Liam Bannon (Part 1) on a career outside the box

Geri: 00:00:05

Welcome to Changing Academic Life. I'm Geraldine Fitzpatrick and this is a podcast series where academics and others share their stories, provide ideas and provoke discussions about what we can do individually and collectively to change academic life for the better.

Liam: 00:00:30

The point is that there's also new ideas and, and kind of ways of thinking about problems that really, if we don't allow that, if we don't give people some space to think outside the box, like we're going to be stuck in the box. it's and it's a very small, I believe it's a very small box.

Geri: 00:00:49

That's the voice of Liam Bannon my guest in this episode. And Liam was never one to be stuck in the boxes. Liam is a professor emeritus and he was the founder and director of the interaction design center at the university of Limerick in Ireland. As you'll hear in, Liam's telling of his own story. He was always looking for the links and ideas outside of, and in between the boxes. He's been a hugely influential thinker writer and researcher. Along with his various collaborators. In shaping work around technology and design. Contributing, especially to the areas of human computer interaction. HCI and computer supported cooperative work CSCW and doing so drawing on his very broad disciplinary interests. One thing I think is particularly interesting, given all that is happening now with AI artificial intelligence. are his reflections on being around the first wave of AI in the 1970s I think it's also really interesting the way his career story provides a personalized account in a way of the story of the development of the fields of HCI. And CSCW. More generally. I think his story is an example of the opportunities and challenges that come from trying to shape your own path. And follow what you really believe in and what interests you. Albeit recognizing that he was able to do this in a different era of academia. Starting at around 37 minutes he also steps back from some of the details of his career and reflects more generally across some of these issues. I should say here that we recorded this interview in 2017. Yes. You heard that right. And this was at the ECSCW conference in Sheffield. So a small heads up because we were in person there's some cross microphone capture and back channeling. So it may not be as clean as if we recorded remotely, but still more than understandable. And I'll also just add that at this time. And in the ensuing period, Liam has been dealing with some really significant and serious health issues. We're going to record a part two of our conversation to continue some reflections on these experiences. As well as his more general reflections and lessons learned that we can take away from his career. So I hope you enjoy this conversation with Liam Bannon. I'm really delighted to be able to speak with you today, Liam. So thanks for giving me the time. For people who don't know you, just a little bit of context about your background. What, your first degree was cognitive science, psychology?

Liam: 00:03:49

Well, it was science, actually, it was a science. I had an interest in school in both. the arts and the sciences and so it was a bit of a problem as to what direction to go in. remember this teacher saying, do science, you might get a job at the end of it. So I did science, so it was maths, physics, chemistry, biology. My interest was chemistry really, but in terms of those subjects. But in the second year of my undergraduate and that degree, they had a new program of maths, psychology, computer science. This is back in 1971.

Geri: 00:04:24

That's that's a bit of a radical combination.

Liam: 00:04:26

Yeah, it was a bit strange because psychology was actually in the arts building, in the arts faculty. And, uh, computer science had just been introduced as an undergraduate subject the year before, 1970, so it was very new as an undergraduate, so I didn't really know much about psychology or computing. I remember going out that summer before the start. It just appealed to me as something a bit different so there were about 12 of us who took that option. and and of that 12, then we were traipsed over to psychology lectures in the arts building every, every day. And, uh, I really enjoyed it because what psychology, the undergraduate program in UCD in Dublin was a very general one that meant you, introduced you to everything, all different areas, animal behavior, perception, learning, memory, educational psychology, personality, statistics. Physiology, you know,

Geri: 00:05:29

Wow yeah

Liam: 00:05:30

it allowed, I just found it, it was great because I knew in a sense I was really a wordsmith. My interests were more English history and that. So this opened out that, it put me back even though I was in a science program. Then we, the third year we did computer science and psychology. At that stage didn't have an honors degree in computing. So we just had a general degree in computing and then the final year we just did psychology. So I ended up, and that, in that last year especially, I became interested in relationships between the two, computing and psychology. And there were two areas, obviously, of interest. One was the modeling, thinking of the computer as a model for the mind. And so a lot of psychologists were thinking of inputs and the information processing model. And of course I was interested in that. Another area was, of course then the idea of artificial intelligence, and I became interested in thinking of the computer as a model for the mind, as something to help us understand the mind. I was interested basically in cognition and thinking, the mind, language, they were my main interests. Um, I also found computing interesting and, you know, some of the semantics of programming languages and things like that. Some, some aspects of computing I found interesting. The second area of interest, which was a more practical one, was that I worked As both an instructor in computing, but also on the help desk in the computing center. And I started to pay attention to the concerns of people with using the technology. And this is in the days of punch cards and that. But there was still this issue of like people, errors that people people were making in compiling and running programs. And so I had that sort of human factors interest in computing systems. So what that led to was a feeling I wanted to move on, but I was, I wanted to be more in psychology, on the human science side, than on the computing side I wanted to do both. So I, there was an opportunity to do a Masters in computing in Trinity in Dublin. One year I kind of taught Masters, they just started in computer science. And we had some funding for it. So I did that for a year and I did a small project on looking at programming errors. So I collected data on people running programs and what were the most frequent errors and things. It was a fairly basic, uh, logging study basically. Um, and then I was thinking about doing further work and so I was looking for positions or doctoral positions. outside of Ireland, so mainly in North America. And I was thinking about, I wanted to, to be sort of in AI, but not in, Like the straight computer

Geri: 00:08:22

Yeah, the technical

Liam: 00:08:23

So I was looking for people who had psychology in computing. And at that time there were about three, three or four groups. There were some of the Carnegie Mellon people crossed, like Newell and Simon and that. There was Norman and Lindsay and Rumelhart, kind of the people at San Diego. There was a couple of people in Washington State, Hunt and some people. And then I I was reading at this stage kind of AI articles and I was a member of SIGART and I used to get the newsletter and I was quite young and trying to learn. We didn't have courses on AI now. Matter of fact, our psychology teacher was totally against the idea of AI. And, uh, but I felt it was, I was kind of a proponent of thinking of it as a new way of thinking about the mind. So. I, by chance came across an article. By somebody who wrote a review of IJHCI 73, I I think it was. This was in 74 or so. And it was by this guy with a very strange name called Zenon Pilishin. And, uh, who, and I was curious, who is this guy? And he was at a place called the University of Western Ontario. I said, where's that? And he said, it's in London, Ontario, in Canada, near Toronto. And I looked up his background, and he was an interesting mix. Mix, he was an engineer initially who then did psychology So he had a computing background and a, and a psychology background. He also had interest in philosophy of science. But he was in the psychology department two thirds and one third in computer science.

