Sociological perspective of Flow

In simple terms what I’m looking to do with this research is: (1) identify when interdisciplinary groups are in ‘flow’; (2) identify the context / circumstances around this ‘flow’ – (see next paragraph for comments on this though); and seek to re-create this context through appropriate technologies and programmes to aid development of competencies and creativity.

A few comment about this very simple statement. I keep saying I’m interested in interdisciplinary work, and sometimes I event start thinking about the differences between multi, inter and trans disciplinary, but should this really be the focus? There seem to be a number of different ways of looking at this – how would we think about disciplines for? through looking at people’s training / education, through how people self-identify, by characterising types of activities? Why is it important though? This seems to map on to looking at people ‘belonging’ to a discipline, so therefore multi-disciplinary being inherently multi-people. If the research was to follow this direction alone, then I can see there may be pragmatic problems for data collection is it was to focus directly on interdisciplinary collaborative (same-time, same-place) activities – just simply problems of organising the workshops, making sure we had coverage of the relevant disciplines, etc. If it was slightly re-framed around activities or relaxing of the space-time constraints (which may well be interesting actually in personal manufacturing) then it allows more freedom to gather interesting data.

The idea of capturing the context of flow was mentioned in the first paragraph – however, this shouldn’t be interpreted too simplistically. Actually, this is really at the core of the work – Csikszentmihalyi’s flow is a psychological notion and thus can be accounted for through psychological modes of inquiry; a reinterpretation of this is that flow may be considered from a sociological perspective and thus requires a different mode of inquiry.

What does this mean in practice? The most common method of measuring flow is through using the Experience Sampling Method (ESM) developed by Larson & Csikszentmihalyi (1983) which asks individual participants to stop at specific times and take notes of their experience. They record their feelings ‘right there, right now’ using a variety of questionnaire approaches. The reliability of these findings comes from multiple repetitions and shows up correlation of events. An example of a sociological perspective on this may be found in Suchman’s notions of situated actions where the interest lies beyond the immediate context and would seek to take into account individuals “past experiences, future expectations, control and feedback of self-image within society”. Another example is the ideas of Ed Hutchins around distributed cognition – using this perspective then cognition (and thus perceptions of experience) are not best understood through information processing at the level of the individual, but rather as a distributed phenomenon.

A slight interlude to capture points made in meeting with Monika. I need to send Monika / Gordon a full draft context/lit review by Monday 26th September – I’ll then be able to get some comments back in time to incorporate them in time for the submission date. Key points are: is it clear?, does it say what I need it to say? have I missed anything significant in the literature review? Importantly, it requires an overall argument – as a stylistic measure it’s good if it all comes out at the end – i.e. at strategic points, spell out argument so far, or sub-argument – but don’t destroy suspense of it coming out at the end. Certainly you never ever want the read to day at any point “well this is all very interesting, but so what?”.

The actual upgrade panel is, naturally, very important. It would be nice to see the presentation given some details of the empirical work done so far – some examples, and then the details of the ‘tweet button’ example. Entertain the panel and allow them to see the significance of the work. As important aspect here is believing in the work – having confidence, which most come from the writing obviously. Some key questions that might come up: What is it all about in one sentence? Why is it important? Hasn’t it all been done before? I need to really believe in my answers to these questions and to follow-up supplementary questions. A key question for me is why the sociological approach? What will it bring? What criticisms are there of the socio-technical approach to informing system design, e.g., compared to say user modelling?

It’s worth looking at writings of Fred Turner in From counterculture to cyberculture – particularly about Stewart Brand from the Whole Earth Catalogue. There are some thoughts in there about initial revolutionary ideas of the internet – some of which have come true, but it’s more participatory. A quote – “We are as gods and might as well get good at it” – opening line of the first World Earth Catalogue in 1968 – borrowed from A Runaway World? by anthropologist Edmund Leach. There seems to be an argument in here that what matters is the tools people are given… There is also a youtube video chaired by Fred Turner involving Stewart Brand and Howard Rheingold (also Whole Earth Catalogue) which may have something of interest. It’s also worth looking at Convergence Culture by Henry Jenkins.

