paradoxical user acceptance of ambient intelligent systems
TRANSCRIPT
Paradoxical User Acceptance of Ambient Intelligent Systems - Sociology of User Experience Approach
Fabrice Forest
Grenoble Institut de l'Innovation Grenoble University - INNOVACS, BP47, 38040 Grenoble Cedex 9,
France [email protected]
Philippe Mallein MINATEC IDEAs Laboratory ®,CEA
DRT Leti 17 rue des Martyrs, 38054 Grenoble
Cedex 9, France [email protected]
Leena Arhippainen Center for Internet Excellence
P.O. Box 1001, FIN-90014 University of Oulu, Finland
ABSTRACT The common way to make studies about user adoption of new technology is to test the future services with users. When conceiving new technological services, designers try to predict the way of life, when their innovation would be available. However, the society is innovating endlessly so that today’s user is changing and is not the same than future user. It is easy to predict what will be technically feasible, however, what will be socially acceptable and meaningful is uncertain. Although usage studies try to understand the users of new technologies, the way people will really utilize new technologies in their everyday life appears often ingenious, surprising or even paradoxical. The purpose of this paper is to give a way to anticipate and - why not – to encourage unpredictable uses by designing paradoxical usage systems.
Categories and Subject Descriptors J.4 [Social and Behavioral Sciences]: Economics, Psychology, Sociology
General Terms Design, Economics, Human Factors.
Keywords Ambient intelligence, psychology, social factors, user centered design, HCI, user experience
1. INTRODUCTION In the Human Computer Interaction (HCI) research field user experiences have studied a lot over the last decade from several research fields. [3][6][7][15][17][18]. User experience (UX) is important factor for products' success [12][16], and it has become a central target in product and service design [19]. The success of the new information and communication technologies (ICT) and services is largely depending on users. The way how people
perceive and value new services have a strong impact on acceptance [5][14]. The amount of mobile ICT users has increased enormously during the last two decades. This means several aspects for designing: designers need to take into account users’ backgrounds, and mobile technologies should fit to the context of use. Also, user’s sociological identity profile (henceforth user profile) towards new ICTs has impacts on acceptance [14]. The traditional way to study user acceptance of new technologies is to test future technologies with today’s users. However, the society is incessantly innovating so that a user is continuously evolving. When designers are conceiving new technologies, they try to predict the way of life and the society trends, when their innovation would be available. Indeed, they can predict, what would be feasible from a technological point of view, but what could be acceptable from the user’s point of view is uncertain. This paper presents psycho-sociological concepts and a method, which allow understanding how the technological innovation process could meet the user and the social innovation process. First, the paper introduces the background of the Sociology of User Experience and ICT user profiles. Then, the paper introduces the key concepts for a paradoxical analysis of the user’s acceptance and proposes an approach to combine the introduced concepts as tools for the design of innovative and meaningful paradoxical systems of use.
2. SOCIOLOGY OF USER EXPERIENCE The issues related to the Social and Human Factors such as the “usability” and “acceptability” of ICT technologies are recognized as fundamental to the success or failure of ICT innovations. Therefore, it is important to present the concepts and methods of the Sociology of the User Experience (SUE) for example, the concepts of 1) ‘social identity user profiles’ and 2) ‘significations of use’ defined by the MSH-Alpes User Lab [5][14]. These profiles are based on the user’s past experience, that he/she integrates and stores. Faced with a new user experience, the user will call on these integrated experiences but will also have to react to this new situation by giving meaning to the new usages he/she encounters. The purpose of this section is to introduce SUE and to define the role it plays in the Usage Aided Design (UAD) process.
2.1 The UAD in ICT Innovation Conception Traditionally, ICT innovations were conceived by engineers in technical environments. Recent studies have shown that this classic method of innovation conception produced products and services that, while being highly innovative from a technological
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Forest, F., Mallein, P., Arhippainen, L. (2013). Paradoxical User Acceptance of Ambient Intelligent Systems - Sociology of User Experience Approach. In Proc. Academic MindTrek Conference, October 1-4, Tampere, Finland.
standpoint, were equally poorly adapted to the user’s lifestyle and preferences. The repeatedly low success rate of new technological innovations led several social scientists to question this method and to propose alternatives. Their work has led to the introduction of the Social and Human Sciences into the technological innovation conception process. This approach suggests that social and human scientists work together with the engineers, starting from the inception phase of the innovation, in order to improve the success rate of new ICT products and services. Sociologists have become more and more involved in this new cooperative approach. One of the fruits of this sociological labor is the “CAUTIC method” [13] that is developed with a specific research program in 1996 -1999 on the basis of work on sociology of usage of ICT innovations in France since 1978. The UAD process is a design technique that includes HCI and usability specialists, user experience sociologists, and economy and market researchers.
