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Future Design Mindful ofthe MoRAS

George W. FurnasUniversity of Michigan

ABSTRACT

As human–computer interaction (HCI) expands its scope, the proper contextfor the design of information technology (IT) is increasingly an interconnectedmosaic of responsive adaptive systems (MoRAS) including people’s heads, or-ganizations, communities, markets, and cultures. The introduction of IT notonly perturbs the individual systems but also critically changes the couplingstructure of the whole mosaic that comprises them. These various systems re-spond and adapt to these changes, in effect undertaking their own sort of “de-sign” efforts, sometimes at odds with explicit intentions. The need tounderstand the role of all these different systems in the outcome explains whyIT design has become an increasingly interdisciplinary effort. It is likely thatour designs will be more successful if we become more mindful of this biggerpicture. This article discusses the motivations for the MoRAS perspective;briefly sketches the MoRAS itself; and presents some tales that illustrate its dy-namics, the role of IT within it, and the implications for the future trajectory ofHCI. The article concludes with design implications and an agenda for further-ing the framework.

HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION, 2000, Volume 15, pp. 205–261Copyright © 2000, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

George Furnas is cognitive psychologist and computer scientist with an inter-est in information access, information visualization, graphical computing, andcollaborative filtering; he is a professor in the School of Information at the Uni-versity of Michigan.

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CONTENTS

1. INTRODUCTION: ++HUMAN–COMPUTER INTERACTION ANDTHE MOSAIC OF RESPONSIVE ADAPTIVE SYSTEMS

2. MIRAGES OF IMMINENT DEMISE3. SKETCH OF THE MoRAS FRAMEWORK

3.1. Parts of the MoRAS3.2. Coupling in the MoRAS3.3. Outline of a Theory for the MoRAS

DesignValueTechnologyInformationThe Role of ITA Note on ++HCI and Adaptation in MoRAS

4. USING THE MoRAS FRAMEWORK4.1. MoRAS and the SI Curriculum

MoRAS Motivation 1: Search Is More Than the One-Shot QueryMoRAS Motivation 2: Exploiting Analogies for Design

4.2. Needs Versus WantsA First LookA Second LookPossible Solutions and the Role of ++HCI-Guided IT

5. THE MoRAS AND ++HCI DESIGN5.1. Summarizing Where We Have Been5.2. Design Recommendations

Sample MoRAS Design PrinciplesMoRAS Design Questions

5.3. Design ExampleChoosing a Design FocusAnalysisDesign Goals and Ideas

5.4. Discussion of the Design Example6. DISCUSSION

6.1. Agenda for the FutureResearch AgendaEducational AgendaDesign Agenda

6.2. Caveats6.3. Concluding Remarks

1. INTRODUCTION: ++HUMAN–COMPUTERINTERACTION AND THE MOSAIC OF RESPONSIVEADAPTIVE SYSTEMS

The field of human–computer interaction (HCI) is on a trajectory of triplyexpanding scope. Each component of the name is taking on increased span. Ina trend well anticipated by Grudin (1990), the scope of concern is advancingwell beyond the individual human user to the workgroup, the organization,markets, and society. Similarly, in more personal spheres, concern has movedto design for better impact on nuclear and extended families, neighborhoods,and communities. Meanwhile, the scope of the computer has expanded aswell. No longer just boxes on our desktops, they have become communicationintense, information rich, and increasingly ubiquitous and embedded, ex-panding into a broader, more seamless web of information technology (IT)and systems. Finally, what began as a human interaction with a computer nowincludes organizations participating in electronic markets, families confront-ing the World Wide Web, and individuals interacting with others via compu-tational and communication media. We are not interacting with thetechnology, so much as interacting with information, tasks, and other peoplevia the technology, carrying on activities made possible by those technologies.In a sense, then, the successor to HCI as we have known it—let us call it++HCI—is made up of ++H, ++C and ++I.1

How can we address the expanded horizon of ++HCI concern in an effec-tive way? Guidance comes from the familiar territory of traditional work inHCI. There it is fundamental that designers must be mindful of more than thecomputer system: They must understand the human system as well, and theways of coupling these two systems (via display and interaction design) into alarger joint one that will succeed as a coherent whole.

Efforts in ++HCI requires similar attention. For example, Landauer (1995)noted that despite more than 1 trillion dollars spent on IT in the past 4 decades,there was for many years considerable difficulty realizing a net effect on pro-ductivity in white-collar jobs. He argued persuasively that in pursuing IT, in-dustry had been too mindless about the broader scope of the technology,asking neither the traditional HCI question of whether the technology was infact useable and useful for individual users nor the larger ++HCI question ofwhether it benefitted the workgroups and organizations that embedded them.

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1. The “++” operator in the Bell Labs family of languages (C, C++, AWK, etc.)indicates the successor function. In prefix form it means that the value of the vari-able should be incremented before being interpreted in the current context. Thus,by analogy, ++HCI is meant to refer to “the successor of HCI.”

It was a neglect of an elementary principle of control theory: If you care aboutsomething, pay attention to it and adjust accordingly.

The hypothesis, then, is that we need to be more explicitly mindful of thelarger scope we care about—a broader sense of human spheres of interest, abroader conception of computation and IT, and a broader view ofinteractivities. Attempts to be mindful of this larger scope are already manifestin the interdisciplinary habit of leading HCI research. Once the barely heededtask of programmers, it has become the work of computer scientists, psycholo-gists, sociologists, information scientists, anthropologists, information econo-mists, and organizational theorists, among others. This rich, interdisciplinaryflavor became the pattern at Apple–ATG, Bell Labs, Bellcore, CarnegieMellon, EURISCO, EuroPARC, Georgia Tech, GMD–IPSI,Hewlett-Packard, IPO, MIT, Michigan, and Xerox PARC, to name just a few.

