A transcript of Episode 249 of UX Podcast. James Royal-Lawson and Per Axbom are joined by Genevieve Bell to discuss digital anthropology, cyber physical systems, and the educational needs that have evolved.
This transcript has been machine generated and checked by James Green.
Transcript
James Royal-Lawson
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Computer voice
UX Podcast Episode 249.
[Music]
Per Axbom
You’re listening to UX Podcast coming to you from Stockholm, Sweden.
James Royal-Lawson
Helping the UX community explore ideas and share knowledge since 2011.
Per Axbom
We are your hosts Per Axbom…
James Royal-Lawson
…and James Royal-Lawson.
Per Axbom
With listeners in 197 countries and territories in the world from Burundi to Romania,
James Royal-Lawson
Genevieve Bell is an anthropologist. Originally from Australia, Genevieve spent almost two decades with Intel over in the US. As their resident anthropologist, she’s credited with establishing User Experience at the organisation.
Per Axbom
Genevieve has received numerous awards and accolades, including an Officer of the Order of Australia in the 2020 Australia Day Honours for her distinguished service to education.
James Royal-Lawson
During the past three years, Genevieve has been with the Australian National University, working on a project to create a new field of engineering – the 3A Institute where she is Director.
Per Axbom
Stay with us until the end for our post-interview reflections.
[Music]
James Royal-Lawson
So I think, I think many of us when we actually think of technical systems, we think of the modern digital technologies, but technical systems, they’ve been around with us an awful long time, haven’t they Genevieve?
Genevieve Bell
They have, and it’s nice to get to talk to you and Per, James. And often when I start conversations, not usually podcasts, but other conversations, I’d start by actually acknowledging where I am and that’s partly a story about an older technical system. So, today I’m sitting on the lands of the Ngunawal and Ngambri people, and I want to pay my respects to the elders past and present, and to acknowledge that this conversation will be listened to on the lands of traditional owners and traditional elders all over the world, and I want to pay my respects to them too.
And for me, part of acknowledging the place where you’re standing, or the place where you’re starting is, whenever I want to think about technical systems, or about building the future or telling stories about the future, I like to imagine that most of those stories didn’t come out of nowhere, right? They start somewhere when someone, and I’m lucky enough to live these days in a country where humans have been building technical systems well, for as closes as forever as we can probably get. So there are technical systems in Australia that date back 40 to 60,000 years. And I was…
James Royal-Lawson
60,000 years?
Genevieve Bell
Yeah, absolutely of humans, deliberately creating structures that changed the world in order to create different kinds of experiences. I was lucky enough two years ago to go visit one in a town called brewarrina, which is on the New South Wales Queensland border. So, you’re thinking of a map of Australia, go two thirds of the way up and mostly to the right. And there’s a river system there, and there’s a place where a large river bends basically and on that bend there are a series of stone fish weirs, archaeologists argue about how old they are. But the running argument is somewhere between 4 to 40,000 years old. In either instance, that makes them some of the oldest human built technical structures in the world. And these are deliberate right, they extend over a kilometre in distance down a river. They are a series of stone U-shaped pens that were built to contain the fish as the water moves up and water flows down that river and the fish move up that river…
James Royal-Lawson
Filters the fish, and flow of the river?
Genevieve Bell
Basically, yeah, there are a series of fish fish traps or they built like fish nets. That is the origin story of them that the one of the ancestors, you know, decided to build these stone fish nets. They were last photographed in use in the 19 teens. So a system that is thousands, if not 10s of thousands of years in the making. It suggests an incredibly robust understanding of hydrology, of fish behaviour.
These must have been carefully tended and curated over seasons and years and decades. And they were not built for the sake of them right they weren’t because someone said I’ve got some stone lying around, we should do something with that. The stone comes from quite some distance. It’s dry stone if you know anything about that kind of technology. So dry stone walls familiar I suspect in your part of the world as in mine. And they were utilised with complicated social patterns about who tended them who looked after the fish, but ultimately what they were the service of allowing multiple nations to gather on the banks of that river and trade, conduct rituals exchange information.
Be well, human at scale, right. And so here’s this system that says, the humans that lived in that place understood stone. But they understood hydrology, they understood the behaviours of fish, and they thought about people and human society. And so whenever I think about technical systems in my now life 21st century, I like to hold that idea in the back of my head that it is possible to build technical systems that are not just technologies, right? They are systems of knowledge, they are ways of understanding the environment, ways of making sense of and supporting human behaviour, and that those things don’t have to be at odds with each other, they can actually exist as a system of systems. And so it’s kind of this powerful image that sits in the back of my head most days.
