Moral Artifacts - Philosophy of HCI

What is an artifact? A man-made object, an archaeologist might answer. A product of the social behavior of an individual or group, a sociologist would reply. Anything that bears information about the culture of its creator, an anthropologist would muse. Technologists have a different approach - artifacts are byproducts of software developments, undesirable alterations in data, visual glitches. Apparently, some artifact did something bad to a technologist some day in the distant past and left a negative bias forever tainting their relationship.

Taking into view this bias, can an artifact be "bad" or "good"? Can it be "moral"?

If an artifact bears cultural information, it can carry the moral baggage of its creator. If it's the product of a social behavior, it can be intrinsically bad or good. It is so because there was such intent in its creation, or because it is so heavily shaped by its moral context that this moral bias cannot be extricated from the artifact.

But the most interesting interpretation of a moral artifact it that of artifacts that can shape morality through their usage. The most obvious example that occurs to me is the condom.

It began as a form of birth control for the 15th century nobility and swinged in importance as prophylactic and contraception for centuries, but the difficulty and pricing kept them from mass adoption until the 19th century, when it, although illegal in many places (damn you, religious morals!), became the most popular method of birth control. In these years, a surge in 'moral' rigidity made ignorance of proper sexual behavior (prophylaxis, contraception, abortion etc) widespread and the condom fought this surge in unwanted pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. But it wasn't until the 1910s when cement dipping and later latex made mass production of condoms possible.

In the '30s, the Anglicans relaxed their disapproval of contraception (something the Catholics are still to do) and the two World Wars made condoms still more important as American soldiers received a ration of condoms and were instructed on their proper use. This created a generation used to contraception and STD prevention. The free sex movement of the '60s would not be possible without condoms, nor would AIDS have been kept at bay in the '80s without them.

Even now, when we are in specially reactionary times (and for the first time in years we see condom fatigue in many cultures), condoms are an inextricable part of our culture, and it's difficult to tell who shaped whom: are condoms to blame for our sexual culture, or is it the other way around? One way or the other, it's undeniable: the condom is both a fruit of and a huge influencer of current culture and morals.

Analysing Eye-tracking Data - Sopo using iTunes

Unfortunately, from all the captures made by our team, only one did not go awry (the capture on the other two froze around 8 seconds into the video. The CSV files are there, but without capture, there's very little to make sense of them).

0:14 - Exercise starts

 - There is some hesitation as to how you create a playlist. User settles for right-clicking on the sidebar to the left and creating one from the drop-down context menu. Task takes 12 seconds total.

0:26 - Playlist created

 - Once settled with the right click context menu methodology, user clicks on the tab called Songs after scanning the sidebar for options and a quick glance at the tab list on top. She then proceeds to right click songs, scroll down the very long context menu and add songs to her playlist 

0:42 - Two files added to playlist

 - Then proceeds a long hesitation where the user scans the song list for a long while, seemingly unaware of the next task or unable to find how to go back to the playlist. This ends at 0:57, a full 15 seconds later, when user finds and clicks the Playlists tab. She quickly drags the top song to the bottom of the playlist, completing the task.

0:59 - Switched order of playlist

 - Again the user's eyes wander around the two axes of the application - the tab list and the sidebar - for indication on how to delete the playlist. She finally settles for the comfort of the right-click and deletes the playlist after 10 seconds.

1:09 - Playlist deleted 

The video seems to indicate a lack of controls for specific functions. After scanning the chrome, the user always settles for right clicking items and scanning through a (sometimes very long) list of actions until she finds the one she's looking for. These added steps and lack of affordance seem widespread in the app. 

Galaxy Sound - Music game

The idea is to have three sounds loops (beats, riffs, etc) playing at the same time. You interact with shapes (triangles and circles) to manipulate the loops (pitch, tempo, etc) so you can either keep them perfect (and keep a high score) or, just for fun, make some mistakes that shape how the loops will play during the next level.
The idea is that you experiment with small imperfections and the effect these have on your perception of sound while (hopefully) having fun.
It makes a lot more sense to see what I mean, so please go to the presentation to have an idea of the dynamics of the game:

Presentation in Google Docs

A (atypical) week in pictures

Cognitive experiences mediated by technology - Three examples

It's really difficult to come up with only three cognitive experiences mediated by technology. If you were born in the 90s, you probably know no other type. I was born in the late 70s but still, raised by a geek father and a very open-minded mother, I was exposed to technology in a way that most children raised in the 80s weren't, at least not in Brazil: I had an Atari, dad brought a computer home and started learning to code COBOL, I got to play tons of computer games and started coding myself at a very early age.

All that is to say that most of my cognitive experiences are mediated by technology in the electronic sense (the sense most people think of when saying technology). To filter out the crud, I'll focus on experiences that used to be analog to me until a few years ago:

Navigating is one of my passions. I love paper maps and moving around, and also love urban life and exploring the nooks and crannies of different cities. Until a few years ago, navigating using digital devices was cumbersome (it was only 2006 when I was still printing maps from Google Maps, itself an evolution of going to an airport bookstore and buying a city map). Back then, I'd plan a trip and prepare maps so I could locate myself within the city, waypoints in marker pen and annotations galore, like where to take the correct buses etc. Nowadays I use my smartphone for most navigation, from Google Maps for general mapping to Foursquare to find nice places to eat and drink and Waze to drive around with spoken instructions in Portuguese (it saves some cognitive overhead of listening to spoken English). Nowadays I'm infatuated with an app called Trafi Eesti (iOS and Android) which gives me public transit routes in a way that kicks Google Maps' ass! It can route in different public transit solutions and can also remember your favorite routes and stops so you know exactly when trolley 3 will pass Kaubamaja or the 11 will leave Kunstiakadeemia. Lots of love there!

Speaking of love (and since we'll be talking of long-distance relationships), my relationship with Cau began online and we had never seen each other's face for a long time before I finally decided to travel 500km to see her. We remained living apart for many months after that, communicating via social networking and smartphone apps. This has shaped the way we communicate even now: we love sharing links with each other so even if we're in the same room, we may send a Facebook message every now and then. We are constantly in touch via WhatsApp and, since I'm notified of her messages on my Pebble, I don't even need to be actively looking at my phone to know her whereabouts online and offline: if she posts something to my Facebook timeline, my wrist vibrates, ditto if I'm at work and she checks-in on Foursquare. It even sounds creepy told this way, but this is public information we choose to share (a whole tangle of complications itself, since most people's sense of privacy is completely distorted nowadays, but I'll leave that for another discussion). In a sense, our intimate space is the size of the distance between us, because we're never really apart thanks to technology.

We love watching TV shows together, but decided that, even though cable is very cheap in Tallinn, we'd become cord-cutters: most of the TV shows we like are easier to watch over Netflix, which is actually even cheaper than cable. So we instead subscribe just to fast internet and built a home-theater PC. It replaced the cable box, radio and my XBox 360. I now buy games online via Steam and a single box deals with everything entertainment-connected in the house: no extra remote controllers, no tangle of cables. It actually reduced piracy, as weird as it might sound: we never get frustrated that there's noting to watch on TV or no new games to play, so the urge to download movies via Torrents has decreased, instead of increasing a lot like I predicted it would when we decided to abandon cable and a game-dedicated box. Really unexpected.

There are many experiences more that were re-shaped by digital technology, but these are very poignant examples and I believe they illustrate the concept well.