- [Juan Pablo] ...On developing basically technologies
and information systems related to
helping with recovery from the Rwandan genocide
and many of the authors
have been working on this for a long time
and the one presenting today is Daisy Yu
from the University of Washington
and I'll let her introduce all the other authors.
- Good afternoon everyone.
I'm Daisy Yu from University of Washington,
Value Sensitive Design research lab.
I'm very happy to be here today to share our work
on Multi-lifespan Design Thinking.
Our paper has two foci.
On the one hand,
it's a design method paper.
On the other hand,
we provide a theoretical framework
for the concept of transitional justice
and what it means to work with diaspora population
coming from post-conflict societies.
In this talk today,
I will focus on the design methods
but anything that I don't cover during the talk
I'd be happy to chat with you afterwards.
This study,
as Juan Pablo introduced so wonderfully,
is part of a larger very long-term design project called:
"Voices from the Rwanda Tribunal".
At the heart of this project
is a collection of video interviews
from people who worked at the United Nations
International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda,
which is also known as the ICTR.
It is a special court
that the UN established,
in response to the 1994 genocide in Rwanda.
It's the first kind of international justice system
since the Nuremberg,
and the first court in history
to have delivered verdicts against persons responsible
for committing genocide
based on the UN genocide convention of 1948.
The ICTR was also the very first institution in the world
to recognise rape as a means of perpetrating genocide.
So the court is of great historical importance
in many ways.
The project Voices from the Rwanda Tribunal
was launched in 2008
and has been introduced to the CHI community
multiple times since.
And hopefully you will continue to see new research
emerge around this project for a very long time.
Specifically, the paper we discuss today
builds on our prior work published at CHI 2013.
At that time, we developed a participatory design method
called Envisioning Workshops.
The goal was to understand
how the people of Rwanda would envision
future information systems
for providing better access
to the Voices from the Rwanda Tribunal interview collection.
So in summer 2012, we traveled to three provincial cities
in Rwanda
and worked with 109 Rwandan participants.
The Envisioning Workshops was proved effective
in bringing together participants from diverse background.
Most importantly,
we saw people from survivor communities
and perpetrator communities
coming together to collaborate on a design project.
At the same time
we gained better insights into how
we might significantly improve the method.
Particularly,
we felt the need to explore the element of time
more deeply and explicitly
when we collaborate to envision futures.
So time is a very important consideration
for our project,
as we emphasize multi-lifespan design thinking
in an attempt to provide an alternative
to our fast-paced design cycle
that is very much widespread in the field of HCI
Back in 2010,
Batya Friedman and Lisa Nathan introduced
Multi-lifespan Design approach.
Calling for HCI designers and researchers
to engage in critical societal problems
that are unlikely to be solved
within a single human lifespan.
Genocide, HIV/AIDS, deforestation, habitat destruction,
and species extinction.
There are significant problems
that defy short-term solutions.
Some losses are just too great
that they are not likely to be made up
within the time-frame of a single human lifespan.
And we believe that there are possible opportunities
and roles for design and technology
to help construct longer term solutions
to such problems.
Taking this multi-lifespan perspective,
we focused on co-generating long-term visions
with Rwandan participants to guide our design.
Our aim here is to stimulate participants
to move outside the narrow conditions
of the present situation.
Especially when the present situation
is highly unstable and conflictual,
which is often, if not always the case
when working in societies undergoing
post-conflict transitional justice process.
And instead, we wanted to shift the focus
to possible futures that we can build together.
We drew inspiration from various existing
design theories and methods
that focus on envisioning futures.
But then, "future" means many different things
and people experience time very differently.
For example,
people with post-traumatic stress disorder
are often reported to experience
a sense of fore-shortened future.
So we asked ourselves:
"During our previous 2012 workshops
were the participants thinking sufficiently long-term,
as we hoped?
And how can we better position participants
to reflect on time in our next envisioning workshops?"