The three identified gaps in the literature seem very interesting (1) maker community work, but little about their practices; (2) flow, but little from a sociological perspective or interdisciplinary group related; and (3) design, making well documented – little addressing design/manufacturing/materials/programming. Indeed the same critique of (2) flow should be applied to (3) designers / makers / materials. If I understand it correctly, then Karen Barad’s work identifies that agency is shared amongst humans and materials, it’s not static and it’s part of a conversational process – it happens all the time – agency is an interactive, performed, dynamic phenomenon. Her key idea is that of ‘agential realism’  - the world being made up of phenomena which are “the ontological inseparability of intra-acting agencies”.

Finally, don’t forget that there needs to be that ‘golden thread’, the intellectual problem, that connects everything – and all the decisions related to the research, e.g. literature reviewed, methodologies choosing etc, make sense in relation to the intellectual problem and the golden thread that connects everything together. This should be made obvious, but not in a simplistic, in-your-face, clumsy way.

Okay – we know what we’re doing now  - focus on being clear and expressing the logic and significance of the work. Now to focus on the actual literature review.

Collaborative Interdisciplinary Flow

The PhD work is becoming much clearer now in that I now what’s of significant interest and what are the gaps in the academic literature. I now need to apply a bit of Occam’s razor to help make it focused and clear – and also allow the clarity to drive the research programme – what’s important, what’s not etc. As well as the ‘clarity’ issue, the other imperative is to be pragmatic and not allow the work to get caught up in some sort of existential crisis where nothing makes sense. We’re not looking from some universal mathematical truth here – we’re looking for what is ‘useful’ and does it make sense empirically and does it have a logical/analytical structure to the overall argument.

So, the focus is on achieving clarity and structure – so other readers can easily see what the research programme is about, why it’s important, and how it will be undertaken. They may well disagree with some of the aspects of course, but the work should be able to face up to these objections and explain how they have been taken into account.

To help communicate the work to others, and indeed to clarify it for myself, a conventional structure will be used covering research area, topic and questions.

A little bit of reverse engineering is required to get to the logic and structure of the work as it is an outcome of a lot of work over the last year which has been rather messy in nature. To start with the clear issues.

There are three identified gaps in the academic literature:

1. The Maker community has been well studied, but there is only a small amount work on understanding the actual practices employed in making;

1. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s ‘Flow’ concept has been extensively written about, but there is limited work addressing collaborative, interdisciplinary flow;

1. Although Design and Making have been well documented, there is little work addressing physical materials and digital technologies.

These need to be connected now to the original research area and topic so that they make sense as an outcome of the literature review. Then we need to ask what’s next – we going to address these gaps through the workshops etc to allow us to do what? We’re using the knowledge (what is this knowledge? identified conditions for supporting collaborative interdisciplinary flow – characteristics of technologies, contexts and programmes which support cif?) gained to create technologies and educational programmes that support ‘collaborative, interdisciplinary flow’ as a means of supporting skills development?

The key issue that is under investigation is whether CIF does indeed help support skills development (or creativity? or innovation?) in digital product development. In order to fulfil the promise of personal manufacturing then these skills must be developed.
We are then looking at how in order to fulfil the promise of personal manufacturing (in the areas of smart things / physical computing / what?) we need develop a broad range of skills from design to manufacture, from materials to programming. How would we characterise these skills / competences – and what is the difference? Requires broad range of skills, requires creativity, requires interdisciplinarity… These skills are required by both makers of end-products and by the tool (software and hardware) developers – is the research work addressing both of these? This sums up what I think of as the ‘research problem’. Then we can move on to what has been looked at of interest in this area. An interesting starting point (why exactly?) is the maker community, secondly we can look at experiential learning, situated learning, communities of practice and flow (to sustain the learning process), thirdly there is an interesting set of challenges which bring together design, manufacture, materials and programming – which seem to (still a little unclear) ideas around ambiguity and precision in educational programmes for design / engineering / computing.

The Gap

[Some notes - Three things I should try cover - structure of workshop reports / an actual report, research area / context, structure going from research area / research topic / reseach questions / theoretical frameworks, methodolgies - craft of research / punch type thing - but I do need to be clear about the reflection on the empirical work - what’s my contribution even at this stage. Also need to mention data collection and think about timescales...]