James Royal-Lawson
And that system, because if it lasted that long, 40,000 plus years, then they must have been, you said, managing it, but I guess you mean, they’re also iterating it because…
Genevieve Bell
…absolutely, there’s evidence of that system, evolving and growing over time of expanding and sort of contracting in terms of where the stones were being moved. And of course, it’s also a system that existed through a period of European colonisation in Australia. So when Europeans first turned up in that set of river valleys in the 18 teens and 1820s, they saw the weirs, they knew that Aboriginal people had fish there. By the time the townships were built there, later in that century, Europeans took some of the rocks out of the river, because they were smooth and well shaped and used them to make the foundations of the town nearby.
Thus both changing the way that system worked, but also taking some of that knowledge and in some ways, inserting it into a whole other structure. And in the meantime, new concrete weirs were put on that river to redirect the water so that it could be used for shipping. And that sort of changed those systems. But no, you’re absolutely right, that’s a period of time, 30, 10,000 years, 40,000 years, multiple changes in the global environment, such that people would have had to have thought differently, and continued to iterate and evolve that system, and work out what worked, and then what they were willing to change and how to go about changing it.
And I think you know, for me, I don’t know about you two, I’ve spent a long time in Silicon Valley, and I spent a long time around engineers and the notion of saying to someone, right? Here’s the thing, that system you’re building, I need to get at least 10,000 years out of it. 40 would be excellent. But 10 is your bottom line is, you know, other than Stewart Brand’s Long Now Foundation, I can’t think of that many people who are thinking on a 10,000 year horizon for a technical system.
James Royal-Lawson
Given that we’ve done those, achieved those kind of technical systems over those kind of periods of time and scale, and given I suppose the frustrations with how many of the systems we’re dealing with today or developing like Silicon Valley, or in the digital sphere, that feels, the frustration feels that we’re not building stuff with that kind of same, well not just due diligence, but thoughtfulness and consideration for how it’s going to do what it wants to do, or should be doing in the beginning. When – did we drop the ball somewhere?
Genevieve Bell
Well, I think we have not necessarily thought about technology inside those other relationships and responsibilities. Right. And I think sort of, for me, one of the things about these fish traps in Brewarrina, and other systems like them, is that they weren’t just about the stone, right? This is not a lithics oriented system. ‘We have a stone system.’ [laughs] It’s not that, right. It was designed with an intentionality of supporting human activity and known human activity and things that mattered. And it was designed into the environment rather than pretending that it didn’t exist with a blank slate.
Right? So there’s a – I’m not sure that we missed the ball, I think it’s that we allowed ourselves to imagine a different starting point. And, we haven’t always thought about technologies that way, if you look back at multiple points in the history of the West in the history of technologies globally, we’ve often been willing to imagine there were different starting points. It didn’t always start with, ‘oh, we have this technology, what will we do with it?’ It often started with – there’s this thing, we should work out how to do better, or I think we’ve been trying to think about how to solve for or a tension we need to resolve. And we’re going to put a technology in the middle to resolve it. But I think the notion of you know, it’s the Field of Dreams approach. We’ll build it and someone will tell us what to do with it. Or worse yet, we’ll build it and someone will put it in a demo on a keynote stage, and then we’ll feel better.
Per Axbom
Which is essentially the story of Twitter. We’ll build it and see what happens.
Genevieve Bell
Yeah, though, I think there were notions sitting inside those early teams at Twitter about what they hoped to build. I think they were very much thinking about how might you share information in new ways. How would you, much as I don’t love this term, how would you democratise the way people could talk? I don’t love it because I think it implies a stable notion of democracy and I would say the last couple of years have taught us that’s possibly not true. And that, by even by our accents, it sounds we probably come from three completely different versions of democracy. So I’m always curious as to which democratisation we imagine. But I think that good people at Twitter, imagined a world.
And that’s one of the questions I always ask, you know, as someone who thinks about technical systems a lot, one of the questions I ask of systems already built, of systems being built, of systems imagined. It’s what’s the world that system thinks it’s building? Like, what is the world that it’s calling into existence? And for whom? And when people you know, imagine a user, what’s the user they’re really imagining? And how do you push enough on that conversation to be able to get to a degree of specificity where you realise that, often unintentionally, that user has a very particular set of characteristics that are not globally shared.