Geri: 00:09:57

So you recognized a kindred spirit.

Liam: 00:09:59

So I thought this might be somebody interesting. And then I contacted him and he sent me a couple of papers and I read them. And I, What the Mind's Eye Tells the Mind's Brain, one of his very classic papers. And I thought this is interesting, so I went there.

Geri: 00:10:13

So I'm going to put a link on the web page to an article that, someone wrote after interviewing you that actually talks through all of your career moves and that. One of the things that really what strikes me when I think about you is, and it's reflected in what you said at the very beginning about your interest, is how eclectic you are. And what I think you've done in terms of contributing to the field is doing a lot of that bridging between different fields. And often being at the forefront of some of the new bridges that emerge. Whether that's some of the early cognitive science stuff or the participatory design stuff or, yeah. How how did you, how did you. Get to the sort of lead of these waves.

Liam: 00:10:54

Well, because in a sense, I mean, around that time, cognitive psychology was reaching out in terms of trying to understand the mind. And so it was the start of the whole, the cognitive movement was 60s with Bruner and, um, Miller Galanter, pre brain plans and structural behavior. So that had been on. nicer cognitive psychology. So this was the first movement in terms of trying to understand more, thinking of the mechanisms of the mind. And so in that sense, one example of mechanism we had was the computer. So it became interesting to think about how could we, if we build, it wasn't the idea of building a robot so much that wasn't of interest to me. It was the idea of having a mechanism by which We might be able to explore the functional way in which something could happen in terms of the mind. Um, so that was what was of interest initially. And so in that sense, cognitive science was emerging around this time. And actually my supervisor, Zenon, was one of the major players in that whole emergence of cognitive science in the 80s. Uh, or in the 70s, late 70s, mid 70s. So I was kind of aware of his circle of people and contacts. He was visiting at M. I. T. at the A. I. Lab. He was visiting with people at Carnegie Mellon. We were on the ARPANET. We had a dial into the ARPANET even in those early days. So I was kind of aware of, you know, It was the first time for me like being in a research environment where here was somebody who was intellectually in the vanguard, kind of connected in this movement. So interdisciplinarity, mixing kind of computing, psychology, and also to some extent like fostering neuroscience is kind of thinking about mind. Um, So that was one phase, kind of the, and linguistics also actually, language and language mechanisms was also in there. So that was cognitive science and then a few years later we had, I could explain like HCI to me then was a emergence of people and I've written a little bit about this in terms of my view of how that emerged kind of partly with some people on the technical side becoming curious why people weren't using the software and also on the psychology side in terms of thinking of an applied psychology area of people using technology and thinking about, um, this idea of, uh, the information processing model that we could ascribe kind of both computers and humans in the same way and describe them as processing information. And then after HCI, then you had CSCW, and that really

Geri: 00:13:50

Which is Computer Supported Cooperative Work, which is trying to bring attention to the social and collaborative aspects of

Liam: 00:13:57

To me, though, the common element was really about going back going back to even earlier, the Human Factors in Computer Systems, which is the original title of HCI, of the HCI conference. Um, and there was some work back in the 70s, and in fact there was an early Atwood and Ramsey, back in 78, I think it was, had a bibliography of work in Human Factors in Computer Systems, which I got hold of, um, in 78. I spent a year, 78, 79, at Honeywell, Uh, in Minnesota as a human factors intern. But I wrote to them. They were looking for more traditional performance. human factors people. But I wrote and said, well, they should actually be interested in computing because more people were using computers and computer based systems and cognitive science was an emerging area. And so, tongue in cheek a little, I said they should hire somebody who had this mix of backgrounds in computing.

Geri: 00:14:52

And lo and behold, you know, I'm your man.

Liam: 00:14:55

And so they took a, took a gamble. I was one of three people. The other two were, had more traditional human engineering programs. But actually, it turned out, quite interesting that year, um, in ways that I hadn't expected. Part of, also because I had a link with the University of Minnesota, the Center for Research in Human Learning, Jim Jenkins group, and there were some very interesting graduate students there who I found very interesting. There were also people at Honeywell, but what they discovered was in a way that the fact that I had some computing background as well and my interest in that area was actually quite suited to some of the projects they were doing. And, uh, also opened my eyes a little bit to working in the military industrial complex because a lot of the projects at Honeywell were, uh, on the defense system side. And that was something new to me given I come from Ireland and Canada, where it wasn't very big or non existent. Well, not quite non existent. There are a few projects defense projects in Canada, but not a lot of the communications and technology work in Canada wasn't military related. So, is so what I'm saying is that to my mind, the common element of all of this in going on to interaction design and participatory design, the common element was really that I was interested in, not just in the mechanisms in terms of the technology, but in terms of the fact that how it could supposedly support people. So my interest always had been in thinking of the technology as a medium through which, which allowed people to do things, either in terms of being a tool or in terms of being a medium through which they could connect with others. My interest wasn't in trying to extract human expertise into the machine. but rather thinking of the machine as a tool or artefact.

Geri: 00:16:47

Yeah.