2.2 Roles of the Social and Human Sciences in the UAD process of ICT Innovations The discipline of ergonomics can provide valuable answers to the following question: "what is the best way to design a new ICT device in order to be easy to use, easy to learn, easy to understand?" Ergonomic specialists deal with these usability issues. The sociology of the user experience can provide valuable answers to the following question: "what is the best way to design a new ICT device or service in order to be meaningful, to make sense for the users?" The SUE deals with suitability issues: how and why innovation is desirable. Thus, ergonomics and the sociology of the user experience have to be used complementarily in the design process. It is possible for a user to find an ICT device or service as usable, and to not accept it at the same time depending on whether or not it makes sense in his/her daily life. For instance, even a product with good usability can cause negative experiences [11], and thus lead to a situation that a user does not want to use it. However, it happens more frequently that the opposite occurs - a new ICT device or service can make enough sense for the user in his/her daily life that he/she does not care about poor usability at the beginning of its life cycle.
Let us take an old example of the Short Message Service (SMS), which permits users to send short written messages using their mobile phone. When SMS was first introduced, this service was certainly not easy to use, easy to understand nor easy to learn. On the other hand, this service made sense immediately to the users and more specifically to young users. It provided a possibility to communicate more silently and more discreetly with others. To begin with, the SMS provides a possibility to write as one would speak. This way of writing eliminates the usual obstacles that the traditional “heavy” rules of written communication can cause. The user can also expand the classic orthographic rules by adding signs and symbols to adapt the message any way he/she wants. In fact, the SMS service has instigated the creation of a new written language. This new language allows communication without physical presence. The removal of the body, through elimination of human voice, in the communication process, is seen by young users as liberating in the sense that they feel that they can communicate more freely. This phenomenon is present particularly among adolescents who, at the time of puberty, often have difficulty with human to human contact. To be able to communicate without this pressure is as a new liberty offered by this new service. These are the reasons why the SMS has a very
important “signification of use” which conferred on it a very strong acceptability. The SMS was thus deemed to be socially acceptable by the user. In order to maintain and expand the significations of use it was then very important to work on usability issues. The service providers who further developed the SMS had to take into account not only the technical aspects of the mobile phone, but also the new SMS language that was being elaborated by the users. By taking into account this new usage, the service providers developed new functions such as emoticons that can be integrated into the message, or the MMS. The example of the evolution of the SMS illustrates clearly the importance of the significations of use as well as the symbiotic nature of the relationship between usability and acceptability.
In order to fully understand the relationship between suitability and usability it is important to summarize that the conditions necessary for an ICT device or service to be accepted are sorted out by sociological analyses of user experience based on the “significations of use” while the conditions for a device or service to be usable are based on the ease of use, the facility to learn to use the device and the ability to understand it which is based on experimental ergonomic studies. Favorable “significations of use” show that the new device has value for the users. In this case, the sociology of the user experience attempts to explain the creation of value. The new device has value when it is meaningful to the users. Favorable usability tests indicate that the value of the device or service is accessible to the user. In this case, ergonomic science attempts to provide design conditions for an optimum access to value. The new device offers a better access to its value when it is usable for the users. While it is not always the case, it is usually recommended that, when using the UAD process, the acceptability conditions of the device or service would be examined before studying the usability conditions. Once the “significations of use” have been identified and the usability tests have indicated that the value of the device or service is accessible to the user, it is necessary to test whether or not the accessible value identified can be realized: even if an ICT device or service creates an accessible value, it cannot be realized if it is not given an economic value.
As a summary, the main issues related to social and human factors that are successively treated by the Social and Human Sciences in a UAD process of innovation in ICT devices and services are:
Conditions of user acceptance (the sociology of the user experience): How to create value?
Conditions for good usability (Ergonomics): How to facilitate access to value?
Conditions for value realization (Economics-experimental economy, strategic marketing) How to realize value?
2.3 SUE and Social Identity User Profiles The Sociology of the User Experience is based on two concepts: 1. Social identity user profiles: This explains the way in which
the user stores, processes and re-uses user experiences in relation to his or her social identity.
2. Significations of use: This concerns the conditions necessary in which a user buys, possesses and uses an ICT innovation in relation to the meaning(s) that he or she attributes to it.