And, you know, I know that sometimes becomes a conversation about bias. But not all bias is intentional or designed to deliberately disenfranchise. I have a colleague of mine, who works for a large scientific organisation here in Australia. And he said to me, not that long ago that they had a bias in their data. I looked at him and went, your data is pictures of fish, you have 40 years worth of pictures of fish? What kind of bias do you have? Like in fish? Like you don’t like orange fish? What’s the problem? He’s like, no, no, the collection method was basically putting a camera in someone’s hands and throwing them off the back of a boat. Often graduate students safely, mind you. But that meant that you could only do it in daytime, and in fair weather. And as a result of that, their data skews daylight and fair weather. So they have a bias towards nighttime and storms. And that is actually an interesting problem for them scientifically, but it’s not like, you know, they had a kind of a – not all bias was sort of intentional about discrimination against the night and storms, it was about the affordances of the system, right?
And so, as we think about what is the world that’s being called into existence, why? And being able to ask people to be much more specific about it than they usually are? Because sometimes it’s unintentional. And sometimes I think there are moments where we are careless, and sometimes where we are callous. And being really clear about what the world is that’s being imagined, is part and parcel for me at least of the work, I think, you know, kind of have a responsibility to do.
James Royal-Lawson
Thinking back to some of the previous kind of like big technological leaps that we’ve had, that the timescales at which they operate on, have been, have been over decades and decades, rather than kind of a couple of decades. How does that kind of impact on how we’re dealing with these kind of changes? Like, the industrial revolution? It didn’t it didn’t happen over over 40 years? It happened of a much longer period than that…
Genevieve Bell
Oh, absolutely. Um, I think one of the really interesting features of my time in Silicon Valley particularly was people’s willingness to talk about technologies as though they were brand new, and not to be good at drawing the threads about that both where those technologies conversations had started, which was often frequently decades beforehand. And also what other pieces of extant technology they were pulling through with them.
Um, you know, any number of examples you can say here, so I’m willing to bet that some of your listeners are listening to this on a mobile phone. In that mobile phone is obviously technology of the 21st century, algorithms that were written in the last decade, ways of tempering glass that are similarly incredibly recent. But lurking inside that phone, there is a camera, or at least a digital camera, the algorithms of which are tuned around ways of making faces look good, that are themselves derivative of Kodak colour film, which in turn, owes its history to the early structure of the camera, which in turn, particularly for faces owes all of its optimization to well, a man named Matthew Brady who took photographs in the Civil War. So the camera in your 21st century mobile phone carries around in it, the activities of a man from 1863.
Likewise, if you were to open a virtual keyboard to send a message to me and go, ‘you’re a raving lunatic, lady, like stop talking’, and you pulled out your virtual keyboard, and you looked across the top line of that keyboard, the letter line, you can spell the word typewriter off that top line. The reason you can do that is that the original typewriter was designed to be demoed. And in order to demo well, they wanted to be able to type its name off its top line, hit the carriage return a couple of times and have a piece of paper came out with the name of the object on it. So in your modern phone you are carrying around also the need for that object’s keyboard to be displayed to clients in the 1870s.
So here is a brand new object that has sitting inside of it, all these old pieces of the world, right. And that same phone probably is running some kind of lightweight AI stack that’s making some decisions for you. So in lieu of proactive computing, those notions were first tested and trialled in the 1950s. And so we can talk about contemporary technologies, but often they are carrying around much older ideas in them. And they’re also part of conversations that have been going on for a tremendous amount of time about how things should work and how they shouldn’t. Right. So for me, I often think you want to peel back a layer or two, and say, what else is lurking in here? And what are all the other decisions that got made long before I turned up in this conversation? Because even the things that feel incredibly new, are often well, not so new.
Per Axbom
And one of the issues, isn’t it that we’re also talking about technology today, and forgetting that this was, will also be part of something in hundreds of years to come, it will be part of society in some way. Something that I know you like to say is that AI is the steam engine that we should be looking at. So what is the equivalent of the railroad and the train?