Liam: 00:16:48

And that became more, it started out as a rather naive understanding, kind of in a sense just a concern about trying to support people, and also being concerned that I found a lot of people on the technology side Just viewed people as stupid who had problems, you know, that they were stupid users, you know, they didn't understand their, it's obvious, you know, it was, and I found this is really like at a certain moral level. I felt this was objectionable. It cast thinking of most people in the world as being. And also a bad design stance to be taking because I think it's led to designing systems for idiots rather than trying to think about designing for competent human practitioners. And in that sense also, when I went to California as a post doc to Don Norman's group, I spent also a lot of time, Interacting with a group there, Mike Cole and his group, the Laboratory for Comparative Human Cognition. And they were, Interested in cultural historical activity theory and Vygotsky traditions and a major aspect of that was the idea of thinking of mediating artifacts. Vygotsky's notions of language as a mediator in terms of communication. And the idea that mind is not just something that is individual, that we move from the individual. The standard notion from the more traditional psychology was we'd individual mind, then we might talk about the group or the social mind, the mass or something larger. it was very much, the first thing was the individual and the self, kind of an individual creation. Whereas in this other view, when you start reading Vygotsky, kind of Vygotsky mind is social. And so the notion that we go from, Inter to intra rather than from intra to inter, I found fascinating. So there was a theoretical framework that I became interested in, in terms of looking at, in a sense, the ecosystem. It wasn't just the individual using the technology, which is very much the focus of a lot of HCI. But even from those early days, I had an interest in something larger than that individual human computer dyad. And I think that's reflected actually, I mean, I, in the work I did at San Diego, not that it was not very, um, it was very naive, it wasn't very well theoretically grounded, it wasn't experimentally well founded, but in my own thinking, my time there, and to give credit to Don, although at times he was unsure where I was going and what going I was doing, he actually gave me the space and, and, you know, opened, allowed me to actually explore. And that time in San Diego was very, very important in terms of my intellectual development, in terms of trying to kind of understand more and framing how to talk about these things. And even though the output from my time there is quite little, it can be seen in actually a tech report, parts of which appeared in three chapters in the user centered system design book. But if you read those has been really pivotal, I'm not sure about that, I don't think so, but it influenced a few people. But I don't think it comes across as strongly in the three pieces because they're in separate parts of the book. All noise. A little piece called Issues in Design. And that's talking a little bit about the ethics of design and about how we think about, you know, idiot proof design how think about, you how we think about and the people we're designing for. Just a very small note, a few pages, but the second piece was on the social, well it ended up being called Helping Users Help Each Other. But that piece was really talking about the social context of design, saying you know, why are we spending all this effort on building help systems Computer automated Help systems, and yet we do very few studies of how they're used. Yeah. And in act of fact, they're not used a lot. And partly the reason is because they're written from the perspective of the machine and they describe all the features of the machine, but they're not written from a human practice perspective as we would say today in terms of an understanding of how do we use what's useful here in the specific context of our work and when we want to do. Something to make these systems usable in our daily context. We talk to our neighbor or somebody. And so, why?

Geri: 00:21:30

yeah,

Liam: 00:21:31

in that, I try to raise this issue of how, how do we find out information? Rather than going to these help systems, we actually, very often, we ask others. We ask people who have similar practices and we learn from them. And then, how come we never talk about that in HCI? How come we don't think, is there some way? And the next stage of that for me was, is there some way through the system we could have access to others in terms of online resources? Not to a piece of dead text, but actually to live people. So in a sense, the third chapter is on computer mediated communication. Not in the classic sense of just how email comparing online and offline, but I put out a query on the early internet which was, An unused net, which was asking about collaboration tools, using the technology as a medium. And the chapter is computers as communication devices. So, saying not to look at the computer as a calculator or as a substitute human, rather as a medium through which we can communicate. And it's kind of ironic in a sense, because the whole interest in social media, you could say, and exactly what Facebook does, it's, it's a medium.

Geri: 00:22:41

Exactly. So much of what we use technology for now. So, when you look back, because you have had many sort of shifts and moves and explorations throughout your career as these ideas, you know, evolve and new, new contacts are made and you go to new places. When you look back, what are the sorts of things where you think you have made a really strong contribution or the things that you're proudest of?

Liam: 00:23:09

Well, I don't know. It's hard sometimes because in a sense I'm, I'm a bit of a sham in some sense, like in terms of a standard research profile. Because I think the contribution I make is rather, a rather elusive one. It's kind of a and elusive. Allusive and allusive and alluding to, and I think my, you see the papers I write, most of them, they're not, well I have a few pieces where there's empirical work and that's also sometimes done with people in my group. But I think the contribution that I make is often trying to point to topics or issues and bringing in material that I think should be relevant. In some cases I don't have a strong conceptual fame from first principles. In some cases I work with people because of course I have a specific view on certain things, but I also am influenced by, hugely by my collaborators. And I've had a huge number of collaborators. I really like working with people. And a lot of the people's, in some of the pieces that are more well known, of course, a lot of this strong kind of conceptual work is often done by my colleagues, I will say. But what I do is help shape it and frame it and, and relate it in a way. And I think, so I play this role that. I think if we all did this, there'd be very little empirical research done of the proper kind maybe, but I think there is a space for trying to, trying to move forward in terms of, not always trying to be, quote, new, but it's trying to, in actual fact, part of what I think My contribution is in trying to say, what's out there that we might learn from? What other bodies of work may be relevant that we seem to be ignoring? And in a sense, although in some cases, it might appear at first that I'm all over the place, actually, I think there is a core, and the core, It's basically, in a sense, human centered design, or a focus on people. And it so happens, because I did computing, I'm surrounded by people working with technology and artifacts and systems that supposedly support people, but yet they don't. So I was very happy with CSCW, Computer Support for Collaborative Work, and Kjeld and I, Kjeld Schmidt, you know, One of my major collaborators for many years, um, like what we were interested in was that idea of support for people and people's practices

Geri: 00:25:38

Yeah.