The motivation to adopt an ICT innovation is based on the “social identity profile of the user” and on the “significations of use” that the he or she attributes to the new ICT device or service. Social identity issues have an impact on the use of ICT devices or services more than ever before. That is to say that, by definition, devices or services created to treat information or communicate, are directly linked to the user’s expression of his or her social identity in society. This means that when using ICT devices or services, the user, whether explicitly or not, is defining, conceiving of and living a certain view of his or her social identity. From this process are developed the elements that, together, form the user’s social identity profile. During a study realised for France Telecom in 2003 [14], 25 ICT users were interviewed. Based on the 8 variables (time, space, self, others, action, knowledge and know-how, power, and organization) [14] of social identity user profiles, and the analysis of these interviews, a typology of four generic user profiles have been defined. These profiles show the types of social identities that the users, due to their previous experience in using ICTs, “naturally” search and express in the use of ICTs. Due to their 'non-negotiator' characteristics, the first two profiles are called as the Fan and the Detractor. And, due to their 'negotiator' characteristics, the other two profiles are called as the Utilitarian and the Humanist. The utilitarian negotiates the interest of the use of ICTs on the basis of their usefulness in different situations, whereas the humanist negotiates the interest of the use of ICTs on the basis of their respect or enhancement of human and cultural values in different situations. Table 1 presents the ICT user profiles, which are identified by [14] and described by [5]. In the interest of illustrating the concept of these dimensions we explored the relationship to time and the relationship to others. The dimension referred to the relation to time, deals with the importance the user attributes to the time efficiency that the device or service may provide. Some users consider ICTs to be exciting because they allow the user to communicate or access information rapidly and on demand. The user’s relationship with others also impacts the use of ICT devices and services. The concept of virtual presence, a technology that allows a user to be present in more than one place at the same time, is of particular interest to certain users because it allows them to interact with others without the social and physical barriers existent in a real environment. It also facilitates the creation of social communities based on virtual presence. For these users immediateness and “virtuality” are essential to their well-being and the expression of their identity in today’s society. However, other users consider that this quick access to information can lead to situations of dependence - they express a fear that this ease of access and rapidity can lead to a veritable addiction to ICT devices and services. They also suggest that these devices and services devaluate the quality of information available. They fear that the combination of the quick access and low quality of information will affect the user’s learning process and lead to the diffusion of false or inaccurate information. Thus, the user simply stocks information while never actually acquiring knowledge. They fear equally the possibility that virtual presence will lead to the development of false relationships and thus will have a negative impact on their relationships with others. These two possible scenarios demonstrate two of the profiles that have been defined: the fan and the detractor. These two profiles are opposite and mutually exclusive.
Table 1. ICT User Profiles [5]. ICT User
Profile Description
The Fans The Fans are aficionados of ICT’s enthusiast towards these devices and services. ICT’s are considered as a strong element of their identity. Their way of life is based on ICT uses.
The Utilitarians
The Utilitarians are rather open to the uses of ICT’s on condition that it makes life easier and support them in the achievement of their objective. They pay a lot of attention to the usability, to the usefulness and efficiency of ICT’s.
The Humanists The Humanists consider the ICT with a critical eye. Uses of ICT’s are strongly dependent on the priority that user gives to the human relations, human being and values.
The Detractors The Detractors are strongly reluctant to use innovative ICT’s and they are extremely hostile to ICT’s on principle. They conceive it like an aggression against their values, their identity and their way of life.
Two other profiles have also emerged from the social identity profile studies that we have done: the utilitarian and the humanist. These two profiles differ from the fan and the detractor in that they are not mutually exclusive. The utilitarian and the humanist are prepared to negotiate the acceptance of ICT devices and services. That is to say that for the utilitarian, the use and acceptance of the ICT device depends on the situation (i.e. private or professional). For example, a utilitarian might place great importance on virtual presence in his or her professional environment while not using this technology at all in his or her private life. The decision of whether or not to accept the innovation is motivated entirely by the principle of utility. For the humanist, however, the use and acceptance of the device or service depends on his or her personal social and cultural values. The first two profiles, the fan and the detractor, are non-negotiator user profiles and the other two, the utilitarian and the humanist, are negotiator user profiles.
2.4 The “significations of use” With this understanding of the social identity profiles, it is now possible to examine the significations of use in more detail. While the “social identity profile” is based on the user’s past experience, the “significations of use” are what mediate the user’s reaction to a new usage experience. Therefore when faced with a new user experience, he/she will react according to their social identity profile as well as the signification that he/she attributes to the use of the new service or device in question. In front of an ICT innovation, being it a concept, a mock-up or a prototype, the user checks if this innovation can be meaningful to his/her daily life. Researches in the sociology of the user experience discovered that this implicit evaluation of “significations of use” by the user is done by searching the answers to four generic issues: 1. Can I assimilate this new technology into my mental know-
how?