Genevieve Bell
Oh, absolutely. I think you know, one of the things that for as much as it is true that the contemporary pieces of technology we have with us carry history, the ones we have now will build it right. For me. Often we talk about AI, although it was first imagined in 1956. We’ve been building towards it for quite some time. But at the moment, I still think despite all of that history, we’re in the really early days of it. And for me, the unfolding of the history of steam is a useful – metaphors sort of the wrong word, maybe an analogy? I don’t know, I sometimes think history is useful, not because it gives you answers because it lets you frame better questions. But if you think about, you know, the steam engine as the atmospheric engine on top of a mine in Cornwall, it, you know, doesn’t takes 100 years to become what’s the word I want a steam engine, a locomotive to go from being a fixed object to being a moving object takes 100 plus years.
James Royal-Lawson
That’s a fixed object that solved a very specific need.
Genevieve Bell
It was, it drained water out of mines, right. It was designed to pull water out of a mine initially to save lives because its inventor was someone who was a lay preacher, and he not only served as a safety inspector on mines, but also someone who was conducting funerals for people who died. So he was very conscious of safety, right. And he builds something that will suck water out of mines. And of course, it’s sitting on top of a mine, so it has water and coal all at its disposal does not need to be particularly energy efficient. By the time it becomes mobile, you need to make some radical changes because that original Newcomen engine is two storeys high, not good for a drain. So they do a whole lot of technical things to make that work right to make it mobile and to sort of reimagine how the engine was configured.
But to have a train, it’s not just about the engine, right? You have to think about where are the train tracks, how you’re going to think about safety. Are you going to sell tickets, all that kind of mechanical stuff mechanistic stuff, you know, and because the trains have original history in Britain, that meant that the British government got heavily involved from day one basically regulating the cost of tickets so that everyone could have access. So, equity of access, regulating safety, because horrifyingly, on the day of the first railway opening someone was killed by an accident.
It took a lot longer however, to resolve for me, what is the most interesting thing about the impact of the train on British society, which is about ideas of time. So as you had this sort of explosion of railway systems, you ended up initially with shared railway tracks. So one railway track, multiple trains moving on that track. To automate that work, you actually have to have a fixed idea of time, so that you’re sharing the same track so that you know where all the trains are going to be. Which sounds like a trivial problem. But in the 1830s, and 40s, every town in London had a different every town England had a different time. Time was configured locally. So the mayor stood in town square looked up, if you could find the sun, and I’m sure it was a heat, if he could find the sun when the sun was at the top of the sky. That was when it was midday. That means between London and Glasgow, there’s actually a variation in time by a couple of minutes. Not a lot in the grander scheme of things wouldn’t have been a particular concern because you need to know local time to get to the market and be on time. But if you’ve got time between two places, that little tiny variation is enough to create enormous catastrophic activity.
And so the railways got together, a combination of all the railways in Britain and basically created something called railway time. And it’s the reason why every railway station has a clock on it was because they had their own time zone. And the rest of England pottered (and Scotland) pottered on in their own time zones. And if you wanted to work out what the time was in any given town you had to know did you need to catch a train, so you wanted railway time, or were you doing anything else in which case you wanted everyone else’s time. And it’s not until 1880 or 1881, that there’s a bill passes in the houses of common to make railway time, Standard Time. And so ultimately, what ends up happening is the time we needed to make the rail system work became the time the rest of us lived with, ever after.
And for me thinking about what it would mean, when AI goes from being the atmospheric steam engine, to being Stephenson’s rocket, to being the railway ,is to ask the question of what are the pieces of our worlds that we now take for granted will actually ultimately change? Railways made time at one level, right? It’s how you would have to think about it, it’s not a thing, when you look at a train, you don’t think what you must have thought was I should get from point A to point B. But what it also did was utterly reconfigured how we thought about something that had almost nothing to do with the engine itself. And so when I talk about saying, ‘Well, if current AI is the steam engine, what’s the railway?’ What I’m really asking isn’t just what’s the technical evolution that will need to happen? But what are the other intangibles in our world that will ultimately be profoundly reinvented. And I don’t have the answer (before you ask!)
James Royal-Lawson
I’m just, I’m starting to think about this now that, you know, we’re spending a lot of our time being engineers and producing these things in the here and now. But what you’re saying to me is that we all, we all well maybe not, we all need to be but we need to be more of us futurists, I guess, to, contemplate and consider what’s going to be at the same time as we’re planning on producing the now.