[Slight change of plan in that I’m going to try focus on what’s my contribution and the literature review for this morning, then I’ll come back to the above next]

The idea that’s got my greatest attention recently is that of the ‘gap’. It’s an idea that has evolved from a number of sources – the two primary ones being Monika’s comment about the gap between a beginner’s skills level and an expert’s and then thinking about Csikszentmihalyi’s ‘flow’ to help sustain the learning process, and the comment by Ben [Surname?] of Google who was asking me about the gap between what could be achieve through an Arduino like DIY system at home and a professionally developed system – how close would it be? This idea of the ‘gap’ could be used to structure the the literature review chapter, and I should also bring in the empirical work that’s been done in the workshops as Daniela mentioned – keeping it reflective in that way will help the ‘liveliness’ of the review to stop it becoming a dry mere description of related work. It should also make serious attempts to develop theory in the literature review – somewhere I have a paper, or maybe it’s a posting on the phd-design list, that describes different levels of theory – from initial definitions (very important – as that sets out scope and names a thing) to classifying, taxonomies, models, formal models – I need to find that paper and also link it in with the methodology section. The other area that I’d thought about was using ‘the’ new product development lifecycle to illustrate the differences between DIY and professional making (and on that point – I need to make clear that I certainly don’t see ‘professional’ as being better than ‘DIY’ – it’s much more nuanced than that and I need to draw these out) – but I’m not sure if it’s useful now – I could try and see what comes out I guess. It may be that the differences may be explained better through another perspective – through working practices for example. The really interesting aspect of this, as both Gordon and Monika have mentioned, is the meeting of material and digital – the skills required for design and working with physical material and the ‘procedural literacy’ (Mateus?) demanded by digital technologies.

How to think about his gap? (And it definitely requires a better word/phrase to describe it – and I shouldn’t forget that I’m interested in using Csikszentmihalyi’s notion of ‘flow’ or my new ‘collaborative / trans-disciplinary’ version of ‘flow’ to ‘bridge’ the gap – i.e. create the conditions to allow that to happen in trans-disciplinary collaborative work – I should also think about how you measure / identify flow – I think individual measurement are taken using participant’s pressing of a button, marking themselves on a score? Is it done quantitatively more than qualitatively?). To begin with I’ll simply list out some of the areas that I’ve observed in no particular order: gaps between spaces, gaps between technologies, gaps between disciplines, gaps between skills, gaps between practices, gaps between education styles, gaps between prototype and finished product, gaps between ambiguity and precision, gaps between aesthetics and the gaps gaps between motivations & values.
Technology Gaps

In pure software development, there is often very little difference for the end-users whether they are DIY amateurs or professionals. If we look at development of applications for smartphones and use Android and iOS as popular examples

[Schumpeterian perspective on this... creative destruction of technologies]

[Very important point that I need to remember - when I write up the workshop reports, I need to include some level of analysis of issues / points identified using the academic literature and theories]

These gap ‘dimensions’ are actually quite useful for the context chapter probably – defining the scope of the work – so it’s worth thinking about the relationship between the context chapter and the literature chapter. My guess is that the literature chapter needs to focus much more [on what precisely] and build the case for the research questions and approach taken – why is developing trans-disciplinary skills in this are important? Why do you think Csikszentmihalyi’s ‘flow’ is appropriate and potentially useful? Why this and not something else – for example why not focus situated learning? etc.

Connecting to the Academic Literature

Looking back at what I’ve written for a description of what my PhD is all about makes me realise that it really is very interesting. I think it’s captured what I’ve been trying to achieve for quite sometime. It is worth thinking about how to put some flesh on this bare bones now and the place to start is say why this area is interesting to the academic community as well as just to me. That is to say – why is it significant? Also, I’ve just realised I need to start defining some of these terms – for example why the interest in trans-disciplinary collaboration as opposed to inter-disciplinary, or even multi-disciplinary? Maybe the research work covers all three actually and it might just draw out definitions and examples of these different types of cross-disciplinary experiences. There a few papers which attempt to define a taxonomy or hierarchy of cross-disciplinary modes, so it will be worth drawing them out in the literature review chapter. I think I have at least one of these papers in my library [need to check references etc].

