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One Perspective on Information Systems

Dec 10, ’10 1:30 PM

A semester has ended and I have been loaded with essays and articles on the basics of information systems.
What is information systems? One major purpose for the massive amount of reading materials was to train us to read for themes (as opposed to semantics). A thematic reading demands an understanding of form and also content/subject matter.

I hope to go back on all the readings for the purpose of differentiating as well as comparing the various ways in which a specific topic/subject matter can be explored. For example, I’d like to go back and see how the different authors understand “information,” “technology,” or “systems.”

One of the viewpoints that I find very interesting is Horst Rittel’s view of information systems. He has a lot to say about planning systems and planning information systems. I believe it’s one form of what others call the “social technical” (social technology) and his is a system that is filled with politics. In the vein of C.W. Churchman, it is a human information system that is composed of people and the fundamental elements are the values and worldviews of human beings.

I just read an article by a Libby Liu from the Huffington Post: “What are they hearing in North Korea These Days?” What kinds of information are the citizens getting and NOT getting? It’s interesting to think of the various types of information embied in various forms. There are communication channels that are controlled such as the internet and telephones. People are finding ways to work around the system by picking up telephone signals from China  as well as radio stations from South Korea to learn about what’s going on in their own country. There are also artifacts such as “Radios, issued by the state, have their dials fixed only to the regime’s broadcasts.” Even in this very common device, there is a summary of society’s politics, control, and oppression. It’s quite different from only having a few stations to listen to (in various rural areas I presume) because of the limitations in transmission service not the functionality of the device itself. There are also the interactions within the society for propogating information. Liu writes, “Through our contacts inside North Korea, we know listeners sometimes gather and listen together, and then spread information by word of mouth among friends and family.” This is a very powerful form of communication. As these intimate interactions are put together, they form an organized group of people who are building towards some kind of critical mass (article states 1 out of 24 million shortwave listeners). A North Korean defector says, “Relationships forged listening to broadcasts together are almost equal to [a] secret society that is simply not organized yet.” This is one form of an information system. Perhaps a self-sustaining, self-perpetuating, and learning from itself … or should I say, themselves.

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UTOS and Rigor in Design

Oct 9, ’10 2:24 PM

Wanted to capture this thought before I forget. It comes after reading Shadish, Cook, and Campbell’s Experimental and Quasi-Experimental Designs. Citing Cronbach who came up with this, Shadish, Cook, and Campbell provide a vocabulary to talk about causal generalization. They write, “Cronbach noted that each experiement consists of units that receive the experiences being contrasted, of the treatments themselves, of observations made on the units, and of the settings in which the study is conducted” (Shadish, et al., p. 19).

So here it is:

  • UNITS | PEOPLE
  • TREATMENT
  • OBSERVATIONS | OUTCOMES
  • SETTINGS | SITES | ENVIRONMENTS

Data are collected or can be collected across these four constructs and relationships established. For example, a frequent construct validity concerns the relationship between TREATMENT and OUTCOME.
The power of this framework comes in establishing experiments. For example,

  • A certain PATIENT EDUCATION (target cause, TREATMENT)
  • promotes PHYSICAL RECOVERY (target effect, OUTCOME)
  • among SURGICAL PATIENTS (target population of units, PEOPLE)
  • in HOSPITALS (target universe of settings, SETTING)

In this setup, one could analyze the heck out of each construct/variable and come to interesting relationship conclusions. Pretty cool.
This vocabulary gives us a way to talk about the external validity (making generalizations using induction) of an experiment. This is a huge concern in a lot of companies and the bulk of quantitative as well as qualitative research – “What can I say about the general population (UNIT/PEOPLE) based off this sample size?” or “Would our product work in a different environment/setting (SETTING)?” This is the way many companies want to make their investments in research actionable. It’s a logic of induction, seeking universal application.

Cool.

It also seems like design is criticized for lacking rigor based off this kind of framework. Taking one construct, for example the SETTING dimension, design is often accused of lacking sophistication because a product in one setting (or condition) may not be able to perform well (or if utility is not the goal, “integrate well”) in another setting. It’s the issue of repeatability.

But the way these critics usually view design is in terms of artifacts, many times, the tangible products with clear structures and/or forms or one-off processes/methods.

Perhaps this is why there is an interest in “design thinking” because championing something that is internal to the designer (a certain way of thinking and even doing) escapes the accusation of the critics: a product might not be repeated with success in a different setting, a process might not be applicable in a different setting, but the mode of creation may be similar. Yet, in order to avoid the danger of saying that this “design thinking” is only contained within certain individuals and personalities, it has to be taken out of the individual.

