Granularity in Reciprocity

Individuals are discovering beneficial ways to use technology, incorporating technology into their lives in many different ways. People are continually shaping their presence in merging realities and finding new ways to establish trust between each other. New social structures are emerging, and per- sonal lives, organizations and business are adapting.

Accepting the hypothesis that human beings are increasing their participation in ‘communities of systems and people’, the question that guides ongoing research is ‘How should systems be designed for human beings to be willing to accept them?’ (Brazier and van der Veer 2009). This paper, based on the open exploratory study ‘Witnessed Presence and Systems Engineering’, focuses on how people integrate technology in their day-to-day lives. Twenty interviews with professionals in different domains shed light on the process of adaptation to technology- mediated network environments from the perspective of the individual human being who performs his/her presence and establishes trust or not. First focus in the interviews was Witnessed Presence, a phenomenon that is fundamental to social structures. It functions as a catalyst for presence and for trust (Nevejan 2009). Secondly, the focus was YUTPA framework and its 4 dimensions of Time, Place, Action and Relation through which presence and trust configurations emerge, and this inspired the interviews (Nevejan 2007). As a result, new light is shed on the design of presence and on the design of trust in the current emerging network society.
Section 2 addresses methodology. Section 3 presents
theoretical concepts that guide the research: the YUTPA framework and Witnessed Presence. Section 4 focuses on witnessing. Section 5 identifies factors related to the four Yutpa dimensions. Section 6 discusses results and sug- gestions for future research.

The qualitative exploratory study ‘Witnessed Presence and Systems Engineering’ presented in this paper approaches networked reality from a ‘design as research’ perspective (Lunenfeld 2003), to understand how people integrate information and communication technologies in their day- to-day practices and the implications of the use of these technologies in their personal lives.

The qualitative exploratory study ‘Witnessed Presence and Systems Engineering’ presented in this paper approaches networked reality from a ‘design as research’ perspective (Lunenfeld 2003), to understand how people integrate information and communication technologies in their day- to-day practices and the implications of the use of these technologies in their personal lives.
In the context of ‘Witnessed Presence and Systems Engineering’, 20 in-depth interviews explore how professionals from business, art, design, engineering, journalism, theatre, social science analyse changes in their practice and in everyday life around them. The interviews were held between November 2008 and April 2010. Eleven interviews were conducted with experts in India (8 in Bangalore and 3 in New Delhi), and ten interviews were conducted with experts in Europe (3 in London, 5 in Amsterdam and 1 interview was conducted with an expert from Barcelona). All of the experts have professional careers that are affected by the introduction of technology; their age is in the range of 35–75. The choice of experts is based on diversity of profession, field of expertise, cultural background and their conceptual eloquence.
In the in-depth interviews, the concept of witnessing and presence is explored. Each of the 4 dimensions of the YUTPA framework, Time, Place Action and Relation, is addressed in relation to trust in today’s global networked society. The interviews focus on how communication and practice differ ‘with the use of technology’ and ‘without the use of technology’. All interviews are filmed, to trace the lines of reasoning and emergence of new concepts. In the ‘thinking interviews’, the notions of Witnessed Presence and Trust are the main focus. Principal investigator (Caroline Nevejan) and experts engage in a shared endeavour to question perceptions, to better understand and articulate the phenomena inherent to technology enriched personal communication.
Taking full responsibility for the developing conversation, these interviews can be read as testimonies in which experts bear witness to current ICT’s impact on their lives and practices. Experiences, understanding and imagination are explored. As the principal investigator is ‘host’ to experts’ testimonies, the influence of the principal investigator is significant. The constructive process of ‘thinking interviews’ is the basis for the formulation of a new body of knowledge. In this paper, the experts’ contributions are presented in one narrative. No literal citations are provided, but instead, references are made to specific interviews. Transcriptions of all of the interviews, including film fragments, can be accessed at http://www.tmb.systemsdesign.tudelft.nl/witness.

The transcendence of time and place has been a human drive for centuries. Inventions of script, printing, film, radio, television and now the Internet all facilitate the mediation of human presence to other places and other times. These media offer limited perception of the mediated thinking, sounds or visuals. However, when limited sensorial perception is understood in the context of previous experience, human beings have the capacity to con- struct a sense of presence of the mediated objects and subjects (Tokoro and Steels 2003). While accepting mediated presence as real, human beings learn to assess the variety of mediated presences in their own right. Mediated presence is a trade-off between perception and understanding of the perceived (IJsselsteijn 2004).