Genevieve Bell
Well, I think, you know, my favourite futurist William Gibson, once declared that thing about the future was that it was already here, it was just unevenly distributed. Right? So the notion wasn’t that the future was somewhere else that we were going to arrive at, you could find bits of the future in the present. I think another way of thinking about that is that we’re already building the future in the present. And so imagining that the future is some far off location is an easy out. And the reality is a whole lot of decisions we make today will shape profoundly what it, the world is, like 5, 10, 20, 30, 40 years from now.
I think the only piece for me that is instructive, however, about that notion of railways making time is that I’m not sure that Stevenson who’s responsible for that transition of that first unit steam engine, I’m not sure the fastest steam engine, at least I’m not sure Stephenson could have imagined that he was making time and I’m not sure he should have had to. But someone in that system surely might have. And as you imagine that it’s not just about the engineers producing the technical system, it’s about all the people that will end up regulating it and using it and resisting it and imagining it and writing about it. And for me, I suspect one of the pieces we are better at in the 21st century than they were in the 1800s is having more of those voices in the room as those stories unfold, rather than waiting. And so while we shouldn’t necessarily expect any individual technologist to fully imagine a future, there are fewer excuses for not having some people in the room who can at least help you anticipate what some of that might look like what some of the edge cases might be, and make slightly different decisions
I have to imagine, had someone said to James Watt, and to Stephenson and some of the others who innovated in that period of time, ‘listen, that that steam thing that engines could be really successful! Do you think you want to think about configuring its energy efficiency slightly differently, so that it doesn’t produce quite so much smoke? And maybe uses fuel differently?’ I mean, if we had had a different calculation there, there are ways that the air quality in many European and World cities might have been different at the turn of the 20th century, if they’d had that thought. Right. If that imagine they were actually going to build a technology that went to scale like that.
James Royal-Lawson
I mean, he would have, he would almost certainly laughed at someone if they’d told him that entire cities would effectively move or develop around little bits of metal that carry his steam engine around, that they need to think about the pollution because suddenly there’s people there.
Genevieve Bell
Yeah, absolutely. And I think you know, I suspect Watt had some idea about that Newcomen less so but, for any one of them having to think about the consequences of that technology scaling. What I mean, they were having arguments about patents and money, but they weren’t necessarily having arguments about social consequences, although there was a kind of a deep consciousness about the railways, being something that everyone should have access to. But you know, they we’re also worrying about the kind of, if you think about the counterpoint to the technologist at that moment in time being people like Byron and, Shelley and, Wordsworth you know, writing their poems about the dark satanic mills and daffodils and clouds, you know, there was clearly a kind of an imagined Arcadia, to run aside these lumbering machineries.
Per Axbom
I actually have a concrete example for you from a new story in Sweden yesterday, wherein we could read that a lot of the Silicon Valley, huge companies now are of course, placing huge server parks in Sweden, because we have lots of space. And they put in requests to power these, of course, server farms, and one of the requests is around the magnitude of a half a nuclear power plant. And what this means is that for Sweden, is that we won’t be able to build houses in specific places. And it could mean that we actually have to move townships in the end, which is something that we’re already doing. And so we were moving a town because of the mining industry in the north of Sweden. So it made me reflect that. So now we’re actually moving towns because of the server park industry.
Genevieve Bell
That’s fascinating. Well…
James Royal-Lawson
Because it’s cool in the north of Sweden?
Genevieve Bell
Well, you know, yes, you notice they’re not offering them to Australia, where we also have lots of land, because the cost of cooling them would be astronomical! But it also says something about the global distribution of resources too right, of that, we can now imagine moving things that way, I suspect, is a slightly different artefact than it would have been 200 years ago.
James Royal-Lawson
But it leads me to a question though, about our politicians, and, and their capability and abilities to just take or make the right decisions in this world? Are they really kind of, what do we need to demand from them? Or ensure that the qualities they have so they can take these decisions?
Genevieve Bell
Really interesting question, right? There was a long period of time when the political classes were engineers. And so there was a lot of overlap between people who had engineering backgrounds and engineering practice, or legal backgrounds and legal practice, who ended up in politics, right, not in…
James Royal-Lawson
businessmen, established businessmen who then went on to be Members of Parliament and so on.