Liam: 00:25:39

not starting out with just groupware or technology but to understand how people do things and then how we can maybe design better technology that fits into those practices. And in that sense, like it also led me into an interest in with the sociology and anthropology people like Lucy Suchman's work originally and in showing again how you know, understanding the context of work, the local organization of work, and then the ethnomethodology people and the sociologists with their concern about members practices and the way in which work is something that is achieved, not a given. And so it gave a lens, a very detailed account of how work gets done, which I thought was extremely helpful for people in design to think about and to realize not to talk about abstractions.

Geri: 00:26:30

Or to talk about the stupid user. Exactly. So you're a really good example of taking advantage of having eclectic interests and being broad intellectually. There's some ways in which now many of our measures almost sort of presume or require us to be deep and to be known for one thing. But but you've crafted a career, probably not intentionally, I'm assuming, in, in being able to exploit the synergies at, at these intersections and with very diverse collaborators because you have these broad interests.

Liam: 00:27:06

I thought the way you phrased the question, maybe, I think it might, What bothers me? Well, what bothers me? People are always saying I'm concerned about things, this, having concerns. Um, yeah, it concerns me a little because it makes it sound a bit as if eclectic. So, you do lots of different things and then maybe you can bring them in. I think there's a sense in which, as I said, my interest is in people, in, you know, Not just moving out from psychology, it's not just the individual mind, because I I don't believe there is so much in the individual mind. And also, ironically, although I was trained in cognitive psychology and information processing psychology, I've actually, you know, I became disillusioned with that in the, actually quite early on in the mid, late 70s even when I was doing my thesis and I, I kind of became very, antithetical to the AI movement and became very critical of it because it seemed to all the time posit as if though, you know, that sort of the mind, the computer was a good mechanism for a model of what it is to be human of the mind, and I don't think it is, it might have it's a model, but it leaves out a whole lot of things, like in that Early days, it's like, we didn't talk about emotions, we didn't, emotions were some epiphenomenon, or, we didn't, we ignored it, and yet emotions are so fundamental to what it is to be human, yet, for many years it was ignored, so, I mean, my interest moved more in terms of, Understanding humans, the human, humankind, in a sense, more sociological, anthropological perspectives on understanding society, the nature of human society, and the evolution of, in that sense, my interest in artifacts. It's not just about, you know, Industrial design, but it or buildings or whatever, which I'm also interested in people living in spaces because my interest is in human activity and human activity is also,

Geri: 00:29:10

all of these,

Liam: 00:29:11

but it encompasses artifacts that we make from the earliest tool, man as a tool user, like we, we live in houses, we have habitation, we domesticate animals, we have, we live with others. So in the sense that interest in people is fundamental and because I did computing the interest then becomes the artifacts that we create in these new kinds of artifacts since the dawn of computing, which don't, in many cases, disrupt our, our lives. Can we do it better? But the problem is always that too much we focus on the artifact. How can this app help us in our lives? And what I've been trying to do because from a work point of view, I've normally ended up in computing departments because that's where there are jobs. But I've always, in a sense, that informatics informatics should also encompass the social. Actually social informatics, I mean Rob Kling and others use that term, that but I don't even like the term because to me informatics is social. Is inherently foundationally social because it's about people and artifacts. And if you're going to design artifacts, people are going to work with them and therefore you should know something about people. It doesn't mean you train them as psychologists or anthropologists or ethnographers, but anybody studying computing it should also encompass Like, the context in which computing developed, back to the days of, even you go back to Babbage and calculating machines, I mean, he also needed locksmiths and, uh, designers and blacksmiths to build those tools and we very often ignore the skill sets of these people in creating the things and in using, in fashioning a product. so human computer, I I don't like the term human computer interaction, by the way, but that's

Geri: 00:31:05

Me either.

Liam: 00:31:06

story. I don't like the term user, I don't,

Geri: 00:31:09

That reflects your, your, your focus on the human person. You're like very much

Liam: 00:31:14

Yeah, the human society really, yeah. And that is the common thread. So for me, The interest in CSCW, the interest in designing interactive systems is more the interest in the design process on how we open up design, on how we try to democratize design. My interest in participative design, when I first encountered it in the, early 80s was through some of the work in Scandinavia. And again, I've been very influenced by many people there and my link with Aarhus, with Susanne Bødker others have been very influential for me. But my interest was. I felt at the time in San Diego we were doing user centered design, focusing on the user in the sense of psychologists understanding the user. But we weren't really, Still at the point of involvement in design.

Geri: 00:32:03

Yeah. Yeah

Liam: 00:32:03

And that idea of actually reading about people, really involving working with people in trade unions and the workers, kind of an understanding their expertise. So I loved this idea. One of the papers somebody wrote about, you know, not expert systems, but system for experts. You know, the idea of, and another early influence of mine, that many people may not have heard of, that I've been influenced by as an Irish engineer, who worked, at Lucas and Lucas Aerospace, Mike Cooley. And I heard Mike Cooley talk in the early seventies and was very influenced by that. And he had an interest in the work of Marx and manual labor and tools and the notion of skill and tool sets and technology. Building on that, not, so I'm not trying to make an antithesis,

Geri: 00:32:53

Yeah.

Liam: 00:32:53

I'm trying to rethink the relationship between people, tools, computers, in ways that are very different to the thinking that I found in a lot of computer science and AI, which was very much kind of, you know, the human as a meat machine, of, like, as a machine, basically.

Geri: 00:33:13

Mm-Hmm.

Liam: 00:33:14

The other influence, I guess, back in the late 70s, early 80s was Terry Winograd and his work with Flores and that one. The emerging drafts of that book I was privy to. And that helped me in the idea of moving from, you know, to realize that we needed something other than the information processing model. I talk about a bit with that in the early 80s. sorry, the late 80s with paper with Susanne, Beyond the Interface, Encountering Artifacts in Use, which appeared in Jack Carroll's book. But that talks a bit about that history. But to me it's, so just to go back when you kind of prompted about eclecticism, I just wanted to, yes, I do have wide interest history.