The interest in trans-disciplinary work is most obviously covered in the work I’ve looked at in the writings around the digital bauhaus. The Manfisto for a Digital Bauhaus paper by Pelle Ehn is the obvious starting point for the claim of interest here – it’s also of particular interest as the subject area is similar – an interest in design, materials and digital technologies, it was setting out a manifesto in an educational context at Malmo, and that it was a real experiment in implementing its ideas. Ehn’s original papers also through a couple of response papers – one by Colin Beardon who responded by looking the politics, aesthetics and technologies of the digital bauhaus, and a separate one by Lorne Malmborg which evaluated the outputs from the Malmo programme in the context of the original manifesto paper and Beardon’s paper. I think these three papers in themselves give a strong warrant for the academic interest in trans-disciplinary work broadly in the area of interest. Of notable interest is that the original manifesto paper made strong claims for working with society – engaging actively with application areas, so there’s also a strong claim there for economic and social significance and an argument for ‘impact’ through engagement.

What about the interest in ubicom / internet of things / maker community? The interest in the maker community is probably best empirically supported through the study be Stacy Kuznetsov and Eric Paulos – The Rise of the Expert Amateur: DIY projects, communities and cultures. There are quite a few papers looking at the DIY community in particular areas – the work of Daniela Rosner and Spyn etc, DIY methods for HCI, the Inventive Leisure Practices work, the soft circuits work by Leah Buchley. There must also be some academic papers looking at the design work behind arduino and processing for example? A starting point there might be the original Masters thesis for Wiring by Hernando Barragan. Then there’s the sketch and modkit type approaches – which show nice progressions through purely software environments into mixed software/hardware environments and link nicely with the interest in ubiquitous computing. There’s a nice timeline to drawn here – and a nice taxonomy. One of the things I want to make distinct here is work that’s been going on for, or concerned for, the user who is making products for end-users [there must be a better term for this] and the work that’s concerned with producing ‘tools’ for the end-user to use. I’m not sure I’ve got this completely clear in my mind yet. As an example of the latter though – think about the cad/cam packages like vectric – which must take account of the physical world (setting up of machine tools, tolerances etc] – so although the end-products may not by material / digital technology hybrid and neither are the packages (they are developed purely in software) they is a direct connection between the digital and the physical in the working practices. It’s slightly different with the Arduino as an example – the tool itself (the microprocessor board and supporting environment) mixes up both hardware and software. I’m not really sure what the significance of difference is (if any?) but it’s worth thinking about further. It may be that the difference is really only in who produces the various elements used in the workflow? In the Vectric example, they produce purely digital products, but must be aware of the physical properties of the tools, other third party manufacturers make the actual physical machining tools – such as Shopbot. With the Arduino the integration between the digital and physical takes place within the same manufacturer. The other interest here is personal manufacturing – so there’s lot to be covered here in the academic literature which I’ve not really focused on (but a lot around design innovation and innovation management) and the examples like fablabs, shapeways and ponoko – but I’m not too sure how much of these have studied academically? As opposed to the concepts themselves. A quick search on google scholar reveals quite a few papers mentioning Ponoko – so I’ll take a look systematic look at the area.

The other area of interest, and I need to justify this methodologically, is the interest in practices. In some ways, this has just been implicit assumption so far in that it is assumed there is much to be gained by detailed study of how people engage in their work and in their collaborations. I think the are of particular interest here is in the practices across disciplines – how do people really work together? Also of interest is the practices that people undertake at the edges of their competences and disciplines – the so-called boundary practices and the work on legitimate peripheral participation by Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger covering situated learning and communities of practice. The work by Lave on apprenticeships is surely to be of interest here – it’s also something I can reflect on here from my personal experience.