2. Can I integrate this ICT innovation into my daily practices?
3. Can I appropriate this ICT innovation with my private, public or professional roles and identity?
4. Can I adapt this ICT innovation to my private, public or professional environment?
Thus, the significations of use projected by a user on the new device or service are evaluated in the SUE method at these four levels: 1) the assimilation of the device or service to the user’s technical know-how; 2) its integration into the user’s daily practices; 3) the user’s appropriation of the device or service with regard to his or her role and identity and 4) its adaptation to
Table 2. Criteria for judging the acceptability of new ICTs.
Levels Criteria
Assimilation level
Is it comprehensible enough for him/her?
Can he/she compare with the techniques he/she already uses?
Is he/she able to choose among all the functions proposed, those he/she is interested in?
Does he/she consider the new technique as a functional tool, and not only as a means of self-distinction?
Integration level
Does he/she see the new practices with the innovation as complementary rather than competing with his/her existing practices?
Can he/she validate the new practices with reference to his/her existing practices?
Is at least one problem solved by the new practices?
Does the user envisage re-organising, progressively, his/her daily practices?
Appropriation level
Does he consider that the innovation allows him/her to modify, or at least play with, his/her private or professional role?
Does he/she think that using the innovation is in accordance with his cultural values?
Does the user appropriate innovation into his/her fantasy, by linking dream and reality?
Is he/she able to imagine operating extensions of use possible with the innovation?
Adaptation level
Private environment and its evolution:
Can the use of the innovation be adapted to his/her social relations, and its development?
Can the use of the innovation be adapted to his/her family relations?
Can the use of the innovation be adapted to his/her manner of living?
Professional environment:
Can the use of the innovation be adapted to his/her client/supplier relationship and assist their development?
Can the use of the innovation be adapted to his/her situation vis-à-vis his/her economic sector, and its development?
Can the use of the innovation be adapted to the organisation of the company he/she works in, and its development?
the user’s private and/or professional environment. At each level, several criteria have to be met in order to judge the acceptability of an ICT device or service (Table 2).
Each criterion must be satisfied in order to verify that all the user’s requirements are met and that the innovation will succeed. If any of the eighteen criteria are not satisfied, or only partially satisfied, the Sociology of User Experience method identifies from each of the four levels of analysis the obstructions to acceptance of the innovation. These areas can then be addressed and subsequently subjected again to verification if necessary in an iterative process of improvement. At this stage, we can clarify how the SUE concept 2 – significations of use criteria - is complementary to the concept 1 - social identity user profiles. Actually, quantitative studies have demonstrated that Humanists and Utilitarians represent the most important part of the users community [7][8]. Thus, the ICT designers can decide to optimise their innovative concept according to the significations of use for these specific user profiles in order to maximize its possibility to make sense lastingly for a major part of the public. On the other hand, they can also decide how far they wish to consider the Fans and Detractors significations of use in the product or service design in order to exploit the “early adopters” effect of Fans or to avoid the belittling campaigns of Detractors.
3. PARADOXICAL USER ACCEPTANCE The user studies have shown that the classical rationale does not explain all what we can observe in the use of the technologies. Even from the point of view of usability studies, some success stories of technology based services are not explainable: for example, the SMS is an archetypal concept with poor usability
and usefulness so that it was not rational to predict a success for this concept. The classical user centric approaches based on the task analysis from a usability and usefulness point of view would have rejected the SMS service. What is more, it was not designed and marketed as a new service with commercial value. The “logic” of this “illogical” success story is that this amazing mixture live/pre-recorded medium makes sense for a user who invented an astounding written or spoken language. It is not useful, it is not usable - but it is meaningful. From a classical perspective, the meaningfulness of technology based services is not always “logical”. As the traditional logic does not allow explaining everything in the usage phenomena, some alternative concepts and tools are suggested in the next sections.
3.1 Making Sense First First being usable, a new technology based service has to make sense. Making sense cannot simply be seen as being useful. Also futility can make sense. People’s actions and thinking includes always emotions. We cannot separate them totally, and it is important to take them into account in product design. Don Norman [15] integrates the meaning of emotions and cognition in designing by using three emotional categories: visceral, behavioral and reflective. Visceral refers to the product’s look and feel: how the product pleasures the user visually. Behavioral category related to the functionality and practical issues. The last category refers to how well the product fit to the use’s identity and image. Humans are usually proud of this kind of product and they like to tell about it to the other persons. People like products for different reasons and react to them emotionally at first. After the emotional reaction, people start to thinks about them rationally. [15] This confirms the evident that users can be fascinated of the products and systems even without any rational reason or purpose.