Geri: 00:33:56

I guess I don't mean eclecticism in a derogatory way, but, there's value in, in having the interest, the skills, the intellectual capacity to make these links and draw these connections. a um, there's a particular role that, um, There's a, and there's a particular, I don't know, move intellectually as a community that we get from those sorts of discussions that we don't get just from those of us who might stay within a little bubble or a silo or very narrow area.

Liam: 00:34:25

Well, I think there's a space, and maybe it, what I would say, because I sometimes feel like Forrest Gump because I, I feel like I appeared in places. I I happen be fortunate appeared, by chance in a way, a lot of interesting points of inflection there.

Geri: 00:34:42

Which this nice, this article sort of draws out really really nicely.

Liam: 00:34:46

Yeah, because I got, for instance, being with Don Normans and Steve Draper, the user centered human computer interaction project. Human Machine Interaction Project at UC San Diego in the early 80s. That was one of the early, very early HCI projects. And

Geri: 00:35:05

Yeah.

Liam: 00:35:06

I'd, again, they found me interesting because I'd done this psychology and computing, human factors, I'd been at Honeywell, I had this human factors and computer systems sort of thing. And so there weren't many people with, there weren't undergraduate programs and sort of stuff. So that was interesting. I mean, I met a A lot of interesting people there and, as I said, I also have links to other people at San Diego outside of the Cognitive Science group who also were influential to me. People in Sociology, I took a course in Ethnomethodology from Bud Mehan at that time. And then by chance I met Lucy Suchman at that time. I had connections with people at Xerox PARC, and was influenced by some people there, and that got me thinking about things. And then I was back in Dublin working on a conference where I had an influence of a sociologist friend of mine. Uh, and she was much interested in the larger, kind of more, Socialist understanding of science and technology, and it opened my mind, it moved me out of this narrow refrain that I had been having, but it opened me out to a larger literature on the sociology of science and on, um, kind of theories of, of human labor and practice. And then I had the PD, Participative Design Influence. I met some people, Morten Kyng, and Pelle Ehn, and Susanne Bødker, and they, And then they kindly invited me to come with them because they were interested in making a link with the San Diego HCI, this this emerging HCI community. So I went there, and then while they were there, they had this link with the new, Rank Xerox EuroPARC group that was set up in Cambridge in England and so I went there and then I made contact with some of the sociologists there, Christian Heath and David Randall and Richard Harper and other people who were, uh, connected.

Geri: 00:37:03

So all of this, you've just talked about lots of travel and living in lots of different places. What's been, can you reflect on that just as a, I don't know, from a lived experience perspective in terms of putting down roots or not, or what was the costs of, of needing or doing all those moves or the advantages of doing all those moves?

Liam: 00:37:25

A A couple of big ones. Let's see, the first move outside of Ireland. I mean Ireland in the, in the late 60s, early 70s was still, uh, very closed in certain ways and I just felt it's still very, in certain ways, I felt limiting and limited and I wanted to explore elsewhere. It's not, you know, I had this idea of if I stayed in Ireland, so at that time a lot of people did, they did their training one country and got and got positions.

Geri: 00:37:53

A lot of people do, yeah.

Liam: 00:37:55

but I was curious, I wanted to learn, I wanted to, Visit other countries. I, I hadn't visited Ireland. Wasn't in the EU at this stage, you know, it was, so we were traveling to the continent was a big thing. I didn't have much travel at all, so I wanted to go to an English speaking country. Um, well, because I didn't think it'd be easy to, it wasn't easy to go to Europe at that time or work in France or Italy without the language. So I had to definitely felt, okay, I'll go away for the, and then when I got there. There were two types of people I met who left from Ireland. One group were people who hated Ireland, like they'd gotten fed up and really said, I'm never going back, I want to go wherever, US, Australia, wherever, away. And there were other people who were very definitely going away for some training, but they definitely were coming back, you know. I didn't fit in either category, I was just, wasn't sure, I didn't have a fixed view. So I went and then I got the option to go to the States for a year, I did that in Minnesota, then I got the I came back and did a little bit of consulting in Ireland, just briefly, in between things. Then I got the chance for the post doc in California, so I moved there.

Geri: 00:39:05

So you never had this career plan from the sounds of it, it's been really in the moment and responding to opportunities or taking advantage of opportunities as they rose.

Liam: 00:39:15

Yeah, yeah, that's um, Yeah, I didn't actually, you know, at the end of my PhD, I was, it ended up, thesis was still connected with this earlier sort of issue around representations cognitivist models and that. I didn't feel happy doing that. continuing with that sort of stuff. So I, in a sense, had a bit of a dilemma about what to do next. So I was, in a sense, fortunate because of this HCI interest that, and the connections that my supervisor still had. So I had sort of entry points into some good places, and then I got taken up. I had the option, actually, of going to work in an office automation consulting firm in Toronto or move to San Diego.

Geri: 00:40:02

Somehow I can't see you in an office automation.

Liam: 00:40:06

It's an interesting group. It was the former Bell Northern lab that Don Tapscott set up. But anyway, so I moved to California and then I did something else. I actually stopped and went traveling in Asia. So one of the funny little anecdotes is if you look at the user centered, the system design book, and you look at the front, at the list of contributors, you have all these people, you know, MIT Media Lab, uh, Xerox PARC, University of California, San Diego, you know. And then there's one address that's not a university address, and it's 16 Fortfield Avenue, Ternier, Dublin 6, Ireland. That's my parent address, it's my home. Because at that stage, when the book came out in book 86, I was traveling in Asia,

Geri: 00:40:52

You're a peripatetic academic.

Liam: 00:40:53

I intended to spend a couple of months, I thought, but I ended up spending almost two years on the road. outside of academia. So my CV has this one line which says on leave.

Geri: 00:41:05

So did that impact, well it doesn't sound like it impacted, you know.

Liam: 00:41:09

It was difficult I mean actually a lot of my friends said you can't you can't stop.