Transdisciplinary Flow

How best to write about my PhD? I’ve been thinking about this at the moment as I seem to be occasionally seeing glimpses of what the PhD looks like in my minds-eye and it looks really interesting – of course this is merely illusionary and it is whatever it is when it’s written down and communicated, that is the important realisation that I’ve made.  Given that, how do I try to write it down and try cover the things that I think are important? It seems it’s useful to have at least some structure to ensure it’s comprehensive at least and that it doesn’t miss whole important sections. I’ve made numerous sketches and word-diagrams to try and capture what I’m thinking but it seems important now to try and write it down. So, the writing for the next few days will be about trying to capture the essence of what my research is about, how it will be carried out and why it’s interesting and significant. I’ll also try to capture exactly what I plan to hand in in terms of writing for the upgrade panel.Given that the upgrade panel is the most important event at the moment, then I’ll start there. There are some formal requirements – an updated highwire review form, a short presentation that covers refined goals, progress made and plan for completion, and additional documentary evidence. The documentary evidence is the most important focus at the moment as this will be key to delivery of the plan – it is meant to be ‘substantial’ writing – e.g. a draft chapter or papers or direct relevance to the PhD. In terms of length , substantial seems to imply something of the order of 10,000 words – 5,000 words not enough, 15,000 words too much.What I would like to be in position to hand in for this ‘substantial writing’ is: (1) ’d like to be really clear my my research question(s) and sub-questions are – if I achieve a real sense of clarity here then it will drive the PhD; (2) a draft ‘context’ chapter – what is the domain of interest and why is it interesting; (3) a draft literature review using the ‘gap’ context to structure it – where bits are missing I should be explicit about pointing these out so my supervisors are clear on what I think I need to do; (4) a draft methodology chapter – capturing what data collection methods would be appropriate given what I’m interested in and putting it into some kind of epistemological context – this could be something to put some focus on actually given my interest in the topic – and particularly thinking of novel ways of collecting data and in the analysis. I wonder if it’s worth thinking about it like we did for Mike’s methods essay where we had to look at it from two perspectives. It’s certainly the chapter where I could go into some detail about research issues like reliability, validity, generalisability etc and what the concerns are for this research; (5) reports from each of the four workshops I’ve been involved with – writing from field notes, reflections and any imagery we have of the events; and finally (6) the FST outreach bid that I wrote and a subsequent plan which fits in with the PhD plan.

If I can do that – and it seems a lot, but it may be that it gives me room for manoeuvre with the ‘draft’ status of the literature review if it’s clear I know exactly what I need to do. The plan for the next stage should be pretty comprehensive I think and I should maybe treat it like a ‘real’ project plan and consider timings, dependencies, contingency plans etc. Again, the more focus and detail here the better it will be for the subsequent research inquiry.

How do I structure what the PhD is all about? I think using some of the details from above might help that – initially, and just as a first list, I need to think about: research area, research topic, research questions, theoretical models, methodologies, and data collection opportunities. How would I describe the work to a third party? A first attempt would look something like:

I’m interested in trans-disciplinary innovation. In particular I’m interested in trans-disciplinary innovation in the area of digital making where the tools or products use both traditional materials and digital technologies. I am specifically interested in how people develop their skills in a collaborative setting involving design, materials, manufacturing and programming. I’m interested in both the production of ‘end-products’ and in ‘tools’ – so I’m interested in people who make ‘end-products’ and in people who make ‘tools’ to support the development of those end-products. I’m interested in the DIY maker community and the ‘gap’ between making professional end-products and tools – and the shift in mass-manufacturing to personal manufacturing. A specific theoretical approach I’m interested in is how can Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of ‘flow’ be used in this context to support the development of skills to close the gap between amateur making and professional making. I use the term trans-disciplinary in a broad sense, in that I’m interested in how discipline specific amateurs and professionals develop the skills to contribute successfully to genuinely collaborative trans-disciplinary experiences. As part of this, I’m also interested in the theoretical notion of ‘boundary practices’ which may help the understanding of how different disciplines work. Finally, I am interested in the type of thinking that designers, makers and programmers use – particularly the relationship between the need for ambiguity on the one hand and the need for precision on the other.

I think that’s a reasonable, if inarticulate, capture of the area I’m interested in and I should keep coming back to that to refine it further and make it clearer. What’s missing perhaps is that I’m interested in identifying the ‘conditions’ for inter-disciplinary flow – and that might be related to technologies, spaces, programmes of activity etc and what characteristics or properties would need to be embodied in these to support trans-disciplinary flow. This also seem to relate to competency development as looked at by Elizabeth Shove in her DIY book, and to other notions of situated-learning and the values people find in, for example, open-source development.

Context and Discipline Approaches

[Some notes for later - 1st chapter should be about setting out context of the maker community - inc. ponoko etc like businesses - 2nd chapter is about the gap. Skills required for end-users and for tool makers! Eg. Gcode. Just some notes re companies - ponoko, razorlabs, shapeways, seeedstudio; cnc machining - skills in materials, design, programming]

I’ve had a few days break from writing, so I really need to just need to get back into the routine. To do this I’m going to write only briefly about the final workshop – which was the Blackpool 6th Form Electronics students one – and then start getting my thoughts written down about the PhD as it seems to becoming clearer in my own mind now, whether it will transfer into writing will be interesting. If possible, I’d really like to work mainly on clarifying the PhD today, tomorrow and (at least) Monday morning now as I need to be in a position to be clear what it is I’m doing for the PhD meeting on Wednesday.

