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[RRE]Designing New Information Services
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Designing New Information Services
Phil Agre http://dlis.gseis.ucla.edu/pagre/
May 1999
3800 words
Draft -- footnotes and references to follow.
Everybody knows that information technology will change the world, but nobody knows how. Basic changes in technology have created a vast new design space, including both new ideas made conceivable by the technology and old ideas made practicable by early experience with its widespread adoption. Technological change is often an occasion for institutional change, and interest groups are stepping forward to announce that exponential improvements in information technology make their own institutional change agendas both possible and inevitable. And indeed, such agendas can become self-fulfilling to a certain extent if they become inscribed in the basic categories of software architecture and public policy. Before this can happen, before the possibilities of technology are foreclosed by the limits of imagination, it is important for us as citizens and professionals to make available for discussion the full range of technological and institutional options that are actually open at this seemingly pivotal time.
How do technology and institutions interact? Numerous stories about the matter circulate in the culture. To make the diversity of these stories apparent, let us begin with a story that once dominated much of the world, but that has fallen out of fashion. This story identifies information technology with rationalization. Indeed, in its original definition, the phrase information technology referred specifically to the use of computers to replace human judgement by rational decision-making in organizations. On one level this story extended the practices of industrial automation from the factory floor to the manager's office; on another level it was part of a centralized command-and-control ideology that was just as deeply identified with capitalism as it has come to be with socialism.
Strange as it would have seemed to the imagination of the 1960s, information technology has since lost its close cultural association with rationality. In part this change has been driven by actual organizational experience. Businesses that have tried to organize their computer systems around a single consistent information architecture have largely failed. Indeed, in business schools this attempt to create a universal language for business is now regarded as one of the really bad ideas. And in its place has arisen a healthy respect for the difficulty of reconciling the vocabularies and practices of different business disciplines such as marketing, manufacturing, and finance. This kind of epistemological pluralism is denounced as the purest relativism when propounded by feminists such as Sandra Harding, but when framed in terms of the local knowledge that refutes central planning it is the plainest common sense.
As a result, a new story about information technology and institutional change has taken hold, one that embraces the opposite extreme of decentralized self-organization. Central to this story is the concept of disintermediation, which courtesy of the miracle of Latin morphology is readily understood as the obsolescence of all institutions that play a mediating role between buyers and sellers, borrowers and lenders, students and knowledge, citizens and laws. The new institutional order is imagined to be perfectly fluid, so that anybody can be connected to anybody or anything at any time, and anybody else or anything else at any other time. It is an order without centralized direction, and with a perfect devolution of all decision-making power from hierarchies to peripheries.
We may ask of this latter picture both whether it is desireable and whether it is true. Its desirability rests largely on its antipathy to institutions, which it would dissolve. Institutions are envisaged as encumbering and static, selfishly imposing an artificial and outdated order on lives and relationships that could otherwise be freely chosen. These mediating institutions had existed to create a path from point A to point B, goes the story, but now that information technology provides such paths by its very workings, the institutions exist only to resist change and postpone their own fall. This story depicts institutions in a certain way: simply as constraining and not as enabling, and simply as conduits and not as repositories of memory in their own right. It is surely a story with significant elements of truth. And yet our responsibility in imagining an evolved institutional order in a new technological world is to ensure that other elements of truth are heard as well, and incorporated as well into the common sense of our times.
To evaluate these stories and others, it will help to get beyond some simple oppositions. For example, it is useless to favor or oppose technology. The point is not that technology is as undeniable as gravity, but rather that technology is plastic: we can be certain that the most basic quantitative aspects of information and communications technologies will continue to improve for the foreseeable future, but nothing follows from this about the qualitative organization of that technology that we will actually choose. Information technology is singularly open to social shaping and creative appropriation, and opposition to a particular story about information technology does not imply opposition to technology as such.
