Alex Wilkie

Research Interests:

Turning people into silicon: an ethnography of users and user-centered design: how the user is made to operate as semiotic and material actor during the development of interactive technologies.

My research project is an ethnography of interaction designers and related innovation actors embedded in a multinational microprocessor manufacturer who models users, assembles interactivity and thereby guides product design and development processes as well as informing the long-term strategic thinking of the organisation. The aim is to examine in detail the discourse and practices in which multiple user representations facilitate user-centred design (UCD) and innovation practices in relation to technological development. My research entails three core tasks:

1. To map empirically the diverse uses of the ‘user’ within a research environment and development programmes that employ or are engaged with UCD practices and outcomes. Following Mol (2003) the ‘user’ will be analysed in terms of the multiple expectations it embodies around persons. How the capacities and, ultimately, functionality are modelled and organised around the attributes of the imagined end-user. Moreover, the performative role of such ‘expectation discourses’ will also be examined to see how design futures and the future of the organisation are enacted in the present.
2. To detail the ways in which different and multiple versions of the user are coordinated, contested and ordered in the course of specific practices and emerging corporate strategy. Here, I analyze how user representations might facilitate or complicate collaborations between innovation actors, such as interaction designers, human factors experts, social scientists, engineers and marketers by virtue of operating flexibly as a shared ‘boundary object’ (Star and Griesemer 1989).
3. To identify the conditions under which the multiple meanings of ‘user’ are accepted or discarded (‘closed down’) and explore how meanings of users emerge. How, for example, particular versions of the ‘user’ are enacted and exchanged amongst a wider community of practice.

References

Mol, A. (2003). The body multiple: Ontology in medical practice. Durham, N.C. ; London, Duke University Press.

Star, S. L. and J. R. Griesemer (1989). Institutional ecology, ‘translations’ and boundary objects: Amateurs and professionals in Berkeley’s museum of vertebrate zoology, 1907-39. Social Studies of Science 19(3): 387-420.