The final Arduino workshop had been in the pipeline for quite a long time and it was just a matter of getting suitable dates to fit it with a busy timetable. The group consisted of approximately 12 A-Level electronic students (year 2), all boys, with three teachers (one male, two female). The intention of the one-day workshop was to give the students exposure into a little bit of design work, interaction design, and to programming. The students had considerable experience with electronics, from both theoretical and practical perspectives, which included working with PIC microcontrollers and programming using assembly language. The was very limited exposure to the Arduino prototyping platform.

The students were given a design brief set in the context of the University orchard – which fitted nicely with the previous Pachube workshop and the ‘open orchard’ ideas. The brief was very open-ended in that they were expected to come up with a concept for a ubiquitous computing system that would be useful in the orchard setting and that it might encompass any application area – to support a social space, to provide educational material about the orchard. The concepts were presented to us and we discussed them and help identify any possible obstacles or improvements. The second stage of the workshop was to select an area of the concept that was amenable to prototyping in someway using the arduino system and then implement it in the system. For me personally, this was the most interesting session of the day as I was interested in how they would cope with the implementation given that they has little programming experience and virtually no exposure to the arduino platform. I gave a brief presentation about the arudino system, which included the students following along to ensure each group had a connected and working arduino system. After the presentation, they were free to develop their implementations with the organisers available to assist and answer any questions. My interest was in how the students would cope in managing their aspirations with respect to a prototype and their limited experience and what strategies they might use to develop their prototypes given their lack of knowledge of the system.

After pointing out the arduino examples in the development environment, the speed on development increased rapidly. There were clearly used to discovering information and then changing it to suit their particular context. This strategy is often used by the maker community who simply want to do ‘something’, achieve a particular piece of functionality, and rather than develop code from scratch, search the web for something that either does what they want exactly, or near enough to that they want and they can adapt it to suit their needs. The students, who were working in groups, seemed to cope very well using this strategy – it would be worth investigating their practices in more detail to identify what tactics they used to discover what was needed and the ‘search’ strategy used – for example the relationship between the words they used to describe a particular piece of functionality and how it was described in the exampes section using a taxonomy. On the fact of it there seemed to be a good match, but it would be interesting to investigating this in detail. The second observation was the ‘style’ of implementation used – and this is very subjective from my perspective – it seemed to quite ‘electronics led’. What do I mean by this? A lot of functionality, such as turning an LED light on when a particular condition is met may be implemented in different ways. A ‘traditional’ electronics approach is to build the logic directly with the electronics components sending a particular line high using a specfic electronics circuit. (I need to much more detailed about this as an example, but I will need to check it out using an electronics book). The development of microprocessor has allowed other programmatic approaches to be used. Using this approach, a condition can be identified in software rather than hardware using low-level assembly languages or higher level languages such a C/C++ used with the arduino system. This move of functionality from hardware to software uses a different sets of skills for implementation – and also it’s a ‘style’ of implementation were the decisions is taken quite early on in the development – often implicitly as the developers come from a particular background and have developed in a particular context. There was one clear example where this happened in the workshop and I had a ‘sense’ that this was happening generally – but, again, further investigation would be needed to see what was really happening. This may be an example of particular discipline practices or maybe even the ‘boundary practice’ that look so interesting.

A final observation on the working practices of the group is the different roles the team members sometimes took on. The most obvious example of this is where I noticed that one system prototype was incredibly well put together and tidy. One of the group had been allocated (is this true or was it self-selective – probably that latter, but with encouragement from his group I imagine) the role of breadboard implementer – he did all of the component placements, the cutting of wires, the connecting of components. The issue of ‘roles’ within the groups is certainly worth investigating further.

[a thought - it would be very interesting for the lit review chapter to be empirically led and then look into the literature to see what might be said about particular investigations - would that be realistic though? If not for all, then maybe for bits of it at least?]

I think the next couple of days I will focus completely on reflecting upon what my PhD is, what the domain is, what the research questions are, what are relevant theories and methodolgies.