Human audiences, for example, have learnt that in a theatre, the train on a screen will not hit the first row, even though it seems to come right at them. During a telephone call, people know that the person at the other end of the line is real even though they only perceive sound without additional visual proof. Since the 1990s, the Internet has expanded exponentially and currently social networks facilitate 24/7 connections with family, friends, colleagues and with new contacts. Through steep collaborative learning curves, groups of people assess new possibilities and make trade-off as to how to accept these new contacts/ presences in their communication patterns. Making trade- offs is not only an individual process, it is also a communal process (IJsselsteijn ibid). Once new technologies are accepted in their own right, they become part of human organizational and business practices. Online transactions have become a multibillion-dollar business within a dec- ade. The speed and scale of the Internet not only changes time and place configurations when mediating presence, but it also offers new possibilities to relate to others and new possibilities to act.

Natural presence and mediated presence are the result of trade-offs that individual human beings make. Making trade-offs is a collaborative learning process defined by an interaction between cultures and technologies available (IJsselsteijn 2004).

From a neurobiological and evolution- ary perspective, presence is essentially the strive for well- being and survival (Riva et al. 2004). To have presence means to have the ability to steer towards one’s own well- being and survival. Human beings steer away from pain, from hostility or from danger. Sensations, emotions and feelings are distinct in the performance of presence, and they indicate directions for well-being and survival. Steering towards one’s own well-being and survival is the ultimate basis of ethics (Damasio 2004). High trust is much more beneficial for personal lives and organizations than low trust (Fukuyama 1995; Kleiner 2002). Specific con- figurations of presence design support the strive for well- being and survival, while others do not.

In this paper, social structures are described as specific configurations of presence design through which potential trust emerges. Traditionally social structures are based on sharing a unity of time, place and action with others. Today new configurations of this unity are accepted as real communication by millions of people around the globe. The YUTPA framework depicts these new configurations.

The YUTPA framework takes 4 dimensions into account, not only time and place but also the possibility to act and the way human beings relate to each other. These 4 dimensions define how people make trade-offs and perform presence themselves to establish trust in the current network society. YUTPA is the acronym for ‘being with You in Unity of Time, Place and Action’. When any one of the 4 dimensions decreases through the use of technology, human beings adapt by filling the gap by processes of attribution and by focusing on intensity in other dimensions. In the trade-off between the 4 dimensions, not only presence is shaped, but also the conditions for potential trust are created. Different presence configurations offer different possibilities for trust to emerge (Nevejan 2009) (Fig. 1).

Seeking well-being and survival, human beings in technological environments are ‘thinking actors’: they adapt to their changing environment. Through processes of trial and error in a continuous confrontation between intention and realization, people integrate technology in day-to-day practices, implicitly or explicitly determining trust trade-offs.

As ‘thinking actors’, human beings may not be aware of the configurations in which they partake; yet, by participating, human beings help to produce and support values systems embody (Nevejan 2007). From a design perspective, it is possible to analyse and design specific values in specific contexts (Lunenfeld 2003). From the perspective of value-sensitive design, any system communicates specific values anyway (van der Hoven
2005). Networking, network, networked and network- making power affect social structures because thousands or millions of people participate; yet, few people realize the power structures they are part of (Castells 2009). The YUTPA framework sheds light on how human agency in the new space and time configurations of the network society is constructed (Giddens 1984).

Recognizing each other’s spatiotemporal trajectories seems to be a requirement for the emergence of shared concepts and language (Kuhn 2000). In the enactment of being, in the performance of presence, other beings and social structures are essential. Both in natural presence and in mediated presence, Witnessed Presence is a catalyst.

An action that is witnessed becomes a deed. A witness has the potential to interfere with a situation to which she is a witness by acting upon this situation and/or by giving testimony about what happened in the situation. Both being witness and bearing witness include the possibility to influence what happens next. A witness accepts responsibility for what she witnesses. Witnessing is key in the design of presence and is key to the design of trust (Nevejan 2009). The capacity to be a witness and bear witness to other beings is the essence of humanness (Oliver 2001). Technology challenges the way people are witness to each other; it challenges both presence and trust designs to the core because scale and speed of communication and transactions is beyond what was ever possible before. Ongoing research into ‘communities of systems and people’ shows that witnessing is a fundamental dynamic in communities of practice (Nevejan and Brazier 2010).
This paper explores how people are witness to each other when using technology and make trade-offs in the presences they perform (and accept presences of others) to decide the trust they engage with. Results show that granularity of reciprocity in specific configurations of the dimensions benefits potential trust to build.

