=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-1776/paper1
|storemode=property
|title=Desirability, Frameworks, and Socio-Technical Environments for “Want-To” Participation
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1776/paper1.pdf
|volume=Vol-1776
|authors=Gerhard Fischer
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/nordichi/Fischer16
}}
==Desirability, Frameworks, and Socio-Technical Environments for “Want-To” Participation==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1776/paper1.pdf
Desirability, Frameworks, and Socio-Technical
Environments for “Want-To” Participation
Gerhard Fischer
University of Colorado, Boulder, USA
gerhard@colorado.edu
Abstract. There is overwhelming evidence that people will become more en-
gaged in working, learning, and collaborating, if they “want-to” rather than
they “have-to” participate in these activities. Frameworks are needed to under-
stand and support the transition from a hierarchically organized, curriculum
dominated, plan and push world to a world in which people have possibilities
for co-creation and pursuing their interests in the context of personally meaning
problems. Based on insight from different fields (including research in behav-
ioral economics, learning sciences and an analysis of success and failure mod-
els), design requirements are articulated and analyzed to provide people with
more opportunities by redesign working, learning, and collaborating so that
they resemble more the success models in which people engage in “want-to”
participation.
1 Introduction
Observing and asking people of all ages they “want to” build complex artifacts with
LEGO, construct model trains, spend time gardening, participate in book clubs, build
furniture with Ikea, construct houses for Habitat for Humanities, and contribute to
Wikipedia and Open Source Systems whereas they “have- to” go to work on Monday
morning or attend class in schools and universities. The differentiation stated this way
hides the complexities between “have-to” and “want-to”: most activities that people
do are a mixture of the two objectives (see Fig. 2). While “want-to” activities are not
good in an absolute sense, they are credited with allowing people to engage in flow
experiences [1] by changing (1) alienation to involvement, (2) boredom to enjoyment,
and (3) helplessness to control. Flow experiences are not based on a return to the Gar-
den of Eden with a life of abundance free of all work, effort, and pain [2].
The short paper explores the challenges and opportunities offered by new media to
increase “want-to” participation. It derives criteria from an analysis of “want to” suc-
cess models in different domains to design socio-technical environments that have the
potential to increase the “want to” experiences of people in working, learning and
collaborating.
1
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2 Challenges and Opportunities
New media provide unprecedented resources and opportunities for individuals to
engage in authentic activities, participate in social debates and discussions, create
shared understanding, and frame and solve personally meaningful problems. Our
research is grounded in the fundamental belief that everyone has interest and
knowledge in one or more niche domains and is eager to actively contribute in per-
sonally meaningful activities [3]. In contrast to traditional education, which often
delivers predigested information [4], the richness of these interests and the passion of
the people involved leads to a “Long Tail” distribution of knowledge [5], [6], [7].
Millions of people spend hours every day (1) engaging in personally meaningful ac-
tivities that they do not bring to work [2]; (2) learn new things with great interest and
enthusiasm that they never exercised in schools [8]; and (3) participate and collabo-
rate voluntarily in social production and peer-to-peer activities in cultures of partici-
pation [9], [10]. Fig. 1 provides an initial, high-level differentiation between “have-
to” and “want-to” activities. The unique opportunity is to create socio-technical envi-
ronments that would allow more people in more activities and for more time engage
in “want-to” participation.
3 Success Stories of “Want-To” Participation
The analysis of success models provides an existence proof to disprove the notion that
working, learning, and collaborating must always be less enjoyable than freely chosen
leisure [2]. Numerous additional success stories for “what-to” participation exists
(that can not be discussed in this short contribution) including: (1) the engagement of
people of all ages with LEGO [11]; (2) the participation in Maker cultures [12]; (3)
the participation in Computer Clubhouses [13]; and (4) playing computer games with
high levels of engagement [14].
Fig. 1. Differentiation between “Have-To” and “Want-To” Activities
2
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An Exemplary and Inspirational Example: The “Rocket Boys”. The film “Octo-
ber Sky” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_Sky) (based on a true story) illustrates
the many aspects of how passion and self-directed learning can change people’s lives.
In the film, a personally motivating event (observing the Sputnik in the sky) piques
the interest in rockets and space science of four boys in a coal-mining town. The boys
pursue this interest and eventually win a major science fair. For all members of the
group, this represents a life-changing experience and sparks a desire to go to college
and become engineers. The movie illustrates in a unique way the essential aspects of
“want-to” work, learning, and collaboration:
failure and the tenacity to overcome it (e.g., the first few attempts to build a rocket
are unsuccessful);
inspiration and encouragement (from their high school teacher) are critical factors;
help from people with special expertise and from peers being knowledgeable in
different domains; and
partial success (the initial successful launch of a rocket) creates positive encour-
agement and recognition by the community (e.g., a news reporter writes an article
about their exploration in rocket design).
These supportive aspects are critical to overcome the obstacles that “want-to” partici-
pation often faces: in this particular case, the “Rocket Boys” engage in their activities
against their parents’ wishes. This story is just one of a large number of documented
cases that show that life-changing encounters can be found more often in interest-
driven, self-directed learning environments than in school environments [9], [15],
[16].