It will also help to get beyond particular disciplinary frames. Notwithstanding the emergence of new cultural stories, the day-to-day language and practices of computer science still embody a great deal of the control orientation that they derived from the institutional environments of their birth. The main tradition of computer system design is, for example, inherently hostile to privacy in its assumption that everyone and everything in sight needs to be identified, and in its inability to comprehend, much less to adopt, the technologies of privacy protection that eliminate conventional identifiers or render them difficult to reconstruct. Clearly the disciplinary frame of computing can benefit from constructive interference from other fields. Likewise the disciplinary frame of economies, powerful though it certainly is as a way of looking at the world, interacts in complex ways with technical and political perspectives, particularly in the fraught area of the economics of information. The political perspectives, for their part, supply important conceptualizations of the legitimacy and illegitimacy of institutions while lacking some of the very detailed analytical powers of technology and economics. Finally, since language is at the heart of computer system design and the human interactions that computers mediate, linguistic and discourse-analytic perspectives will be required as well, each with its own somewhat incommensurable way of framing the issues that arise. The great promise of information studies is to provide the disciplinary switchboard through which these fields and others can come together as we try to imagine and manage new information technologies as phenomena of human social life.
At the point of intersection of these various disciplinary perspectives, the need has become clear for a new integrated design practice, one that draws on a great diversity of converging disciplines to design a new generation of information services. Technologies and institutions can be, and should be, designed together, and the distinctive opportunities and requirements of each should be brought to bear on the other. No longer will it suffice to imagine new gadgets without any conception of the relationships and activities within which they will be used, and no longer can we assume that the traditional and familiar institutional forms will remain well-suited to the opportunities that new technologies provide. Something of the necessary convergence of design disciplines can be seen in novel organizational forms in business that take advantage of computer networking to increase spams of control and flatten hierarchies, in the invasion of the territory of ergonomically-minded user interface design by graphic designers, many of whom now call themselves information and interaction designers, and in the emergence of a new generation of information appliances whose basic conception is driven as much by industrial design as by circuit design. Much more can be done to bring these various design disciplines into productive dialog and stepwise synthesis, and the design of new information services is a good place to start. Observe that the object of design is not the gadget but th service. As such the new design practice works outward from the experience of generations of librarians and commercial information providers who have design information services for a great diversity of audiences. New technology can lead to greater fragmentation of knowledge in this area, or to greater integration, depending on who takes the initiative to define it.
What would such an integrated design practice be like? Let us start with fundamentals. Every design practice presupposes a particular relationship to power. Architecture presupposes a client who can cause buildings to be built, and urban design presupposes a greater power still. Computer systems design is also the design of the human activity of using the systems, and as such it presupposes that somebody is able to persuade some people people to organize their activity differently. It is little wonder, then, that computer design went through significant changes during the transition from the military and business markets, where such persuasive power exists in abundance, to consumer markets, where it does not. The relation of design to power is particularly crucial in the context of emerging information technologies, which are organized around compatibility standards that arise in global markets. The United States government, for example, is rapidly learning that it can no longer set standards in an area such as information security through its own unilateral action, and that it must instead build multilateral political alliances while using export controls in an attempt at least to prevent vendors from settling on standards that it does not like. And what goes for the government goes particularly for lone designers and firms: new designs will only be adopted to the extent that they become standards, and they will only become standards if they are compatible, both in timing and in substance, with a remarkably complex environment of coevolving standards and the public and private stakeholders whose interests they affect. Some designers do have the great fortune to be allied with a firm such as Microsoft that possesses great unilateral leverage over a particular portion of the standards environment. All others will need some worked-out sense of their participation in a larger process, and the practicalities and strategies of this participation will be indissociable from even the smallest details of the design work.
Let us collect some concepts that will be indispensable to this new design practice. One fundamental concept is that of network effects. In its narrowest use, a good in a market exhibits network effects to the extent that its value to a consumer depends on the number of other consumers who have it. The classic example is telephone service, which becomes more valuable as more potential callers subscribe. Information goods and services such as network protocols and data formats generally exhibit network effects when they must be compatible with those employed by other users. But the concept can also be applied more broadly. Vast and cumbersome though it is, the institutional system of the European Union exhibits network effects whose pwoer is visible in the number of countries that are lining up to join. Organizational practices likewise exhibit network effects when they facilitate the circulation of learning and expertise from one site of practice to another. Network effects favor compatibility over adaptation to local circumstances, and they tend to create winners and losers. The process by which these winners and losers are chosen are diverse, but they will be matters of great concern to all well-informed and self-interested participants. A designers whose products obtain a critical mass of users will succeed, and a designer who comes to market too early or too late, or who lacks persuasive power, or whose competitors are better able to act in a coordinated way at many points in a complex global market, is likely to fail. Much depends on the particulars of the case.
