Putting the human in Human-Computer Interaction:
The role of anthropology in the development of interactive design systems
Being a UX/UI Designer with a background in cultural and social anthropology, I oftentimes find myself encountering the question of how I made “the leap” from anthropology to UX/UI Design. Naturally, having learned what I learned and knowing what I know, I would simply respond with: “At the end of the day it is all about the human experience.” Yet, I felt the urge to put into proper context and writing what I intrinsically know. Thus, this article aims to offer a brief overview of the intersections between the discipline of anthropology and the field of human-computer interaction. It is by no means a complete guide, nor does it go full into depth within the various intersectional spaces, as this would require more space and time to touch upon. Hopefully, readers will receive some valuable insights and relevant inputs as to how anthropology and HCI are historically and thematically interrelated.
As the name suggests, anthropology, literally translated into “the study of humans” is rooted in its concern with the study of unknown people- precisely, people unknown to the Western world, where this academic field was originally founded. Today, its methodologies, techniques and perspectives continue to serve UX Research and usability improvement, offering proper tools for a user-centric design of (unknown) people and their interactions with digital and non-digital products, services and devices.
HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION (HCI)
HCI as an area of research and practice developed initially as a specialty area in computer science through the emergence of personal computing in the early 1980s. Personal software like productivity applications and interactive computer games as well as personal computer platforms such as operating systems and programming languages broadened the scope and made everyone in the world a potential computer user, asking for cognitive science and human factors engineering to be embraced through a new discipline. Deficiencies, specifically in terms of usability were highlighted through that further reach of people now wanting to use computers as tools.
The broad project of cognitive science, which had already formed in the late 1970s and incorporated cognitive psychology, artificial intelligence, linguistics, cognitive anthropology and the philosophy of mind, paved the way for an articulation of systematic and scientifically informed applications to be known as “cognitive engineering”, a synthesis of science and engineering. Presented people, concepts, skills and a vision for solving the needs of future computer users were offered through this field of cognitive engineering, of which HCI was one of the first examples.
Along with the so-called “software crisis” of the 1970s, which forced software engineering to put a focus on nonfunctional requirements, such as usability and maintainability as well as on empirical software development processes (which rely intrinsically on iterative prototyping and empirical testing) then made clear how the way forward for computing entailed a better understanding and empowerment of the user. The diversity of needs and opportunities presented in the early 1980s finally created a highly visible interdisciplinary project that was supposed to be harbored by HCI.
Although originally birthed through computer science, HCI quickly expanded to entail visualization, information systems, collaborative systems, the system development process and many other areas of design. It has even grown to be broader, larger and much more diverse than computer science itself. Despite its initial focus on individual and generic user behavior it now also includes areas such as social and organizational computing, accessibility for the elderly, the cognitively and physically impaired and the widest spectrum of human experiences and activities. HCI has developed from its initial concern with early graphical user interfaces to include a range of techniques and devices, multi-modal interactions, tool support for user interfaced specification and emerging context-aware interactions. It has become a name for a community of communities.
ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE CYBERSPACE
Evidently, no other discipline than social anthropology presents the ground work for ethnographic approaches currently used in HCI. More so, anthropology has played a crucial role in the development of interdisciplinary fields such as cognitive science, global studies, and various ethnic studies, while fundamentally being of interdisciplinary and holistic nature itself.
Within my studies at the university of Vienna, I found that there is an anthropology to almost every aspect of human life, as my classes surrounded around the anthropology of economics, the anthropology of globalisation, the anthropology of consumption and visual anthropology, just to name a few. Throughout these sub-disciplines, anthropology has borrowed from and cooperated with various subject-relevant disciplines to provide a broader understanding of human interactions with specific phenomena.
Cyber-anthropology as an autonomous research area was first recognised by Arturo Escobar in 1994. He defines cyberculture as a set of modern social constructions of reality, called “technoscapes” and stated the concept of technosociality, to stress how sociocultural constructs are largely influenced by computer and information technologies. Pfaffenberger understands technology as an essentially human phenomenon he calls “humanized nature”. He believes that anthropologists’ distinctive combination of small-scale, local-level observational studies with holism (the study of interrelated components of a system or society) is uniquely suited for exploring the complex relationships between technology and culture. Anthropologists generally argue that cyberculture is not actually an inherently new discipline, but the necessary application of traditional ethnographic research to a modern society that is becoming “post-organic”, with complex changes in the ways that life, labor and language are produced and given meaning to.