4 EUD and Cultures of Participation: “Have-To” and “Want-
To” Intertwined
An interview that we conducted some time ago with a geoscientist illustrates how
“have-to” and “want-to” are intertwined. He uses a couple of domain-specific soft-
ware systems to analyze his research data but none of the existing systems can pro-
vide complete solutions to his problems as his research unfolds and his understanding
of the problem, data, and results proceeds. During the interview, he says:
“I spend in average an hour every day developing software for myself to analyze
the data I collected because there is not any available software” (rationale for doing
so: because the is an infinite number of different problems in the world there is a
need for an infinite number of software system);
“Even if there is a software developer sitting next to me, it would not be of much
help because my needs vary as my research progresses and I cannot clearly explain
what I want to do at any moment” (rationale for lack of external support: ill-
defined problems cannot be delegated);
3
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“I spent three months to gain enough programming knowledge to get by (rationale
for learning something new in order “to get by”: he is not a professional software
engineer and does not intend to become one);
Software development has now become an essential task of my research, but I do
not consider myself a software developer and I don’t know many other things
about software development”(rationale for acquiring personally meaningful idio-
syncratic knowledge to increase his individual autonomy: he has acquired excellent
programming skills for solving his own problems and develops software for a larg-
er context rather than the computational artifact itself).
5 Conceptual Frameworks and Socio-Technical Environments
Supporting “Want-To” Participation
To make activities conducive to “want-to” participation requires the creation of envi-
ronments in which people can experience flow experiences: the right mixture between
the challenges they are facing and the skills that they have [1]. Most human activities
will not be pure “have-to” or “want-to” activities, but they represent a mixture of the
two experiences (e.g.: (1) as self-driving cars become a reality, different people at
different times “have-to” to drive a car as well as “want-to” drive a car).
Fig. 2. Creating Support for Moving Activities Towards “Want-To”
An important objective of our research and teaching has been to move activities so
they will reside more at the “want-to” end of the spectrum (as illustrated in Fig.-2).
Some of the specific mechanisms that we have explored in our research [17] are:
allow people to engage in working, learning, and collaborating activities that are
personally meaningful to them [6], [18];
eliminate prerequisite skills (e.g.: by supporting not just human computer interac-
tion but human problem-domain interaction) [19];
motivate the learning of new skills by supporting learning-on-demand and the
integration of working and learning [20];
provide feedback (with critiquing systems) relevant to the task at hand [21];
4
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identify the right mixture between self-exploration and self-control and guidance,
mentoring, and organizational support for sharing ideas, knowledge, and artifacts
[22], [23];
develop system architectures that provide “low thresholds” to get started but have
“high ceilings” to allow people to grow over time [1], [24];
empower people to actively contribute (grounded in the following observation:
“The experience of having participated in a problem makes a difference to those
who are affected by the solution. People are more likely to like a solution if they
have been involved in its generation; even though it might not make sense other-
wise” [25]).
All these research activities explore and support how new socio-technical environ-
ments enable people of all ages to obtain more enjoyment and more pleasurable expe-
riences from their activities. One design requirement to create such environments is
that they should support “flow” characterized as “a state in which people are so in-
volved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter” ([1], p 4).
Being in a flow state represents a major prerequisite for “want-to” participation. Fig.
3Errore. L'origine riferimento non è stata trovata. illustrates that to be in a flow
state requires the right mix between challenges and skills. Activities representing
challenges too big for existing skills (e.g.: for an inexperienced skier skiing on black
slopes) lead to anxiety, and not demanding enough challenges for existing skills (e.g.:
for an experienced skier skiing on green slopes) lead to boredom.
Fig. 3. Optimal Flow — Identifying the Right Balance between Skills and Challenges
5
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6 Implications
People of all ages spend substantial amounts of time in idiosyncratic, personally
meaningful activities with a level of engagement and effort that they do not bring to
many working, learning, and collaborating activities. In their work and school envi-
ronments, many people experience their life dominated by “have-to” participation.
The unique opportunity briefly outlined in this contribution is to learn from “want-to”
participation in order to create conceptual frameworks and socio-technical environ-
ments in which personal experiences are shifted more towards the “want-to” end of
the spectrum (see Fig. 2).
Relationship to the CoPDA workshops series. I consider the challenge from “have-
to” to “want-to” participation
an important objective of the overall scope of the CoPDA workshops “Cultures of
Participation in the Digital Age”, complementing and widening the themes of the
three previous workshops;
an extension of my contributions to previous CoPDA workshops ((1)
CoPDA’2013: “Is More More or is Less More? Exploring Frames of Reference for
Quality of Life in the Digital Age”; and (2) CoPDA’2015: “Information, Participa-
tion, and Collaboration Overload — A Design Trade-Off Analysis”); and
a central issue for a number of research themes, including meta-design (enabling,
inviting, and supporting active contributions by all stakeholders) and cultures of
participation (characterized by productive activities that are voluntary and non-
monetary) that we and many others have pursued for the last two decades.
7 References
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7
Proc. of Fourth International Workshop on Cultures of Participation in the Digital Age - CoPDA 2016
Gothenburg (Sweden), October 23, 2016 (published at http://ceur-ws.org).
Copyright © 2016 for the individual papers by the papers' authors. Copying permitted for private and academic purposes.
This volume is published and copyrighted by its editors.