It should be noted that these standards dynamics lie on the boundary between economics and politics. In certain aspects they can be understood as the reflexively interconstraining choices of rational actors, whose outcomes can be modeled quantitatively using the tools of game theory. But at the same time they are phenomena of public debate: a standard succeeds in large measure by becoming a self-fulfilling prophesy whose prophetic power rests largely on symbols and ideology and rhetoric and history. Legal scholars have observed that standards act as a kind of law, and that the establishment of standards is therefore in the deepest sense a political process through which a community comes to govern itself. Each perspective is valid, and it is important to maintain a sense of the tension between them. Only then can we usefully ask under what conditions it is even possible to establish a standard, and what kind of standard is likely to emerge, and who is likely to win and lose as a result.
In practice, network effects usually occur in close conjunction with another economic phenomenon, economics of scale. Economies of scale are found whenever a good can be produced in quantity more cheaply through a substantial initial investment. Information goods are famous for the economies of scale because virtually all of the cost of producing them goes into the first copy. Economics of scale very often reward the establishment of standards, in that the same information good can be circulated and used more widely. A standard computer operating system, established through network effects, will create economies of scale for applications vendors, and the resulting great variety and low prices of software will further reinforce the dominance of the standard operating system, whereupon the same effects will probably lead to standardized winners among the applications as well. Analogous phenomena are found in the organizational realm: a firm that buys a competitor and standardizes the practices of the combined firm will enjoy amplified economies of scale in a wide range of information and knowledge work, thus leading to layoffs in those areas and a competitive advantage, other things being equal, with respect to any remaining competitors.
Taken together, these effects cast considerable light on the nature of computing as a social phenomenon. Technologists characterize computers narrowly in terms of the outputs they provide when certain data are provided as inputs. But the bigger story concerns the origins of those inputs, and the conditions under which the outputs are meaningful back out in the world. If a computer derives inputs from the four corners of the country, or from all around the world, then its outputs will only be meaningful if those data were defined and captured in a uniform way, and this in turn requires some institution to establish and regulate a uniform set of practices across great distances and a potentially great diversity of physical and cultural environments. These are, in a broad sense, the infrastructural conditions of computing.
With these concepts in hand, it is possible to evaluate the radically decentralized story about both information technology and social order that I sketched at the outset. The picture turns out to be complicated, with centralization and decentralization interacting in several ways. The establishment of standards, for example, usually requires centralized coordination, whether by a government, a large private firm, or a professional organization. The establishment of the metric system, for example, required both the rationalizing ideology of the French Revolution and the centralized state apparatus that the Revolution inherited from the ancien regime. Once a standard is established, however, it will usually be self-perpetuating due to network effects, which will create a continuing incentive for everyone to do what everyone else is doing. The centrally established order will continue to be felt whether the center continues to impose it or not. Economies of scale, for their part, tend to produce industry concentration, which is certainly a kind of centralization, but the same technologies that create those economies also permit organizations to decentralize operational decision-making by using standardized practices of measuring and monitoring to retain centralized control.
These interactions between centralization and decentralization create several dangers that any well-thought-out design practice will seek to avoid. There is the danger of premature implementation. Many good ideas in the computer industry fail because they require as prerequisites the establishment of standards, or a critical mass of potential users, or a sufficiently widespread infrastructure, or all three. A proposed design can fail with particular thoroughness when it bundles several functionalities that are only viable as separate standards, each establishing economies of scale by being incorporated into a wide range of applications. An example might be EDI, which bundled a special-purpose networking protocol instead of waiting for a general-purpose network such as the Internet to become widely established.
A second danger arises when an institutional field is incapable of creating the centralized coordination that it needs to establish a new technical or process standard. When this happens, the institution can remain stuck in an inefficient diversity of practices, unable to interoperate, share learning, or establish economies of scale. Decentralization is thus not an unambiguous good, and can be a force for serious backwardness.