Genevieve Bell
Yeah, well, often the case at that point that, you know, certainly at the turn of the 20th century, there was an expectation, if you were going to be a good businessman, you’d been trained in engineering. So at places like General Electric in America, the expectation was if you were being groomed for senior leadership, you were sent off to places like MIT to get an advanced degree in engineering, because the notion was of a kind of technocratic leadership, so that you kind of understood how technologies functioned. So even people like Stafford Beer who was introducing you know, cybernetics into business management, there was very much a notion that those discourses should sit more closely together. I think one of the challenges of late is that, who it is that would build, design, build, regulate, secure. And decommission these systems is a far more diffuse group than it once was.
While we were talking about the railways was about civil engineering, right? We knew exactly who you needed to go consult, to talk about whether the rail was functioning or not, and what it meant to think about it being safe. For me, one of the challenges that’s been propelling me forward for the last three years is very much about, well, who are the moral equivalent of the civil engineers that these systems that have AI at their core, right, who will be the people that manage those, and part of the work we decided to do here at the Australian National University was to build a small Institute with the overly ambitious, overly ambitious agenda of trying to imagine or establish a new branch of engineering to manage these new AI driven systems. It’s not about making more computer scientists or different engineers, it was about saying, much the same way that the railways and indeed electricity and computers had all demanded different kinds of practitioners, these new systems do too.
And the only way I could think about solving precisely your question there James, like, well, how on earth would we educate people was to say, actually, I don’t think we have the requisite knowledge, packaged in the right ways currently, that in fact, we need to change the conversation. So we’ve been doing that here for the last couple of years, we’ve been running an experimental education programme, we’ve been trying to work out what are the building blocks, you’d need to expose people to like what are the things people would need to grok order to be able to kind of say, right, if you’re going to build a cyber physical system, ie a thing with AI in its core, how are you going to do that? Like, what are the big questions you need to ask how do you think about whether those systems are autonomous, what do those systems get to do who gets to determine that, how do you think about safety? What on earth are the interfaces going to be what are the metrics?
Because I would say the one, you know, clear message out of the industrial revolutions, Mark, one, two, and three would be that we might need to think a bit more beyond efficiencies and productivities and start to ask questions about sustainability and responsibility. And so, for me, I don’t think it’s, it’s not only about how do we help our politicians become better regulators? I think it’s about how do we create an entire category of expertise that lets those systems be better regulated? From basically word go. I’ll be busy!
Per Axbom
That sounds fascinating. I mean absolutely fascinating. I mean, essentially, I’ve heard you’re, you’re inventing a whole new Applied Science. So we’re, so we’re inventing a new way to think really?
Genevieve Bell
Not entirely new! Based on tenets we all recognise. But yeah, I’ve been thinking of this as sort of somewhere between a kind of Kuhnian paradigm shift and a bit of Bertrand Russell thrown in for good measure. But no, it really is for me about what does it mean to rather than exist in the interdisciplinary space, which I obviously love, but I think you need to have a new core foundation of knowledge, these systems demand it, right, they demand an understanding of the technical component tree, but also an understanding of the social, ecological and regulatory component tree, you need to put those two things together.
I know people talk a lot about critical thinking, I suspect it’s as much about critical ‘doing’ as it is about critical ‘thinking’. And it also, unless we’re, you know, in some ways, betray my roots, I’m less interested in creating a whole series of lone heroes than I am in creating a collective wants to do things with each other and with others and so it’s not only about how do you build a new body of knowledge, but how do you build new ways of transmitting that knowledge, and of having it embodied in its practitioners? I will say, it’s a glorious experiment, which means it’s incredibly messy, and it will not go the way I intended.
James Royal-Lawson
Well, you’re three years into it. So I guess if even, if we presume you’re successful with establishing this new field of engineering, and you managed to roll it out, or get other institutions in other parts of the world to follow suit, doesn’t that imply that we’re probably going to have the most dangerous period of time, this coming… decade? 15 years? 20 years? Because you know, you’re feeding a system. And, you know, by the time they get to the places we need them to be in, we’re gonna be down the road a little bit further, down the river a bit more.
Genevieve Bell
I think we’re already in that dangerous period. James, I think, you know, 2020 feels like it is unfolding in ways that the words unanticipated and unprecedented don’t exactly do it justice. Um, you know, we, in Australia, we saw our year begin with most of the country on fire, or wreathed in smoke, or both. And I think, you know, for and, you know, coming off the back of a multi year drought, I think it was a kind of a shocking wake up call of how we might want to think about inhabiting our world locally, but also how much of the stories we tell about the 20th.