Details are Important

Following on with the twitter discussion – Twitter provides an api which provides access to a number of services for reading and updating of statuses and related information. To update an account status message (i.e. send a tweet) authentication is required from the account holder to stop unauthorised messages from being sent. This authentication process used is called OAuth, an open standard for authorisation, which allows users to share access to resources without handing over of usernames and passwords. Applications, which much must be be registered with Twitter using another registration process, use the OAuth process to establish credentials. These applications, and the OAuth libraries they use, are generally too complex and large to run directly from an arduino board so require a ‘server’ application to be written which receives commands from an arduino board and relays them to the twitter api. This architectural complexity can be difficult for non-programmers to understand and don’t really get why it’s so complex. [It’s probably worth going into some detail with diagrams here to make the point - which requires separate writing I think].

Once the server application has been written, or more likely, a server application such as ThingTweet on Thingspeak has been found, then detailed code for an HTTP POST message is written for the arduino board. This requires detailed knowledge of the HTTP protocol and understanding to internet communications. A further complexity found on the Lancaster campus site is that internet proxies are used to manage internet connections. Proxies might be seen as yet another server application which relay commands on your behalf whilst protecting you from exposure to security issues. The use of proxies adds further complexities to the development of code.

The development of the press button and tweet prototype took approximately 4 days – which is not a particularly long time, is certainly not withing the time-periods for most workshops. Of course, much of this was duo to lack of technical knowledge that had to learned over the process of the project – but this is nearly always the case in developing just-in-time skills from a project perspective. It might be argued that once learnt the skills can then be used in the future to rapidly develop prototypes requiring similar functionality – in my experience this is not the case, and it’s just as likely that one forgets the complexity of the process and must be learned again from scratch – albeit in a speeded up fashion as the memories slowly come back to you. There seem to be a number of possibilities to help alleviate this issue – one is to ‘practice more’, i.e. keep doing projects that require this functionality until it’s pretty well drilled in, but it seems this doesn’t often happen in practice and there are significant time gaps; another approach would be to methodically record the process to be used at a latter stage – this is common approach used on blogs and sites like instructables.com to share projects – whilst in theory this approach should work well, it seems that often details are missed out or there are sufficient differences in the projects to make it not useful. Design and code reuse has been a goal of software engineering for many years and there are a number of well-known techniques such as libraries and patterns which may have some interest here; other approaches might be used to abstract the problem away through domain specific languages and component which abstract common user required functionality into libraries and well-described models; these seem common approaches to this and similar problems and come with their own advantages and disadvantages [reference required], a slight different approach which may well complement these is to thing about the context of skill acquistion through the ‘flow’ concept – it may be that this is more appropriate for those who have ‘no interest’ or ‘not enough attention span’ in getting the details of an implementation worked out – looking at making, any the level of detail and precision required, as an engaging experience for those involved [there is a paper from Nick Bryan-? on collaborative engagement in the lit review library].

This workshop was useful as it seemed to really highlight the gap between high-level concepts and the level of detail required for implementation. Certainly at least one person from a product-design background found it difficult to engage with the implementation details and seemed to grow bored with the idea and drifted away. How would you engage someone like that? It seems that this ‘closing the gap’ – closing the gap between unskilled and skilled, between design, making and programming, is really interesting and should be the prime focus of my PhD now – in many ways getting people from different disciplines to collaborate meaningfully is very much about people moving from unskilled to skilled – learning new ways of working, new technologies, new terminologies and new practices. Working up a hierarchy of levels of skills might be required here – and there must be much to reference – is the argument that there is a need to move beyond awareness [quick thought - I should look up the notion of boundary practices, I can’t remember where that came up but it might be interesting here] of other practices to actual detailed knowledge? Is the focus on collaboration across disciplines? That would seem to make sense to me, but the we need to really nail down what the limitations are with team-based approach where each brings their own skills to the table.

[Point of this is discussion is to emphasise the level of detail and precision required at an implementation level as compared to a higher-level ‘send a tweet’ concept - it might be worth providing a data flow diagram illustrating the differences here. In fact illustrating this gap between concepts and implementation, between ambiguity and precision may well be the focus of the literature review - both conceptually and figuratively]

I think tomorrow morning I should try and get the final thousand words out on the final workshop session with Blackpool 6th form and then move on to writing about what I see at the real thrust of my PhD and work it out through writing so I’m in a good position to talk about it at the next PhD meeting – I really need to have some details there, in writing and possibly as a presentation, to make sure I’m on good track for the upgrade panel. I might try and write some more this evening given I need to away early in the morning to make sure I get it done.