Although users are interested in adaptive services, they are also a little bit against them. This is because; when adaptive services provide information according to the user’s preferences, the consequence can be that the breadth of experience will decrease. When service makes actions on behalf of the user or proposes suggestions based on user profile, it can lead to the situations that the user will lose some interesting information. The user can miss information that is not in the scope of his/her normal user profile, but could be interesting for him/her anyway. Decrease of the breadth of experience is the situation that users do not want to face. People love (new and exciting) experiences. People go to amusement parks for experiencing for instance fun, joy or fear [15]. Another example is the situation, when the system recommends apartments in a certain region and the user just accepts one of the recommendations, he/she may learn less about the real estate market in that region. The user should be the one who decides whether he/she prefers to learn more about the domain or to save time by delegating work to a system. [10] It is easy to give the power to the system to make recommendations when the users knows what they wants, but often people do not know what they want. The adaptive system could surprise the user and increase the breadth of experience by offering to the user possibilities to experience something unexpected and unpredicted.
3.2 The Bipolar User’s Logic How to anticipate the unexpected uses? Recurrently, sociologists observe illogical justification given by the users in reason for using such and such a high-tech device. For example, the
sociologists observe frequently irrational argument given by user when experiencing prototypes of new devices or services: “I like it, I don’t know what is it used for, but I like it. I have no example of utilization! But instinctively I have this impression…” or “it is wonderful because it is useless!” In a classical perspective, this reasoning is not logical: the user accumulates the negative arguments but he surprisingly concludes in a positive way. Even if the user has no good reasons, it makes sense for him. In some cases, the sense seems to be based on nonsense.
Furthermore, regularly the user justifies the adoption of innovative concept by using contradictory arguments. The researchers in our project observed such contradiction when studying the user’s acceptability of proactive mobile services in two European countries [14]. In order to study and anticipate the user’s acceptability of proactive mobile services, we presented a concept designed in cooperation with the technical engineers through a film demonstrator [1]. This concept of proactive mobile services is a typical example of the ambient intelligent system. It is based on key features leading the way that innovative context-aware based services are usually designed. It can be summarized through two keywords: mobility and personalization.
Mobility - using geo-positioning, the presented services were designed for a nomad user, following him in mobile activities and enhancing mobility by providing him continuously and seamlessly with services when he switches context between home, work and public environment. Such proactive services are aimed at increasing the efficiency of the user when he is moving. It makes user’s mobility faster, reliable, flowing, direct, precise, predictable, and traceable.
Personalization - via user profile, the presented services were designed to be highly adaptive to the user’s preferences, needs, social situation and psychological condition. The point is to make the proactive services unobtrusive and naturally integrated to the user’s identity and context. Additionally, such proactive services are aimed at increasing the satisfaction of the user feeling special by means of personalized information and customized services.
The analysis of the feedback from focus group participants towards this concept confirms that the users like the idea of mobility and personalization depending of the users’ culture [5] and attitudes towards ICTs [4]. Explicitly, they require services that provide them with more mobility and more personalization. However, while collecting the users’ explicit feedback to the questions we were asking (basically “do you like it and why?”) we observed another implicit information indicating an unexpected phenomenon. Although users are talking about “why they like or dislike mobility or personalized services”, they are talking about something else, which appears to be like the contrary of mobility and personalization. Since, we gave them a possibility to talk about their way of life and about the way they could use the proactive services in everyday life, they expressed opposite values to “mobility” and “personalization”.
In concrete terms, the meaningfulness of mobility is balanced by the users’ inclination for slowness, immobility, imprecision, chance, detours, misplaced, etc. When moving, users are not always looking for the speediness but occasionally they want to take their time. Even when they are in mobile situations, they have a lot of static moments: from the point of view of the users, mobility is also made of an addition of immobile times. When
they move, the users do not always know exactly where they want or have to go. Sometimes, the users do not want to go straight to their final destination but they want detours or discovery. When they move, sometimes they want to be surprised or even to get lost! Therefore the interviewed user said that he could divert the applications and use it in his own way.
The meaningfulness of personalization is balanced by the users’ inclination for unknown world, unfamiliar things and unexpected suggestions, etc. Obviously, the users are requiring the adaptation to their specific identity but in the same time they worry to be kept by their user profile in a permanent definition of themselves. They are afraid of a personalized system that could limit their personal development by restricting the discovery differences and otherness. Moreover, the user profile is seen as a box in which the system want to confine the user in order to keep him under control. In fact, the personalization they would like to see from a real intelligent system is not only adaptation to the person they are today, but adaptation to the person they could become. Such a system could help them to enhance their personality e.g. individual temperament, not only reinforce they identity. This is the definition of the proactive adaptation to the user’s profile. They require a personalized system that should be able to use the user profile to provide them with contents that are different from what could logically satisfy them.