With these questions in mind
we developed two new multi-lifespan design methods
that address time in a very explicit manner.
The first method we named it:
Multi-lifespan Timeline.
With this method
we explored 200-year time-frame
which is very broad
and then the second method we named it:
Multi-lifespan Co-Design,
where we explored 20-year time-frames,
so it's more concrete and focused.
Together these methods complement
the previous envisioning method
with addressed futures in more general and open-ended terms.
We explored these design methods
with a total of 51 Africans from Rwanda
and its neighboring countries
who are currently living in the United States.
Last summer, in 2015,
we traveled to three locations:
Texas, Indiana, and Maine,
where we could find a large community of Rwandans.
The first method we introduced
is Multi-lifespan Timeline.
As you can see in the picture
we installed a big timeline on the wall.
This timeline is approximately 4 1/2 yards long,
so it's about 4 metres.
Having the year 2015 marked in the middle,
the timeline traces back 100 years,
all the way to 1915.
In prior to the workshop we,
the research team,
populated the past 100 years
with a handful of example social events
and technological innovations.
So for example,
World War I and World War II,
the computer ENIAC in the 40s,
Rwandan independence in 1962,
first space walk,
and the Voting Rights Act in the United States
in the mid 60s,
the emergence of Internet
and AIDS epidemics in the 80s,
the 1994 genocide in Rwanda
and the first generation iPhone in 2007,
so on and so forth.
And then we opened up the space
for the next 100 years,
where participants were encouraged
to fill the void.
We asked:
"What might happen in the next 100 years,
societally and technologically,
and when would it happen?"
So participants were encouraged to think
in terms of both time and quality of changes
that can happen over multiple hundred years.
This is an example of what the timeline looks like
after the activity.
Participants called out ideas
about what things might happen and when,
and we the workshop facilitators,
wrote them down on a sticky
and put them up on the timeline.
We told participants that we are not interested
in predicting the future.
We asked people to be creative,
that we just wanted to hear anything
that they can imagine.
All ideas were welcome.
Justification was not needed
and critiques were not allowed.
Importantly, each participant was asked
to take a strip of blue tape
to mark their presence on the timeline.
The blue line represents from birth to roughly
when a person becomes 75 years old.
One for each participant.
The purpose was to help participants to visually
position their own lifetime
within a larger movement of history,
spanning 200 years.
And this is what we found.
We found that,
perhaps unsurprisingly,
most of the ideas, visions, were clustered
towards our nearer future.
Particularly, within the next 50 years
with decreasing number of items
as the time moves further into the future.
And yet, in all three workshops
we saw participants generating some interesting visions
for the longer term future
that went well beyond their own lifespans
and well beyond the timeline that we prepared.
For example,
this is a participant saying:
"In like 300, 4-500 years...
It will be de-extinction.
Bringing back dinosaurs and all the extinct animals."
Which is a cool idea.
We observed an interesting strategy
that some participants used to make sense of time.
Especially into the longer term futures
beyond their own lifespans.
We called it: Mirroring.
For example,
a participant reflected on Nelson Mandela's emprisonment
in 1964
and the US Voting Rights Act in 1965,
and said: "So in 50 years,
everybody will have freedom".
By looking back on the distant past,
these participants were able to calibrate looking forward
for a similar length of time.
Next we engaged in Multi-lifespan Envisioning.
This method was reported in detail at CHI 2013,
so I'm just going to skip this part,
but if you have any questions
I'd be happy to answer it later.
And finally, in the workshop
we engaged in Multi-lifespan Co-Design.
The purpose of this method was
to move participants' attention
from a broader range of visions
to a very concrete extentiation of a very particular
future information system.
Specifically, in this case study
participants were asked to focus on 20 years from now
which corresponds to roughly one generation in the future.
Also, I want to remind you that the year 2015
marked the 21st anniversary of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda.
So 20 years seemed like an appropriate length of time
that would make a lot of sense to our participants.