Geri: 00:41:14

I know, there's that sense that you can't stop.

Liam: 00:41:16

was difficult to be honest arriving I arrived back in I moved to Aarhus in January in 2000 sorry 19 88, and I've been basically on the road from July of 85.

Geri: 00:41:36

Wow.

Liam: 00:41:38

So, and I came back into a research group into living in a small apartment and into another country where, yes, my work colleagues, we spoke English, but it was another country. They don't, they actually speak Danish, I guess. Um, That was, it took a while, yeah. It was, was, was a bit a at a personal level. It was, uh, it was, uh, ended up having You know, some interesting good times, you know, but it was, yeah, it was not easy. I was, but I've always been a bit of a loner, I guess. So I, I'm never really certain about, as other people who know me as I'm not so good at making decisions. At the same time, I actually made some of these rather big

Geri: 00:42:24

Yeah, big, yeah.

Liam: 00:42:26

where I fell into them.

Geri: 00:42:27

I mean, one of them, you stopped working formally, would you say retired a few years ago, and you've also had an interesting last couple of years, since then as well.

Liam: 00:42:39

well, okay, I skip over after, or quickly, I was a couple of years in Aarhus, but I wasn't sure if that was a computer science department, and again, I still have this feeling that I wasn't quite sure if that was the home I should have, because I felt in terms of the profile of what people should be, even though there was space there for the systems development group, it still was a bit of an issue for me. So

Geri: 00:43:06

So what people should be in terms of what a good academic, a CV looks like, is that what you mean?

Liam: 00:43:12

in the context of computer science, being a member, being a senior faculty member in computer science, and what kinds of courses you should be teaching. My interest over the years has even moved further away from, in a sense, the details of the technology per se, and more into kind of understanding the practices and the, so I guess, and the sociologist, sociological, anthropological kind of interest. So, I'm, it just felt, yeah, I, in a sense as I said, I, I, I felt at one stage I would like to try to create a new sort of discipline that some sort of media and informatics or social informatics, although the way in which some of that media work is gone, I would question a little bit, I think it's become, or some of it I don't find, so it's become too text based and too removed from actual practice. So it's really, where are the home, where was your home, you know, one's intellectual home. Because it's interesting, like if I look at certain committees now, and there's an arts and humanities group, there's a social science group, there's a engineering [And you can relate to all of them] I can relate to all of and them, And in actual fact, some of the things I do and some of the people I know or even have worked with would be in each of those categories. But if I go up for review by any one of those, they they look at me and say, you're not a psychologist, you're not publishing in psychology, you're not a sociologist, you're not a computer scientist, you're not a media theorist. And so in that sense, there's a potential price in that And I think it happens with new interdisciplinary fields, so like, we've had that discussion a bit more recently about CSCW, that certain faculty people feel that it's, in their, younger people, that it's a problem because of, like, in terms of if they say they do CSCW, it doesn't necessarily help in their promotions committee or whatever, and I understand that, that, that problem, that on the one hand, Some of these areas are where interesting things are happening, but it really is maybe a bleeding edge. That it's leading edge in the sense of it's bringing together new areas and there is sometimes a real buzz and some real energy in the confluence of these different areas. But there also is a price to pay

Geri: 00:45:39

Yeah.

Liam: 00:45:40

It can be difficult to get acceptance or there may be new journals appearing which you can get into but then those don't get ranked highly and so your, uh, your publication channels are reduced and so yeah, it's

Geri: 00:45:54

So what would you say to a younger academic now who's dealing with some of those questions?

Liam: 00:45:59

Well at the end of the road at the end of the road, like, you know, if you look back on, on your life, I think it's maybe hard to consider this when you're in your late 20s or early 30s and doing your post doc or trying to get your first position and get tenure and, I mean, the pressures are, I do believe that the pressures on young academics are ferocious these days, much worse than it used to be, and there used to be more space for people to do their own thing. There were, in different countries, people had different, used to be in some of the northern European countries, there was more scope for people to carve their own path. But I mean, there's this relentless pressure worldwide, also in terms of a homogenization of programs, a reduction in what counts as good science, good work. Um, and I think this is really flawed and problematic and that it tends to end up coming to a least common denominator. Of course there was some shoddy work done at the edges. I'm not denying that. But the point is that there's also new ideas and, and kind of ways of thinking about problems that really, if we don't allow that, if we don't give people some space to think outside the box, like we're going to be stuck in the box. it's and it's a very small, I believe it's a very small box. So I, in terms of advice to young people, I think it's very difficult and I, I don't want to belittle the problem that's there. And I haven't really, to be honest, I haven't given enough thought to this. I mean, I, what I've tried to do when I had some control or influence myself and I had some support or resources was to create a space and I used to say, this is probably a rather weak um, line, but I wanted to try and create a space where we could have interesting people and give them some freedom to do things. Now, some of that turned out not to be very good. Some of it turned out not to work. Some of it turned out to be really interesting. And I think, I hope, that some of the people who, when I did have the lab in Limerick, the Interaction Design Center, and with some of my colleagues there, we did create a space where I think we had, we had fun. We, not just that it wasn't a sense of being, um, selfish, make ourselves but we tried to make a difference. We tried to do something. We tried to create linkages. We brought in people. I had people coming from communication and media studies. I had, um, One of my former people, like my crew here. We're speaking at the ECSCW conference. There's now Professor Luigina Cio;lfi. She came in from communication and media studies from Siena. I mean, we had people from different countries. We had, we had an architect, Parag, who came from India, somebody who was a qualified architect. We had people from software engineering. We had people from art and design school. We started a new master's in interactive media and many of the students came in from the School of Art and Design and that was really influential and interesting to have those people in our group. So, we created an interesting space. But, in a sense, because I wasn't, and this is, I guess, my fault as the leader, I wasn't focused enough or determined enough, it, it was, We probably didn't, within the organization, we didn't push enough on the policy or, or politics front. We created a space and as long as I brought in money, we could keep that space because we were basically self sufficient. We, most of the people in the group are, we, we were paying on grants soft money Yeah. We didn't have many faculty positions. And once that tied up near the end, when I started having some health issues and I became on that, I was the only senior faculty member. We'd wanted to other junior faculty, but it, it was difficult wasn't seen as strategic within the structure. So it just shrank

Geri: 00:50:08

it just Yeah, so the politics is important, but it would be exhausting as well, and it's always decisions and trade offs, isn't it, where you devote your energy?