Where before place was often the beholder of trust, in online communication, time has become the first beholder of trust (interview Hazra 2008). Trust evolves from timing transactions online, whether one is downloading a patch of software, posting on a mailing list or commenting on Facebook (interview Abraham 2008). Online- and systems reality challenges human experience of time. Communi- cating and collaborating in merging realities needs specific time designs to be satisfactory.

In the establishment of facts and the construction of factual truth, date and time are crucial indicators for connecting evidence with witness reports (interview MacFaydyen 2009). Current concepts of date and time are dependent and tied to place. In this sense, facts are time and place dependent while the experience of the 24/7 information economy seems to offer ‘no place and no time’ as virtue.

When people do not share place and the specific nature- and clock time in that place, a deliberate time design is necessary. In international business, for example, sustain- able social online interaction depends upon such time design. When communicating online, people have to inte- grate their rhythms to each other within the larger organi- zation in which they participate. Work processes are orchestrated in rhythms, and shared rhythm is vital for success. Creation of shared rhythm in online collaboration requires knowing when to meet between time zones, with which medium, for which purpose and for which task. There is no coffee machine where synchronization can take place. The experts interviewed in this study agree that there are specific moments when people need to meet in person to establish trust and truth. Expectation and anticipation are both in on- and offline communications defined by the kind of relationship involved (interview Wilson 2008).

It is crucial to adapt local sense of time to a shared sense of time with clients and collaborators abroad. Regularly, one person is about to go to bed while the other person just woke up; yet, one has to synchronize performance. In the outsourcing industry in India, this has led to completely new social infrastructures where, for example, young women travel by night, restaurants stay open, and family structures adapt (interview Ilavarasan 2008).

When working in the IT industry, unlike many other industries, performance and quality of work can be assessed online. As a side effect, especially in the Global Service Delivery model in India’s outsourcing industry (where due to lack of trust between business partners employee’s work is logged and monitored 24 h a day), duration of engagement has become a design issue in itself. Human beings do not appreciate being monitored 24 h a day; it causes stress and ruptures in identity formation (interview Ilavarasan 2008). People need time off; engagement needs a start and an end for it to be beneficial. The 24/7 economy is detrimental for human beings. Systems can be active 24/7; they do not get tired nor get bored as do human beings. Human beings need moments to celebrate, moments of catharsis, moments in which failure or success is shared (interview Narayanan 2008). Failure is fundamental to human growth and takes time to be integrated in a human life, while technology will just treat failure as malfunctioning (interview Narayanan 2008). Human beings need to construct meaning and share this process at distinct moments in time. Systems do not need such moments of catharsis.

When designing time in processes in which systems and people collaborate, differences in scale, organization and experience of time between systems and people have to be taken into account. Duration of engagement, integrating rhythm, synchronizing performance and making moments to signify, are fundamental dynamics from which reciprocity emerges.

Notions of embodied knowledge and authenticity are challenged. System participation has opened up a new range of possibilities to act and to be witness to each other. Configurations of time, place, action and specific relations in which people engage, define whether and how people trust each other and the structures and systems they are part of. Witnessing is specific to the witness. Dialogue and transaction are fundamental to Witnessed Presence. Reciprocity and granularity in each dimension and between dimensions contribute to building trust.

Further research will study how trade-offs for presence and trust in specific configurations are established. Given the outcome of this study that being witness and bearing witness has acquired new dynamics, future research will explore whether and how specific actions in specific relations require specific time and a specific place design, reciprocity and/or granularity.

Secondly, further research explores how the identified dynamics for trust contribute to values of systems design: autonomy, transparency, identify-ability and trace-ability. These values, identified in an interdisciplinary study between Law and Computer Science, focus on human agency in relation to intelligent distributed systems (Brazier et al. 2004).

Future research will focus on the dialogue of the inner witness of human beings and their mental models. Currently, 12 artists are making work to answer the question ‘What happens when one witnesses another?’ The effect of dramatization and imagination as part of the human being’s survival kit, and their effect on trade-offs, is being explored.