According to Ackerman, “human activity is highly flexible, nuanced, and contextualized” (180). I agree with this statement; humans play multiple roles during the course of the day. It is important for technology to be flexible enough to support all of these roles. Unfortunately, that is not always the case. Factors such as the social-technical gap exist.
One thing that I find bothersome about my cell phone, is having to change the volume of my phone while I’m in class or meetings. I tend to forget to do this, and as a result, I will receive text message alerts or calls during my classes/meetings which is very distracting. To resolve this problem, my “smart” phone would create a way to input my schedule. Based on the schedule, the phone would automatically know when to be on ‘ring’, ‘vibrate’, or ‘off’. The social technical gap in this design is that technology is not good at dealing with exceptions. The phone might not know when there is an unexpected change to the schedule. What if a class/meeting is cancelled? What if I oversleep? Sometimes it is those very phone calls that wake me up.
But there are also times when I receive calls & texts at unfortunate times that are not in a schedule, such as when I’m taking a nap, in the shower, or just busy. A LOT of people have the tendency to call while I am taking a nap, which is very bothersome. It would be nice if my “smart” phone was smart enough to know when I just did not want to be bothered with my phone. Of course, there are also exceptions to this rule, such as emergencies.
Another thing that I find bothersome about my cell phone, is all the text messages that I receive. Of all of the text messages I receive, not all of them have the same level of importance to me. It would be nice if my “smart” phone could automatically sort and organize my text messages (perhaps based on my past history) so that I know which ones are important, urgent, or just random. The social-technical gap in this case would have to be that everyone has different meanings of ‘important’. To some people maybe texts from family members are most important, for others maybe texts academically related are most important, and for some people maybe social related texts are the most important. Or maybe it’s a mixture of the three. Individuals have different goals, and it is extremely difficult for a phone to address all of them. I thought that having the phone look at a person’s text history and how quickly they delete or save certain texts could address this problem.
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Your idea about the phone looking at text history is really interesting, that would definitely help me out when I didn't want to be distracted.
ReplyDeleteThe problem I find is that there are just too many exceptions. For example, my dad texts me a lot, and the phone would surely conclude that his texts were important. However, it would probably assign the same importance to "hows class going?" and something actually important (perhaps he called and I missed it).
The other problem is with people that play different roles in your life. I have friends that I do group projects with, but I also see them on the weekends. The phone probably wouldn't distinguish between "we need to submit the assignment tonight" and "what are you doing tonight?" which are clearly of different levels of importance.
I too considered a similar situation with coding text messages. But Emily is right, it gets tricky deciding the importance of a message since many of us know people who play multiple rolls in our lives.
ReplyDeleteThe timing of calls is an even more important concern of mine though. You're right, nap time seems to be the most opportune time for everyone to call! Like Acerman says, people are flexible enough to deal with these changes each minute. I only wish our smart phone could sense when we are sleeping - even if it's not on our schedule that we've programmed in.