an external heuristic of beauty or human centered sensation . Rather, it’s more that a specific composition of actors continuously generates an aesthetic, which coerces us to do, then learn, then feel in a way that is specific to this collective at this particular point in time. Therefore and in contrast to the user experience model, ANT problematizes the need to separate out subjects/objects in terms of practice, competency and the effects and affects such technical and human configurations and practices have on other actorsInstead, all are, produced and designed together in a vast actor-network collectiveNEXT SLIDE