"What am I looking at here?" is a question I've asked repeatedly in the last two weeks of students, researchers, presenters, etc., proudly presenting interesting posters and presentations. Details covering everything from bribery in India, homeless use of twitter, surveillance cameras and federal legislation, ... While the empirical settings are endlessly fascinating and potentially impactful in the lives of many, the conclusions seem almost obvious.
Distractions distract, people sometimes struggle to discover and use information, different kinds of people collaborate differently on different kinds of tasks... One presenter sarcastically summed it up as "we show that different people are different".
I should have been asking the question "What's new here?" What does this empirical work tell us _that we didn't know before_ (or could reasonably guess) about humanity and how it interacts with itself and with technical artefacts? Surely, all of this individually fascinating work is telling us something about _how to avoid_ rediscovering the broad strokes for each future situation we encounter involving computers and humans, so that we can quickly localize and adapt to each situation.
I've seen (versions of) many of these studies and technical tricks countless times in art galleries and hacker spaces elsewhere. The particular combinations instantiated here may be of particular interest, but what features of the recombinations are relevant to the findings we are to absorb?
My personal challenge in not having a deep-rooted grounding in this field, is how to situate all these details in some frame of knowledge. How do all these empirically and operationally defined contexts and situations relate to each other, and to the several disciplines from which this CSCW endeavor draws?
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