Participants worked in groups of 3 to 4 persons.
With each group we provided a spec sheet
where we outlined specific design tests.
To give you more context
I want to let you know
that as part of the pre-workshop activities,
all participants watched together
four short video clips
selected from the Voices from the Rwanda Tribunal
interview collection.
And then later during the Co-Design,
we asked participants to choose one clip
from the four interviews that we watched together earlier
and to imagine a future audience
who is watching the same clip in the year 2035.
We asked participants to create stories and sketches
about an information system
through which future audiences will access that video clip
20 years from now.
During this co-design
we observed another interesting strategy
that pearticipants used to make sense of time.
We call it: Sequencing.
Here's an example story
that one of our participants group created.
"Maria is a 47 years old woman, a lady,
who was raped 27 years ago,
when she was a young lady.
She tried to live with the pain
and struggled through her young life.
She came to know Sexual Abuse Counseling Network
15 years ago
and she made a decision to forgive
her perpetrators and violators,
the people who violated her.
And she has since married
and has one child and a husband.
Today, she is one of the biggest voices
of the Sexual Abuse Counseling Network."
This story illustrates a survivor of rape
taking gradual steps towards healing
over a span of 27 years.
Here's another example.
In this sketch the participants first envisioned
5 years ahead and from there on
added another 15 years
to arrive at the year 2035,
showing a gradual unfolding of the reconciliation process.
So in many cases,
participants were dividing 20 years into smaller chunks,
typically in three chunks
and then creating a sequence of those time segments.
To summarize,
we developed two multi-lifespan design methods
experimenting with several different timescales:
200 years, 100 years, 75 years,
and 20 years.
In response, participants reflected on
and articulated a wide range of time.
From a near-term future to a 300-years or more
into the future.
We also ended by two interesting strategies
participants used to make sense of time,
which point us towards potentially fruitful direction
for exploring multi-lifespan design thinking in future work.
For example,
we can employ methods such as story-boarding
to better support sequential thinking
in the longer term future.
Finally, we identified more categories of
multi-lifespan design problems in addition to those
Freedman and Nathan identified in 2010.
In particular, qualitative analysis of our data shows
that participants often considered
infrastructural changes
and the process of evolving socio-political consciousness
as types of problem that require longer term
multi-lifespan solutions.
These of course are only a few beginning suggestions
for is what is likely a rich area for future
HCI design research.
I hope these ideas will stimulate new HCI research
that takes the longer multi-lifespan view.
Thank you very much.
(applause)
- [Man In Audience] Hi my name is Osama Muttatla.
I'm from University of Bristol.
Thanks for an interesting talk.
Not really a question, just a comment.
I wonder if you haven't done so already.
Seems to me that you might benefit
from the parallels that exist between
what you're doing and research done
in the field of Future Studies.
I'm not sure if you're aware of the field.
It's been around for a bit,
but the idea with Future Studies is
exactly what you're looking at.
Looking at the future and really long term.
And you already, I can see already some techniques
that have parallels with this for example,
Visioning,
but there are also things like Back Casting
and Future Reels
which provides a more concrete techniques
for thinking about concrete things to do now
which will impact the future.
So just thought I would point this out.
- Yeah
I guess I wasn't particularly familiar
with the specific community that you were talking about
Future...
- [Osama] Future Studies
- Yeah, Future Studies.
But we did look at a lot of existing design theories
and methods
that address envisioning
but then some of the limitations
that we felt was that
when we talk about "future" it's often abstract.
Like future in terms of
there is no very explicit
communication of
how far into the future you're talking about
So that was one of the motivations
that we come up with this very specific methods
where we communicate very explicitly
like what point in time you're talking about into the future
So we hope that these methods will be used in many
different fields as well
not just participatory design
but envisioning.
We know that in ubiquitous computing
there's a lot of envisioning going on
and so on and so forth.
Thank you.