The emerging field of design anthropology precisely aims at understanding future users of a design, with the intention of enabling the design team to build up an empathetic understanding of the users’ practices, routines and values. Within the field of design, anthropology’s ethnographic approach has found its place in ethnomethodology and participatory design.
ETHNOGRAPHY
Ethnography as the main research approach within the field of anthropology is based on the observation of people and their environments, in order to gain in-depth understanding of their experiences and learn to see the world through the people’s eyes. In the context of digital products, this creates value for potential users and can serve as a source of innovation for businesses, designers and developers. By providing a distinctive way to discover underlying meanings behind user behavior and find out patterns of behavior in real life contexts, ethnographic methods have not only offered relevant inputs for the development of HCI up until today, but remain their relevance for example within desirability testing through participatory observation and user research through qualitative interviews. The main goal of the ethnographic approach is to gather insights about humans and their interactions with specific phenomena in specific social settings during a specific time frame. Ethnography is an approach with a set of methods, rather than being a method in and of itself.
USABILITY & USER-CENTRISM
The original technical focus of HCI up until today has been the concept of usability, which served to hold the field together and to help it influence computer science and technology development more broadly and effectively. Usability is a quality benchmark assessing the ease of use of a digital product or interface, mainly focusing on the design and operability. Although the concept of usability is under continuous reconstruction, it often subsumes qualities like collective efficacy, enhanced creativity, fun, flow, well being and support for human development.
User-centered design is an approach where user needs, wants and behavior in relation to products and services are given much attention during the design process. It raises the need for designers as “user-ambassadors” to understand the meanings their products have for others. Applied methods are often based on an iterative cycle of investigations, commonly consisting of observations, ideation phases, rapid prototyping and testing. Anthropology serves usability improvement and user-centrism by aiming at involving users in the design process to have their needs and interests reflected in digital products and services.
CONCLUSION
Users today live in a rapidly changing technical environment and access to information and new markets has increased due to globalization, which has lead to bigger competition and greater opportunities. In order to use the innate potential and gain competitive advantage of these conditions, firms have increasingly paid attention toward users and focused on how to increase the creation of value for humans who interact with these new technological advancements. The rise in popularity of buzzwords like user-centrism is but one proof of this. Historically, the discipline of anthropology has offered relevant insights into user behavior and value creation for products and services by enriching technological spaces with insights about humans that play an inherent role in the development and use of said spaces. More so, anthropological perspectives and discoveries open up for critical and transformative reflections on emerging futures by intervening into existent realities. Though the essence of HCI is of multi-disciplinary nature, it has been served well and continues to draw fundamental advantages from anthropological approaches and techniques. Anthropologists on the other hand, are well advised to also look further into a technosocial future and the emerging humanized nature that technology poses according to Pfaffenberger, with their unique ethnographic lens that has always put the human in its center of attention.
SOURCES
- Carroll, John M. 14.09.2021. Human Computer Interaction. Brief Intro. https://uxdesign.cc/design-ethnography-5889fe107b0e.
- Carroll, John M. 2003. HCI Models, Theories and Frameworks. Toward a Multidisciplinary Science. EBSCO Publishing.
- Kjaersgaard, Mette G., Smith, Rachel C. 2015. Design Anthropology in Participatory Design. Interaction Design and Architecture(s) Journal. Vol. 26, 73–80.
- Randall, Dave, Rouncefield, Mark. 14.09.2021. Ethnography. https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/book/the-encyclopedia-of-human-computer-interaction-2nd-ed/ethnography.
- Romeo, Pietro. 2018. Cyber-Anthropology and Human-Computer Interaction. The Reshaping of Nature and Culture in a Technology-Mediated World.
- Ronning, Froydis Sollie. 14.09.2021. Design meets Ethnography. Reflections on Design, Innovation, Value Creation and Ethnography. Norwegian University of Science and Technology.
- Stephen, Mary L., Weinberg, Jerry B. 2002. Participatory Design in a Human-Computer Interaction Course. Teaching Ethnography Methods to Computer Scientists. Covington, Kentucky, USA.