In summary, we observed that something makes sense for the user while something contradictory to the concept makes sense as well. When the user considered the presented concept, it makes him/her to think about something else that appears to be contradictory. We observed that the participants were talking about two apparent conflicting things: they talk explicitly about the concept and they talk implicitly about something, which is not included in the concept, for instance, we presented a concept for mobility performance, but participants talked about immobility moments, slowness, and wandering, etc.
3.3 Paradoxical User’s Logic In this kind of bipolar observation, the researchers who study the user’s adoption of high-tech services have two options. The first one is to ignore the opposite side of the concept considering that this other thing addressed by the user is not the concept. It just means that the user is off the subject when he reacts to the concept by talking about something else. However, it is a risky option because, if they are not considered by the designer, the revealed “drawbacks” could turn into negative cost for the user and interfere with the intended benefits. The second option is to pay attention to the contradiction by considering it precisely, because it is exactly contradictory to the concept as initially presented, then it demonstrates that it is linked to the concept. Even if it is different, this is not another thing than the concept, and this is not off the subject. Like the other side of the same coin, this is another aspect of the concept highlighted from the user’s point of view - the way a user perceives the concept and the way he/she could use it. From the designer’s point of view, these apparent contradictions reveal “the dark side” of the concept. The revealed facets of the concept are inseparable from the intended one and could not be removed as simple weakness of the concept. It is impossible to remove “slowness” from the user’s conception of mobility. It is impossible to remove “discovery” from the user’s conception of personalization.
3.3.1 Paradox and Ambivalence In a classical perspective, a paradox is defined as “something which is opposite to the common sense, something strange, inconceivable, incomprehensible, it is contrary to reason, to the common sense, to the logic. It is an absurd logic of possible-impossible” [2]. In our approach, instead of rejecting the unintended aspects of the concept, the designer’s position is to understand that what makes sense for the users in the concept is a paradox: something and its opposite. From our study, we learned that the concept of proactive mobile services makes sense for the user not only because of mobility and personalization, but also because of immobility and difference. Moreover, the concept will all the more make sense for the user since the synergy of both paradox poles will characterize the concept: “proactive services enhance user’s mobility and immobility” or “proactive services will be accurately personalized to the one that user is not yet (the different one he would become)”. This approach is typical of the participatory design. It considers that the innovative concept is defined as the co-existence of notions that makes sense because it provides simultaneously the user with something and the contrary.
Why does paradox make sense? The riddle is that something apparently “absurd” from the classical logic angle seems to be “meaningful” from the user’s point of view. The paradoxes we observed are announced by the users: it reflects the way how users perceive the qualities of the innovative concept and conceive their utilization of the derived services. The paradoxical perceived qualities of the concept echoes to the ambivalent way users would like to use the concept services. For example, in our project, we discovered that, at the same time that the users perceived the explicit qualities of the proactive mobile services (e.g. mobility) they described implicit qualities (e.g. immobility) that they would also like to experience while using the presented services. In summary, because a user is ambivalent, he/she wants to appropriate the concept in an ambivalent way. When a user refers to the dark side of the concept, it does not mean systematically that user identifies a weakness in the concept or that he/she wants something else than the concept. It signifies that user requires a bipolar concept enabling him to experience his ambivalent identity: mobility - immobility and personalization- difference.
The user does not want just an aspect of the concept or another aspect of this concept (mobility or immobility; personalization or difference). The user wants both: the bright and dark side of the concept, the mobility and immobility, the personalization and difference. Here we are confronted to the specificity of social and human sciences, in which the logical of the observed phenomena is not always rational from the classical point of view. From a human perspective, there is not only one version of the reality. The logic of the user can be illogical. The reality of the users’ expectation towards proactive service is not that a user wants more mobility and personalization. The reality is paradoxical because a user is ambivalent. This reality is that what make sense for the user are mobility and immobility, personalization and difference. The logic of the user is the logic of the “and” even if the combined poles are not “logically” compatible.
3.3.2 Neglected Pole Why designers should consider the underside of the concept? The paradoxes we observed in the way how users perceived a concept are more than just a contradiction. This is not the antagonism of two conflicting poles that neutralize each other. There is no
opposition of a positive side against a negative side that could withdraw the benefit for the user. A paradox is a synergy between two magnetic poles for the user. This active phenomenon generates the sense that a user lend the proposed concept. Such a “meaning engine” can generate user’s attraction, but it can also generate repulsion when it prevents a user from experiencing one of the poles. For example, we learned that users want to experience personalization. However, they told us that they are afraid of personalization if it prevents them to experience the other pole which is otherness, difference, etc. They are attracted both by personalization and difference (variation). Moreover, it appears that they would appreciate all the more personalization since it enables them to experience also difference and variation. The dynamic of the paradox is that the two opposite poles work permanently and complementarily to generate the meaning of use.
