Inspiration for my research

In May 2010, I had the privilege of being able to conduct ethnography at a highways maintenance company, where I observed the company’s scheduler do his work. The process was convoluted, bewildering, and what I can only describe as “soul destroying.” The data he was manipulating was abstracted to such a degree that the concept of this data representing actual humans was no longer relevant to the task at hand, which itself was becoming little more than an Excel box-moving exercise. This poor guy worked until 8 at night, every night, pushing packets of information around in a spreadsheet. It occurred to me that something was wrong with the way we develop technology that we have allowed this kind of technological engagement to become the dominant design.

For several years, I have suspected that something is very wrong about the relationship we humans have to the objects of our creation. It is as if we have set in motion something we can no longer control which has now become our master. We are The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, and our technology is the out of control mops and buckets, doing what they will despite our efforts to stop them; and more worryingly, we are mesmerized by their magical animation, and we accept that they will run amok for eternity. As an undergraduate, I investigated the ways in which Consumerism was contributing to increased rates of anxiety and depression amongst American adolescents. I concluded that these products – clothes, technology, whatever – had transcended their role as mere objects to become meta-objects, i.e. surrounded by constellations of culturally generated meanings which invest the object with much more than its inherent economic value. It is this trading of meanings that makes objects useful for the purposes of identity formation for the adolescent; but the transience of these objects makes identify formation itself unstable, thus leading to greater anxiety and depression for those who have objectified their identities within the commodity.

In the years since that research, my hunch that something is amiss persists, though I now realize that the problem is far more insidious than I had previously considered. As if it is not difficult enough to challenge Consumerism, I am now at the point that I recognize that for anything to change, we have to challenge the foundations upon which Consumerism is based: our very worldview. Consumerism, I would argue, is only one manifestation of a deeply disturbed technological paradigm that glorifies technologies and subjectifies the human such that he is no longer a person so much as an object and instrument of utilitarian, extractable value.

The mission I have accepted for myself for this PhD is grand: I want to propose an alternative technological paradigm, one which seeks to rectify the problems articulated above that I have begun to call “the spiritual disconnect;” i.e. the way in which profoundly important, specifically human values have been largely ignored. In other words, I want to explore how we might design technologies that facilitate soul-satisfying experiences of engagement. The first step towards this solution is perfectly clear: right the pyramid once again, so that human values form the basis upon which we develop technologies, as opposed to being (if considered at all) an afterthought. But what this means in terms of the manifested technologies, the way we manage data, the new potentials for human engagement (both with technologies and with each other), and indeed for our psychologies, is the bulk of my proposed research.