The 21st century are predicated on technologies in the 20th century that no longer seem so stable, electricity, water, telecommunications, or, you know, didn’t kind of operate quite the way we hoped. And I think, you know, in many parts of the world over the last six and seven months, we’ve also seen critical challenges to some other 20th century institutions like civic and civil society, the social contract between organizations and citizens.
And I think we’re probably already in that moment. I’m not sure that it’s a dangerous bubble, not sure I’d characterize it quite that way. But I think we are certainly in a period of time where there is enormous instability, and where my students sometimes joke, they joke that the course should just be ‘hashtag no pressure’. Um, and I think that’s right, you know, we won’t be able to produce people fast enough to sort of insert into all the places and so I tend to think that part of the job isn’t just to produce the practitioners but to produce the awareness that the practitioners are necessary. So it’s not just about making people who can do the job, but making people aware that the need for that job will exist. And sort of starting to form a more coherent story that says, drones and autonomous vehicles and smart buildings and the new grid and AI, that’s all the same conversation.
Those aren’t multiple disparate conversations, they are one and the same conversation. And they in fact, require us starting to think about them as a set, rather than as discrete pieces. And as we start to think about those as a whole set, it lets us imagine that we might need skills to tackle all of them. And yeah, I do hope we’ll be successful. I hope it will not take me a decade, I’m an impatient woman in many regards, a decade will not be, that will be just too long.
So we graduated our first students over here we’ve been together three years, we graduated our first student three months ago, nothing like graduating students in the middle of a pandemic. We took our second cohort at the beginning of this year, we’re just about to send out acceptances to our third cohort, we’ve started a PhD programme. And we’ve been working out how to pop up the institute in other places. I’m acutely aware that asking people to move to Canberra whilst one of the safest places to currently be on the planet is kind of a little bit hard to get here.
And so thinking about how do you take what we know how to do as a really embodied practice, and make it into something that we can experience collectively but remotely, is a really interesting was interesting UX challenge. It’s an interesting pedagogical challenge, it’s an interesting technical challenge. And for me, making sure that whatever that educational encounter is, isn’t just staring at a screen. I, you know, remain steadfastly old fashioned in my idea that I think you have to engage people’s hands, as well as their heads, and their bodies as well as their minds. And so working out how we, even at a distance, deliver educational experiences that kind of do multiple pieces of the puzzles has been an interesting challenge. We’ll see if we get there…
James Royal-Lawson
I mean, I’m gonna find it fascinating to follow what you’re doing and to be part of this world that we’re trying to impact on. And maybe we’re just coming up, well, next year, we come up to our 10th anniversary of the podcast. So we’ll maybe make sure we get you back for the 20th anniversary year, and follow up on this. Per, we’ll write that down in the calendar.
Per Axbom
Definitely
Genevieve Bell
I like that. That’s a, that’s a nice kind of promise that suggests that we’ll also be here in a decade and that, we will look through this particular one. No, listen, I’m always really grateful that people find it interesting. And I guess my only request to your listeners would be you can find us on the interwebs, the institute’s a relatively easy thing to find, I’m hoping you guys will put our website up somewhere?
Per Axbom
It will be in the show notes.
Genevieve Bell
Beautiful. So the thing I learned in my time in the Valley, many things I learnt, but the one thing that sticks with me most is that there’s no way you do something like this by yourself, like it would be crazy and don’t want to. And so for me, usually the request, if anyone is listening to this, is if you can think of a way you think this is something you want to participate in or help in, please find us, because there’s no way you can actually say you’re going to establish a new branch of engineering and do it by yourself.
James Royal-Lawson
Thank you very much for joining us today, Genevieve.
Per Axbom
Thank you.
Genevieve Bell
You’re very welcome.
[Music]
James Royal-Lawson
So listening back to the interview. I was, I’ve been reflecting on what it made me think of these diagrams seen over the years, where someone tries to present or explain UX in a greater scheme of things. So, so maybe you’d see a diagram that would show Interaction Design at the bottom, and then User Experience maybe on top of that, and then perhaps even Service Design or something on top of that. And there’s loads of variations. A famous one is probably Dan Saffer’s diagram from his book Designing for Interaction, which he’s iterated a few times, where it’s, it’s got lots of overlapping kind of circles, Venn diagram with core disciplines of User Experience.