A third danger is to democratic values, when a standardization process must move so quickly that it does not have time for democratic mechanisms, broad representation, and reflective deliberation. This is an urgent matter for due-process-oriented standards organizations that increasingly find themselves bypassed by private standards- setting consortia, which are usually even more dominated by large vendors than the formal standards bodies are. Democratic values are also endangered by the very fact of standardization. Inasmuch as the potential damage from a security breach is multiplied on a network of standardized systems, the need for military and police intervention to secure those systems against malicious disruption is greatly expanded.
A final danger derives from the dynamics of network effects themselves. Under ideal economic conditions the standards that emerge from network competition will closely reflect the interests of consumers as expressed in their market choices. But ideal economic conditions are difficult to obtain in extremely complex and fast-moving high-technology markets, and as a result network effects create a significant bias in favor of rapid time-to-market and against product quality. The result can be the nearly irreversible entrenchment of a low-quality standard -- a phenomenon well-familiar in personal computer software.
These observations provide deeper insight into the nature of institutions and the institutional dimensions of design. The word "institution" is often loosely used to mean "organization", for example in the ways that an organization manages to perpetuate itself and its traditions even as particular individuals come and go. But the mechanisms I have been describing lead to the establishment of institutions in a deeper sense: self-perpetuating rules and structures of human relationships. The uniform interfaces and practices that arise in the world govern people's lives without necessarily being reproduced by any conscious agency. They become woven into the fabric of everyday life. And the design of new information services must of necessity be concerned with the ways in which information and its use are embedded in this fabric, and with the dynamics by which this fabric changes and resists change, quite independently of its participants. Information services have always been woven into the institutionally organized embodied activities of the people who use them, whether through paper, radio and television broadcasts, or the telephone. The Internet, however, is capable of weaving information services much more intricately into people's lives, reaching in much more interactive and specialized ways into particular settings where the services might be of use. Although information technology has a reputation for encouraging disembodiment, something closer to the opposite is likely to be the case. As miniaturization and cheap wireless data communcations liberate information services from cumbersome computer monitors and cheap networked printers decentralize the manufacture of informative paper, everyday activities can be reorganized less and less in terms of their tethering to information resources, and more and more in terms of those aspects of the activity that make more legitimate demands on the body: travel, face-to-face conversation, interaction with the physical machinery that one is building or repairing, aesthetic judgements, recreational activities, cooking and eating, rest, and so on. Now information services will be called upon to conform themselves ever more creatively to the shapes and patterns of bodily activities. Although a library will continue to be a place, just because of the bodily demands of meeting and studying, we will increasingly speak of librarying as an aspect of a wide range of activities, and library services will be designed in such a way that they can be projected when, where, and how they are needed.
Numerous matters of values will arise in the design of these services. As communities of practice increasingly form through the mediation of computer networks and other media, it will be increasingly necessary to decide whether services are to be designed for individuals, in the name of egalitarian uniform access, or for specific communities, in the name of efficient but potentially exclusionary specialized adaptation. One potential resolution of this tension lies in an understanding of the library's role in relation to everyday information use. Routinized information use is embedded in activities and relationships, and to be socialized into a community means, among other things, to be trained in the discovery, evaluation, and use of a specific repertoire of information resources. The professional work of libraries can be divided between supporting the settled-down steady state of these routinized uses of information and supporting the process by which a newcomer, especially one who is just joining a community or who lacks community support, is able to become integrated into the community's practices. As a very broad generalization, it is the former set of information uses that are likely to be most smoothly supported by commercial information services that can reach one by one into specific niches in a system of activity. Yet the latter function, getting someone oriented in the seemingly infinite and chaotic space of information services, where the public interest in social mobility will continue to call, and even more strongly, for the development of professional library services.
Changing technologies and institutions will bring changes to the boundaries of professions, as well as new substance to the underlying values and social purposes of professions. In the library profession, one emerging role is public advocate in the complex evolution of information-related standards. Other roles will be found in the design of new information services. But the most fundamental role, that of guide to the complex and bewildering terrain of information services, will only grow and deepen. The fundamental challenge to library institutions is to shift to the technological and organizational structure that will be required to serve these roles. The dangers that I have described -- inability to move to new standards, premature commitment to standards, and undemocratic standards processes that threaten the legitimacy of the institution -- will affect libraries as much as everyone else, and much depends on the way that librarians respond to the opportunities and challenges that they pose.
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