People research report

My people research is aimed to understand how electronics are build up and how they work as well as the way in which people tend to relate to them. In order to reach my purpose, I’ve been contacting personally professional people in the field of technology such as E.A., a computer scientist, L.M., a micro-electronic engineer, A.J.D. Lambert, a teacher of management technology, expert in disassembling of electronics devices, at the Technical University in Eindhoven and FabLab, a small scale workshop with the tools to make almost anything. At the same time, I’ve been sending out questionnaires to ten people/users that can be categorized in two groups by age: the first one is between 22 and 30 years while the second one is between 55 and 60 years. This is in order to have a wider vision of the field of technology as well as to explore possible developments and changes of human habits.

The research carried out with technical people has allowed me to know and comprehend limits and possibilities of components and systems. We can refer to systems, when more components are connected together in order to accomplish a certain task. It can be a circuit, a printed board, a mobile phone or a PC. In order to have an information flow, it is necessary a strong connectivity amongst the devices. The state of the art shows that it is both physical (the processor) and virtual (the software). The combination of the two allows the system to work, where the software is the flexible element which defines the function. This highlights the strong dependency that electronic appliances have towards technology developments. Indeed, this is what defines their design, performances, consumption, weight and dimensions and the reason why they tend to become obsolete easily. Nevertheless, their degeneration is also due to the fact that, nowadays, popular digital information and communication devices are structured on a hierarchic frame. Therefore, interchangeable modules are a valuable possibility to longer the life of electronics. Two of my consultants pointed me out the possibility to have a different, no-hierarchical architecture of those sorts of systems. A.J.D. Lambert described it with the metaphor of a foot-ball team, where there is not a central unit and the parts are programmed for one common purpose. Like the example shows, repetition is not always bad; the repetition of brains is good as well as of functions. The latest is the one which would define the scale of the system itself.

The research I developed with users offered to me a deeper understanding of what matters to people. People are social animals, however they also need their own privacy; this reflects deeply in their relationship with objects and digital information and communication devices. The most the people define objects, the most they are attached to them. This affinity articulates on two emotional levels: private and social ones or attachment and sense of surviving. According to that, people tend to connect to objects which represent part of themselves or to those which guaranty them a sense of independency and safety.

What people like most is indeed to hold human relationships. Because of that, digital devices tend to be very popular by shortening space and time. Furthermore, those which give the sense of allowing and increasing human contacts are the most used as well as the most popular. However, those sorts of devices are also likely to become obsolete faster because people are willing and happy to switch their electronics, as long as they give them the feeling to increase human contact, as for example the webcam does. This sense of belonging, that appliances feed, deals very directly with the fast performances that they can provide, because they can work almost as fast as our brain, providing different opportunities and fields of action at the same time. Thus, we have the feeling to be free, to have the chance to choose, to express ourselves in our complexity as well as to share it all, if we feel like it. Moreover, the active presence of those devices in our lives is due to the fact that they are human-sized, thus we can carry them around. Therefore, also on a physical level, they turn to be closer and closer to ourselves. We allow them to follow us, in order to have entertainment as well as to be linked to the surround world. This doesn’t happen only when we go out, but also at home, where we tend to place the portable devices close to us or in places where we pass often through. This shows that, also at home, we tend to rely on their portable size. Indeed, it is the action the real feature that links us to them; they are the extenctions of our body, as McLuhan pointed out in the ‘60ies as well as one of my user defined the PC an extinction of his memory, we tend to consider them participating links to the world. Therefore, we need them in order to have the feeling to be part of it. In particular, this is a tendency much stronger in the younger people rather than in the mature ones’, because adults seem not to rely so deeply to digital devices. I am wondering if this sense of independency that they provide tends instead to provide the opposite as well as the incapability to be in silent on our own for a little while.

To conclude, I would say that I see design opportunities in a deeper understanding and portability of those devices. We tend to lack of attachment towards them because we consider them only in pursuit of the activities that they allow us to. Because of that, we find them easy to change. However, as those functions are often much more of those we effectively use, if the performances turned to be personalized according to our needs, not only we might use resources more effectively, but we would reconsider devices through an emotional attachment which now we don’t nurture.