Liam: 00:50:17

It is. Yeah. And I, well, I think one of the things is that you've got to, it's really important to try and have collaborators, whether they're in the same faculty or not, or although it can be difficult within the university system, you may have good collaborators in different faculties, but the problem is they are, ultimately subservient to their head of department or their faculty and it can be problematic. So, although there's a lot of lip talk about interdisciplinarity and creating new interdisciplinary research institutes, you really need to have a core group and the problem is that we didn't, we never got critical mass in terms of interdisciplinarity. You know, regular faculty in that group to make it sustainable. So there are real issues. But when you're struggling to actually just do something here and on year, it's also difficult to have that longer term plan or to spend the time in the politics side of it to try to work out. But I,

Geri: 00:51:21

You're making me think that in an ideal world, so like what, what, what I like that you did was just recognizing that you didn't fit any neat silos, but created your own and brought people together and built something.

Liam: 00:51:35

Mm-Hmm,

Geri: 00:51:36

But it's also recognizing the mix of skills you need to, to do that sustainable long term perspective of it. And like, I, I know I'm not very good at politics. So, you know, if I want to do something about, I would need to think about that. Bringing someone in who would, who's going to be good at that politics and external facing things and

Liam: 00:51:55

Yeah, exactly. I mean, I was just talking to another senior person about this recently, just at this conference, and I actually was saying to this person that maybe they should think about, yeah, hiring somebody on the PR communications or this side of it, you know, or to have a chief operating officer or somebody to. The problem, of course, is how you justify that on soft money in your own project. it can be difficult to actually get full salary for somebody.

Geri: 00:52:22

But recognizing that we now, to operate in these sorts of environments, and to do the interesting research at these cross disciplinary edges, we need more than just good academic research skills.

Liam: 00:52:34

Sure, sure. I think that, yeah, I mean, To be honest, I mean, I don't, I never really felt I wanted to be a director, manager sort of person and near the end, like with several projects and I couldn't myself be involved in all the projects and it became like you felt a loss of, and that's actually what's made me feel it's time to, I need to step out of this because we were still doing things and we had projects, but I was becoming more and more removed and some of the personal interests I had were not the things that were being funded So we had to go after funding to support the people But they were in some cases a bit more removed from what I found really interesting And so I it started a realization that Here I was working on a couple of things, which I was doing on my own, in my own time, that I found motivating. One of those was about forgetting and remembering and forgetting. It was a topic that I was quite fascinated by, but I didn't have the time and the space to actually package it as a research proposal.

Geri: 00:53:43

And that was the thing that was really exciting and fun.

Liam: 00:53:46

At time there were these other projects which I needed to be more hands on working with, and I wasn't. I was kind of missing from my group during that, and I realized, no, this is not,

Geri: 00:53:57

it's not where your energy was.

Liam: 00:53:58

Yeah, it's, and also I had some, at that time I had some health issues were just taking my energy away, so, because I lived a lot of my life, I've been, yeah, relationships, and I, I actually probably, sacrificed too much. I kind of got wrapped up in this academic world. In other words, of course, I met a lot of really good people. And that there were people who are not just my academic colleagues, but also were social friends and collaborators over several years around Europe that I still value highly, but it's not, they're not actually there necessarily when you go back to where is home and suddenly what is home and That became a question. I was, you can, there's a dilemma sometimes, you move so often. I talk about that sometimes with people who've moved. I went back to Ireland, yes, but I never, in some ways a part of me has never really fully settled back there And also I'm not a really part of the establishment there.

Geri: 00:55:02

In the academic the academic sense or in the local community sense?

Liam: 00:55:06

in the academic sense or in the local community because I, I don't. While I have had partnerships, I haven't really settled, and I don't have children, I don't have, in terms of embedding yourself in the local environment, so. so I've, and I've been away a lot, so, as time goes on, you suddenly realize that we are still, although we talk about nomadic life, I mean, there's an element also in which we're still, we still need place, we need groundedness. and it can be difficult. It can be difficult and balancing these things as you go through your career can be quite difficult.

Geri: 00:55:45

I'm sort of connecting that to what your, what your theme of your own research is, which is about being human, you know, at the core. We are people

Liam: 00:55:54

I mean, At the core. Part of it for me, in terms of moving places, was to learn. You know, like I'm, as I said, it's not, that I have this theory and I'm trying to beat everybody over the head with it. But what I do have is a stance, a perspective. and we can use the term human centered design, although I, for other, just like I don't like some of the other labels, I don't particularly like that label, for reasons I might go into another time. But, it did, it was an attempt to at least say, my interest is around, people and the world in which they live, which and the ecosystem in which they are in, which includes other people, artifacts, the workplace, their physical neighborhood, you know, the environment. So in that sense, I'm interested in that whole ecosystem and systems thinking. I mean, that's why I'm interested in going back and trying to bring in some aspects from even earlier literature. What are there still things of relevance in the socio technical literature, even in some of the cybernetics literature, second order cybernetics especially, which included the observer in the process, not just about the technical system. Yeah, so it's a, as I said, I think my, role is, as I said, not as some visionary visionary. I don't think, or somebody who is a theorist actually, but, somebody maybe who in a sense was trying to ask questions and, and and trying to raise questions which at the time maybe within the field, certainly within the computing field, were not being asked very much and so they were at least trying to open the door, maybe that's a way to put it as a for opening a door. Letting a chink of light into other work, and

Geri: 00:57:51

And doors are connections.

