The Massive Task of Haptics and Empathy

In my field of information and library science, scholars like Tefko Saracevic have summed the past decades of information explosion into three ideas: information retrieval, relevance, and interaction. It is in this last idea, interaction, where some of the most fascinating problems -- and solutions -- are being addressed by a ruggedly interdisciplinary crowd: Humanists, artists, scholars, advocates, academics, innovators, entrepreneurs, scientists, technologists, librarians, teachers, artists.

Some examples: Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor launched her own digital game to promote civics learning in schools; librarians use Second Life to reach out to prison inmates; rural students in India use mobile phones to learn English; and composers are writing for musicians whose instruments are laptops and Wii remotes.

This is by no means an exhaustive list, but each example captures the exploratory, experimental, innovative, and maybe even inevitable development of human-information interactions. We are not just clicking buttons and trying to, as Vannevar Bush wrote over 50 years ago, tackle the "massive task of making more accessible a bewildering store of knowledge." Our rugged interdisciplinarians are pulling on that information and figuring out how to literally touch it, use it, share it, and add new information to the universe of knowledge from people who don't often contribute to the record.

Holly Willis of Mobile Voices, a winner of the 2009 HASTAC/MacArthur Foundation Digital Media & Learning competition, spoke about this in her Ideas for Thought presentation at the Symposium for the Future: Tactics and Haptics for a Future That's Now. First of all, I'm just loving the word "haptics," which is described here as the "ability to experience the environment through active exploration." Holly, in discussing a vision deficit among youth, suggests "maybe it's better to think less about a vision of the future and to think about a haptics -- something embodied, performed, enacted and brought into being through use."

Mobile Voices, as Holly describes, "is a participatory storytelling platform based on mobile phones that lets users take pictures and record audio with their phone, tag these with descriptions, and send them to a Web site (http://vozmob.net/). The users of Mobile Voices are low wage immigrant workers who are part of the Institute of Popular Education of Southern California (IDEPSCA), a nonprofit organization serving low-income Latino immigrants...Using the often overlooked multimedia messaging service on most phones, even inexpensive ones, participants upload images and voice-over commentary, creating their own news, poetry, and critical analysis."

Another 2009 winner, Eric Gordon of Participatory Chinatown, takes a different but related approach to human-information interaction in his blog post Creating Empathy Through Role Play. I mean no disrespect to the forefathers (foremothers?) of academic lingo, but "human-information interaction" does not do justice to the idea of empathy as a pivotal part of any kind of information process. Participatory Chinatown uses virtual worlds to help citizens engage in "augmented deliberation," to help them better understand the urban planning process.

In his post, Eric describes a simple premise, "We want people who come to a community meeting to have the experience of Chinatown as someone other than themselves so that they might  be better able to make good decisions about the neighborhood. By getting people out from behind their own concerns (if only for a few minutes), we hope to create the kind of empathy and civic mindedness that is ideal for providing valuable input into a planning process and also for developing trust amongst stakeholders."

I'm still exploring this idea of haptics, but it seems that Eric's project is doing precisely what Holly suggests, "something embodied, performed, enacted and brought into being through use." Most, if not all, Digital Media & Learning winners are doing something "haptic," so that, yes, they are "making more accessible a bewildering store of knowledge," but they are making it deeply personal to groups that have historically received the short rope when it comes to any kind of access. I know there is a furious pace of innovation taking place on the playing field, but I can't help but wonder if the underserved, techno-quiet groups will be the ones to teach us the most human, interactive lessons of all.