Collaboration without shared professional culture

“If only they would know what we know!…”

Developers should learn how to design user interfaces and everyone should learn how to code: The cry for a better education of others in ones own field is frequent: If they only knew what we know, the world would be better and …

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Logo Competitions in Open Source Software Projects

I always wondered why open source projects love community-driven logo competitions (almost all logos of Wikimedia projects seem to have been created this way). What happens is this: A person or a group makes the case the the project needs a logo or needs an improved logo. If they are …

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Control and instructions

I research how people learn new skills using instructions. As fields, I selected working with people who learn programming and people who (re) learn cooking (some of them do so as they got a diagnosed with a condition that demands a new diet). Both fields work with very different materials …

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Unusual methods, marginalized people

This is a text I thought about for a long time. I hoped that I would find a nice theory that someone else suggested for the observations I made, but I was unable to find one or maybe unable to see the ones I know from a perspective that made …

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The problem of gaps, biases and barriers

In discussions about equity in the web and in technology I often come across two terms: Gaps and Biases. Sometimes they are accompanied by barriers. It is said that, to achieve equity, we need to close gaps, correct biases and remove barriers.

a google ngram search for "Gaps and Biases". The Graph starts 1940 at 0% and raises up to 0.0000001% in 2019

“Gaps and Biases” had quite a career since …

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Coordination and Cards

Some days ago, I chatted with a colleague (Gabriel Birke, who writes on  Leben++) about a story telling card game in which the players develop a story based on prompt cards (based on the mechanics of “For the Queen”). He was programming a little web-based version of it. I reviewed …

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On violating the standards of one’s occupation

There are some things that you don't do in an occupation. This might be using lots of glue instead of dowels for a carpenter or nesting several windows into each other if you are an interface designer. These things might be rationally explained: The carpenter might say they want to …

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Agre’s Surveillance and Capture, 26 Years later

This is an edited text based on a talk Lisa Conrad, PhD and me gave at the EASST 2020 in the panel on classic Science and Technology Studies (STS) papers. I think the text is also interesting for computer scientists, design researchers and privacy researchers, so I post it here …

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Knowledges which are not abstract

Whether in books or Wikipedia: A lot of knowledge is presented and edited as text. There is the assumption that this text reflects something about the world (if it is true and not wrong because of deceived senses, bad research, or lying). Such text can be written by a person …

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