Liam: 00:57:53

Yeah, making connections. Like if people are curious, the last, that little Forgetting paper, which I actually quite like because it's appeared in Co Design, the journal, in 2006, I'm not sure, but it's called Forgetting is a Feature, Not a Bug. The main message was really just saying that this fascination about the capture of things, video recording, SenseCam, Microsoft SenseCam, this idea of you know, suddenly we're going to record thousands of images and we're going to record every phone call and every commu Somehow that this was in a, like going to increase our awareness of the world and our kind of our memory of ourselves and whatever. There seemed to me a fundamental lack of understanding in these visions, these bizarre visions, techno visions, of what it was to be human, what it was to be a person in the world. How remembering is an active process, it's not a computer recording of something. How forgetting is an integral part of our human activity. How social forgetting is also an important part And of course It's important we don't forget certain things, I mean, or we'll repeat mistakes of the past. But there's a sense in which forgetting, to a point, as a, thinking about it as a design issue, that there are times when we don't want to be recorded. And to think about that as a design space, so it's not for or against a particular capture model, it's to try and create scenarios that are believable in the sense of what it means to be human. And when I read in the early days, say, of ambient intelligence, which is, I think of as the second or third coming of AI, there's this notion of us being surrounded by these intelligent artifacts that would do things for us, that would be agents for us, and human like that we would discuss. It seemed to me that it was like a very strange, perfect world that didn't make any sense and it was really in the context of that that I started to developing this issue around forgetting. But the other thing I wanted to say about that article is, again, it's not a standard scientific article, but it's a walk through a space, and in that walk I kind of try to link to history, to philosophy, to psychology, to sociology, to law. I mean, because people have talked about issues around forgetting and memory and history in all these areas, and I believe that making us aware of some of these nuances might make us come up with more believable scenarios. And another area that I would mention just briefly would be in the health area where again, or the intelligent home assisted living and some of these areas where again, I think we too often start with a piece of technology. And thankfully now in the last few years, I think we're starting to get the message across I talk about that a little in a 2012 paper paper on, uh, in the interactions,

Geri: 01:01:16

I'll put a link to all of these on the web page. So Liam, any comments in closing?

Liam: 01:01:23

In a way, when I look back at at some of the things I've done, I think I've been very fortunate just to happen to be kind of in spaces and places where things were changing and I happened to be interested in those ages and I've had some bleeding at those edges, but actually most of the time I've actually been able to have a good view and, and to actually walk with people, really interesting people. [I've learned so interesting yeah, I've and places]. I feel so fortunate in in the colleagues I've had and in, in the journey I've had with people kind of, and I've learned so much over these years, but. At the same time, I think there's a core there, which is always that I started out with this interest and concern with people and their world, and it's still, that's still there. It's just such a richer framework and understanding I have of that now than when I started But, uh, the, and maybe some of it, in terms of any message to anybody or what they might find of interest, is that. In some of the bits and pieces I've written, actually a lot of them are kind of essays, really. They're kind of perspectives or positionings. One of my favorite words is, two of my favorite words are framing and perspectives. And that's in some of the work in design around framing. What is a problem? Problem formulation is very important to me because I think very often we start to solve a problem without knowing what the problem is. It's the wrong problem. So I think a lot of the time having a look at how you understand what it is you're doing. What is the frame you're in? Are you comfortable with it? Is it, is there, does it seem that it's actually suitable for what you're doing? So I think Some people find that at times refreshing that they've, maybe, some of the things open a little vista or open that little door into a space maybe they hadn't thought about and I'm happy if, to hear if it encourages people not to follow me in a particular path but rather to actually follow their own path. In um, In the sense of actually exploring something that maybe is not necessarily approved by your immediate superior or whatever, but that is what the road you feel you want to travel.

Geri: 01:03:54

Yep, yep.

Liam: 01:03:55

So, go do it.

Geri: 01:03:56

Go do it, yes, yep. And so, thank you. And, just in terms of influence, I was reminded then that there was a book some years ago, Where we were asked to contribute a chapter that reflected what was really influential in our work. And the paper that I wrote about was the paper that you and Kjeld wrote, in the early days of CSCW. And how that, that's been really influential in setting my own career trajectory off. So, I personally have a lot to thank you for. And just thank you for your time now

Liam: 01:04:32

And it's interesting, to try to articulate a vision because at that time we had seen some work in CSCW which seemed to rather than opening out the space, the possibilities of the technology, was starting to embed within the technology protocols for, for instance, embedding social protocols in the technology now at the group level. And so to, to me this was. anathema to the idea of what CSCW should be. And then the interest in trying to say, we're not talking, we're not starting with the technology. So we parse CSCW from right to left, not left to right. We try to understand work, cooperative work, supporting it, and then we talk about the role of technology.

Geri: 01:05:19

So this is a perfect example of your framing and perspective

Liam: 01:05:23

Yeah, thank you. I, I think we're, both Kjeld and I are, are very happy to see that the paper, although it was published initially in this obscure brand new journal. of CSCW. the journal which we actually started, um, along with some others. But, uh, it's really nice to see that people still find that, it gives a position and it articulates a position on a set of issues which people still

Geri: 01:05:51

still find relevant. Yeah. Which is also a good story about starting the new journal, new conference, new interdisciplinary research area that's was new then and just still exists and is more mainstream. And that papers can still get cited from it.

Liam: 01:06:08

Mm-Hmm. hmm. Yep.

Geri: 01:06:11

So Liam, thank you and wishing you all the very best. You can find the summary notes, a transcript, and related links for this podcast on www. changingacademiclife. com. You can also subscribe to Changing Academic Life on iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, and Google Podcasts. And you can follow ChangeAcadLife on Twitter. And I'm really hoping that we can widen the conversation about how we can do academia differently. And you can contribute to this by rating the podcast and also giving feedback. And if something connected with you, please consider sharing this podcast with your colleagues together. We can make change happen.