Even if a paradox is not made of positive and negative poles, a neglected pole in the way the concept is designed could lead to a negative user’s perception of the concept and even to a short- or long-term rejection. The neglected pole of a paradox remains active and all the more active since it remains neglected. The designer can decide to ignore the pole of immobility and difference in the way he/she conceives new services. A gap in the designer’s knowledge of their concept about potential paradoxical meaning of use can cause interference on the user’s adoption of new services. The risk is to create an unbalanced and short-lived system. In the perspective of a user aided design and with the intention to optimize a meaningful user integration of the high-tech innovative services, the role of the sociologists is to support the designers in considering the user’s point of view during the design process in order to avoid a “neglected pole”. The challenge is to develop user aided design approaches enabling to detect, understand and use a paradox as a bipolar meaning machine for the design of new concept and derived services.
4. A PROPOSED ANALYSIS PROCESS When the designers introduce a new concept to the users, they propose them to agree with and to enter in a system. However, most of the time, the vision of the concept from designers and from the user's point of view reveals that they do not conceive the use of the system in the same way. A way to make the paradoxes appearing is to make them talking about how they define the concept and conceive the use of concept. The essence of the paradoxes is strongly lying on these different ways they see the same concept. A paradox can be defined as “a sign that poses the problem of its sense” [2]. The first step of the analysis process (Figure 1) is to detect signs indicating the presence of a paradox in the way the concept is defined. The second step is to understand the sense of paradox. The outcome of the process is to portray the system of use agreed by users and designers.
4.1 Signs During the design process, sociologists observe signs of paradoxes within the way the innovative concept is defined by the users and designers. Sociologists make the designers and users talking about the concept and then, both visions are compared.
4.1.1 Technological and Social Innovation Dynamics Making the designers talking about “their” concept enables the sociologist to understand what the high-tech based proposal to the
users is. In order to be submitted to the users, this proposal is clarified and simplified to be easily understandable: functioning principle, features and usefulness, user’s category and environment. It is also required to put this designers’ conception in relation with trends of the research and development in the industrial field as well as with the commercial high-tech offers. This task is achieved by the mean of a keeping up with technological innovations. It enables to understand what the specificity of the concept is and what its technological innovativeness is compared to the global technological dynamics. On the other hand, it enables the sociologists to observe how this designers’ vision of the concept is typical of the global tendency of the technological development.
The mediation role of the sociologists is to organize the confrontation of the designers’ vision with the users’ perception of the concept. Making users talking about the way they conceive the use of the derived services from the concept enable to observe the sociological innovation dynamics. This users’ consulting is organized through focus groups gathering typical potential users. Several categories of users (e.g. teenagers, elderly people, etc.) can be aimed by the concept so that several focus groups can be arranged. The achievement of the focus group is structured in two stages. The first stage is devoted to the concept presentation and to the collection of the users’ spontaneous feedback. At that moment, researchers can observe more specifically how users follow or not the technological innovation dynamics and how they adopt or not the designers’ proposal. In the second phase, organization techniques can be used to encourage the subjects to imagine themselves as actual users of the new services. It enables to observe their usage imaginary stimulated by the concept. During the focus groups, users invent new and innovative usages derived from the primary concept. These observations can be completed also by the mean of a sociological review of other studies identifying emergent usages, mutation of users’ practices and values, occurrence of sociological facts and tendencies in the arts. The convergence of indexes array observed in focus groups and in the society evolution enables the sociologist to highlight dim signs of the social innovation dynamics with its new usages.
4.2 Sense Next to the observation and definition of the technological and sociological innovation dynamics, sociologists compare these dynamics in order to observe how it could converge to make sense. This is made by studying correlations between the collected technological materials and sociological phenomena. These resonances can be depicted as the interaction between a) new technologies that are generating new users’ wishes, new potential fields, and b) social trends that express the collective fantasy, which is more or less favorable for new features and applications.