Per Axbom
Yeah, that’s huge. That diagram.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, and it’s, what’s interesting. And what made me think about that, is, in Dan’s diagram, he has, well, a big circle for User Experience design. And in that is: Information Architecture, Architecture, Industrial Design, Visual Design, Interaction Design, Human Computer Interaction, all these kind of, similar ones, too. And they all leak outside of the cycle of User Experience Design. So they’re not fully inside it, to basically communicate that it’s not, User Experience Design isn’t the thing that encompasses them all. It just touches them all.
And, a reflection that Dan had on his original blog post, which is from 2008. He talks about, how you know what, that existential question about what is User Experience Design? Was it by itself as a thing? He says – the answer is not much. Aside from coordination between the various disciplines, or what used to be called Creative Direction, it’s about the joining of different disciplines, and not particularly a discipline in and of itself.
And this, this made me think of what Genevieve said about how – the polyfill until we’ve got to a place where we have these engineers that are educated in, able to, manage this new technology, or AI world or techno, digital world, that we’re living in the polyfill is to increase communication between awareness of the different disciplines.
Per Axbom
I love how you put that there, because when you said, I mean, you said UX doesn’t encompass everything, it, it’s what touches everything. And that, to me says it all. That means that as so many of our guests have said through the years, what they do for a living is help people understand each other. So we help the different stakeholders understand what we’re doing, that we help the developers understand what we want to make, we talked, talk, we research and talk to the users and then the clients or managers need to understand something as well and we help them all understand each other and that is what we bring to the table. Whether we call it UX or not.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, we’re lifting the question, we’re raising the question of, does a certain other discipline need to be included?
Per Axbom
Yeah
James Royal-Lawson
To make things safer, more sustainable, or whatever aspect you want to talk about that we bring, we bring people in.
Per Axbom
But that makes me wonder, of course, again, as we always do, I mean, What place does UX have as a term, in terminology, when we choose to call ourselves UXers, that sometimes confuses more than it helps. Whereas if we if we would stick, as I’ve been doing, I know, over the last years, I’ve been sort of removing the title UX and pushing design and communication science, which are like my core competencies. And I like that about what Genevieve is. I mean, she has been an anthropologist, always. But the space that she’s been working in has changed.
James Royal-Lawson
Yes. Yes she’s…
Per Axbom
Well, all the way from Digital, of course, into the AI work that she’s doing now.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, so as an anthropologist, she predates UX. And she’s going to post-date UX probably, as it moves, moves forward and matures.
Per Axbom
Which would imply that we all need to start thinking about what it is that we’re bringing, and what we need to be aware of, what we need to be aware of in our surroundings to help the people we interact with as much as possible. So it is sort of our job to be generalists. Whereas we, most of us have a competency that we bring to the table. That is sort of our core, core competency. But being able to research and understand many different facets of technology is always, always helpful.
James Royal-Lawson
I mean, gotta be careful, though, Per that we don’t I mean, the many things that we do, what people in our profession do, doesn’t disappear. You know, we, we still, we still need Graphic Designers or Interaction Designers or, you know, writers or whatever. I mean, there’s lots of different competencies that are still there. But some people in our field will be the Generalists that need to bring people together. And all of us will do it to a degree. And even, even the engineers and the developers will do this, and do do this to a certain degree. It’s teamwork.
Per Axbom
Thank you for spending your time with us. Links and notes, and a full transcript for this episode can be found on uxpodcast.com – if you can’t find them in your Pod playing tool of choice.
James Royal-Lawson
And if you really want to listen to something now and straight up, then recommended listening is Episode 202 – Digital Places with Jorge Arango where Lisa Welchman and I were co-hosts for that one, which is very nearly two years ago. And amongst other things, we talk about systems, structure and sustainability.
Per Axbom
Awesome. And also remember, you can contribute to funding the show by visiting uxpodcast.com/support Remember to keep moving.
James Royal-Lawson
See you on the other side.
[Music]
James Royal-Lawson
What do you call an emotional train?
Per Axbom
I don’t know James, what do you call an emotional train?
James Royal-Lawson
A self steam engine.
Sorry, that was really terrible. [laughs]
Per Axbom
It actually took me two seconds… [laughs]
This is a transcript of a conversation between James Royal-Lawson, Per Axbom and Genevieve Bell recorded in October 2020 and published as episode 249 of UX Podcast.