Suppose this “design thinking” is not within an individual. If we want to talk in terms of Simon’s constructs, suppose this “design thinking” is at the boundary between the inner and outer environments. It’s not found in particular settings nor is it found only in certain individuals. It’s found at the interaction of a designer and his/her environment … and it may even be real (really real) and knowable. What a crazy idea.

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And Lose the Name of Action

Oct 7, ’10 2:23 AM

There’s some interesting discussions on the subject of social action and the role of awareness as well as social media.
For two contrasting views, consider Malcolm Gladwell’s essay in suspect of certain social media and their relationship to genuine, “strong-tie” connections and Maria Popova’s article on why Gladwell’s perspective is wrong.

Popova has an part of her article which makes the argument that empathy is the process/mechanism we need to bridge us from awareness to action:

What does this have to do with activism? It’s simple. Online communities broaden our scope of empathy. They do so by introducing new issues to our collective consciousness and exposing us to the lives these issues affect. In cases where our “in-group” lacks direct experience of such concerns, empathy is the missing link between awareness and action — it’s what enables us to act for the well-being of others …

Empathy derived from instilling personal identification and meaning as necessitating change? What is empathy? How does it work? If one ponders hard enough, does it come about? To love my neighbor as myself … a discussion from a theological perspective is one area that sounds like an interesting possibility for a later entry …
My concern in this post is not about social activism nor is it about who is correct. I’m interested in method and process; in all the literature so far on positivism, empiricism, and design science, I have not yet run into a rich account of how change is made. Many theorists/researchers/designers/philosophers so far have been making it clear that the natural and particularly social sciences are concerned about the importance of fluidity and change. Yet no one really knows how to talk about the mechanism behind change.

Kuhn writes about history is comprised of shifting from one paradigm to another. Many times, this is triggered with the accumulation of anomolies in the midst of an emerging crisis environment. However, when describing the actual process of how this transition occurs, he doesn’t quite know how to articulate it. Chalmers writes,

On Kuhn’s view, the kinds of factors that do prove effective in causing scientists to change paradigms is a matter to be discovered by psychological and sociological investigation … A scientific revolution corresponds to the abandonment of one paradigm and the adoption of a new one, not by an individual scientist only but by the relevant scientific community as a whole. As more and more individual scientists, for a variety of reasons, are converted to the new paradigm, there is an “increasing shift in the distribution of professional allegiances” (Kuhn, 1970a, p. 158). If the revolution is to be successful, this shift will spread so as to include the majority of the relevant scientific community, leaving a few dissenters. (Chalmers, What is This Thing Called Science?, 1999, pp. 116-117)

According to Chalmers, Kuhn attributes the agency of change to the scientific community, who in turn are responsible for the change. But just when the reader is curious as to how this happens, Kuhn says its a matter of psychological and sociological exploration.
Next to Kuhn, I’ve also read Kenneth Gergen‘s essay on Generative Theory in hopes of finding some of this sociological exploration in the field of social psychology. Perhaps he has some details in some other writings on how generative theory works, but it doesn’t say in the article I just read. He writes,

It may be useful, then, to consider competing theoretical accounts in terms of their generative capacity, that is the capacity to challenge the guiding assumptions of the culture, to raise fundamental questions regarding contemporary social life, to foster reconsideration of that which is “taken for granted,” and thereby to furnish new alternatives for social action. It is the generative theory that can provoke debate, transform social reality, and ultimately serve to reorder social conduct. (Gergen, “Toward Generative Theory,” 1978, p. 1346)

How does change occur? What is the mechanism? It seems like people know how to talk about this in retrospect (Kuhn) and know that it has to occur (Gergen) but it’s really hard to articulate the conditions for change as it applies to the present. But isn’t this the very nature of design?

I’m familar with Antonio Gramsci’s process of hegemony. He articulates very well one mechanism for creating change. I’m hungry for another perspective with just as much richness that Gramsci provides.

Going back to Kuhn, he does say this about the community of scientists,

To discover how scientific revolutions are effected, we shall therefore have to examine not only the impact of nature and of logic, but also the techniques of persuasive argumentation (emphasis mine) effective within the quite special groups that constitute the community of scientists. (Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 1996, p. 94)

Ah, yes. Rhetoric … finding the places of the arguments. This seems like the mechanism for change, but this is all he mentions along with an example of how Galileo used persuasive arguments to convince his colleagues (According to Chalmers, Feyeraband says Galileo used propaganda and trickery (Chalmers, p. 154)).
This theme of mechanism(s) for change deserves more attention …

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