4.2.1 Paradox Detection and Ambivalence Analysis At this stage, we interpret the signs to detect paradoxes in the users’ vision of the concept because paradoxes are like early indicators of forthcoming changes in society and people values [1]. Paradoxes signify that not only high-tech development is innovating. Paradoxes are signs that the society is also constantly changing and innovating through the way people think and live. Thus, when we observe paradoxes in the way how users perceive a new technological concept, it means that there are strong signs
Figure 1. The analysis process.
of potential uses. These latent uses are just waiting for being activated by the appropriate innovative proposal. Paradoxes are a means to synchronize the technological innovation dynamics with the sociological innovation dynamics.
The reason why paradoxes are so potentially meaningful for the user, can be explained through earlier studies in the sociology of user experience. The paradoxical perception of the concept echoes to the ambivalence conception of the user experience. Paradoxes are potential strong base for the user’s adoption of a new system when the user wants and can adopt the system in an ambivalent way. The user’s logic is not always the logic of high-tech development. That is why the next step of our approach is to identify and to depict how the user wants to use this new system. By analysing the way how user reacts to the concept and the way how he/she conceives the use of the derived services we make appearing the user’s ambivalence.
4.2.2 Neglected Pole Identification Thanks to this confrontation of the system’s paradoxes with the user’s ambivalences, it becomes possible to identify the neglected poles of the initial concept definition. The neglected poles are like keys that unlock the risk of user’s block in front of the concept because of the impossibility he/she has to experiment his/her ambivalence in the use of the proposed system. At this stage, it appears clearly that compared to the user’s ambivalence, the initial concept inclines toward one of the paradox pole.
4.3 System The last step is to think again about the initial concept in order to enhance it by considering the neglected poles. It consists in defining a balanced system of use which is the result of the confrontation between the technological innovation dynamics and the sociological innovation dynamics. This system of use is the negotiated one between designers and users. Such a system will accept its paradoxes and catch the users’ ambivalent ways of doing. It will enable the users to live their ambivalence when appropriating the paradoxical system of use. Concretely, the convergence between the designers’ logic and the users’ logic delineates the field of the sociological opportunities for new technologies and features that were previously improbable or neglected. The role of the sociologists is to support the designers in considering these new socio-technical possibilities when they design new concepts. This step of adjustment of the paradoxical
signs with the ambivalent sense aims at enabling a user experience without neglected pole. This leads inexorably to highly innovative concepts in the sense that they are simultaneously based on high-tech innovations and the edge of social invention. The created systems are paradoxical in the sense that they are widely meaningful because they are derived from the users’ ambivalences and because they are based on neglected poles.
In order to design a meaningful system of use with paradoxes, it is important to keep in mind the SUE concepts 1 and 2 that enable an innovative concept to make sense for specific expectations of different user profiles. Like stated earlier, there are negotiator profiles (Utilitarians and Humanists) and non-negotiator profiles (Fans and Detractors). Making sense through paradoxes is especially true for negotiator profiles because their ICT adoption mental system - and they logic of use - are ambivalent. They think and they behave according to a bipolar scheme. The paradoxes make sense in a bipolar way. Considering the neglected pole is just a tool to make the bipolarity well balanced in the way they experience an innovation. Then, the sociologists support the designers in proposing to the user a system of use avoiding the selection between 'a pole or the other pole', but integrating 'the initial pole and the neglected pole'. The paradoxical innovation system proposed to the user is based on the logic of the “and”. Contrariwise, the non-negotiator profiles work in the logic of the “or”: they perceive ICT innovation and behave with it in polarised way. In summary, they are totally “geek” or totally against ICT innovation for very “enthusiast” or “pessimistic” reasons. This is another reason, why it is important for designers to prioritise a well balanced innovative ICT without neglected pole, because even Fans or Detractors could not really influence medium profiles that this innovation should be used just by them (extreme use of early adopters) or by no one (extreme rejection of decriers).
5. CONCLUSION This paper presents a new approach by taking an advantage of the specific added value of the social and human sciences as a part of the design process. Social and human sciences' approaches such as the Sociology of User Experience can explain unexpected usage phenomena and even support designers in anticipating bipolar users’ feedback. The paper introduces psycho-sociological concepts such as paradox, ambivalence and neglected pole that make possible the analysis of the paradoxical phenomena. The paper presents an analysis process to involve social innovation into the design process of high-tech services in the same capacity as the technological innovation. It proposes to detect and use the paradoxes in order to create systems of use that make sense for a user in an ambivalent way. The aim of this approach is to enable designers to anticipate and, why not, encourage unpredictable uses as a promise of a durable user’s adoption.
6. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS We thank the Academy of Finland and the French Ministry of Research for funding the ADAMOS project. We appreciate all project partners for their contribution to this inquiry. Special thanks to Michel Brun and André Favier (MSH-Alpes) for their contribution to this study. Warm thanks to all participants of the focus groups.
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