This article presents a framework to support the interdisciplinary effort todesign IT in the larger scopes of human concern. The framework views theworld relevant to ++HCI design as being composed of a whole set of systems,ranging from parts of the human mind to workgroups, communities, markets,and societies. The dominant considerations that shape the structure and dy-namics of this set of systems arise by noting that they individually respond totheir environments and adapt to remain viable over time. Further, they arecoupled with one another in a kind of multiscale mosaic, influencing eachother in a variety of ways. Information is at the essence of coupling, and assuch, IT is altering the coupling structure of this system of systems, with eachresponding and adapting in turn. It is argued that this view, construing theworld relevant to ++HCI as a coupled mosaic of responsive adaptive systems(MoRAS), can help us articulate and understand the proper context for the de-sign of IT in ways that will bring greater value to these human systems. Inshort, to do better ++HCI, we must be more mindful of the MoRAS.

The framework is similar in spirit to the approach of Rasmussen, Pejtersen,and Goodstein (1994), who described an HCI design methodology that con-siders multiple dynamic systems and the role of effective couplings. Harris andHenderson’s (1999) recent article is also similar in spirit. These authors em-phasized the adaptive character of organizations in adopting computer tech-nology and how intentional design (ID) can be more supportive of theseadaptive organizational processes. Here, though, we push for an even largerset of coupled adaptive systems as relevant in design, embracing a scope closerto that of Miller’s (1978) grand monograph on Living Systems.

Overview of This Article. Section 2 provides a more concrete motiva-tion for the MoRAS perspective. It uses two famous HCI mirages: thepaperless office and travel-free remote collaboration. Both of these expen-sive mispredictions will be cast as not appropriately considering the

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MoRAS. Following from these two examples, Section 3 then lays out asketch of the parts and dynamics of the MoRAS, particularly as they relateto IT and human needs.

Section 4 uses two examples to suggest the practical value of the frame-work. It begins with the utility of the framework for shaping education of pro-fessionals in ++HCI, an example drawn from curriculum design at the Schoolof Information (SI) at the University of Michigan. It includes an illustration ofwhere analogies at different levels of the MoRAS lead to concrete design sug-gestions for information systems. The second example shows the ability of theMoRAS perspective to frame new important problems of relevance to++HCI, problems that involve many different systems at once. It concerns abroad class of problems with deep IT implications where different parts of theMoRAS, including evolution, science and technology, and the marketplace,are currently at odds.

Section 5 lays out design implications of the MoRAS framework, beginningwith a summary of the relevant arguments of the article up to that point. Thedesign implications are then amplified by sample design principles and a se-ries of MoRAS design questions for focus, analysis, and goal setting. The use ofthese are illustrated in a concrete design example.

Section 6 begins with a multipart agenda for the future development of thisperspective, specifically for education, research, and design practice. It fin-ishes with several important caveats about the MoRAS enterprise and briefconcluding remarks.

2. MIRAGES OF IMMINENT DEMISE

The rise of the information age has brought with it various mirages of thetransformation of work life by computer technology. One particularlylong-standing myth was the predicted demise of paper and the rise of thepaperless office (Bush, 1945; Licklider, 1965; see Landauer, 1995, p. 354).Certainly by the 1960s, it was commonly predicted that electronic representa-tions of information would soon make paper obsolete. This myth had signifi-cant economic consequences—at least one major paper company (Meade)made major investment decisions (buying the electronic information service,Lexis/Nexis) to hedge its bets, a decision they later reversed as the paper in-dustry thrived and the data service proved more complex than anticipated.

The mirage resulted from a simplistic understanding of the role of paper inthe mosaic of human systems. The primary purpose of paper was to recordand present information. Because computers could also record and present in-formation, and were in many ways more versatile, clearly paper was immi-nently obsolescent.


There was much more going on with paper than was first evident, how-ever—a strong testimonial to the multiple systems operating in the MoRAS.The adaptation processes of each of the systems, in fact, amount to a kind ofgeneralized design (GD) process. Like the processes of human ID2 we usuallyconsider, these other processes help create regularities and structure in theworld in service of the viability of the systems involved. In fact, any system thathas remained viable for any extended period of time has had to adapt to thechanging challenges and opportunities of its environment, in effect designingitself in real time as it goes along.

Effective design processes, from generalized ones like biological evolutionto human ID, are often opportunistic, taking the affordances of the situationand exploiting them. In this example, paper has many features, includingphysical security, indelibility, portability, uniqueness, high resolution, stabil-ity, longevity, physical examinability, and ease of annotation. All these havebeen explored and exploited by adaptation (GD) in various parts of theMoRAS. Individuals quickly learn the utility of jotting a phone number on asmall scrap of paper tucked into a pocket, the comfort of curling up in bed witha paper book, and the ease of marking revisions on paper drafts. Organiza-tional routines settled into uses of paper as process token, where group taskswere coordinated by who had what copy of which form when. They relied oninformal annotations on shared documentation to accumulate localworkgroup knowledge. Societal institutional processes similarly adapted tocapitalize on the special opportunities of paper. Thus, postal systems devel-oped the clever little paper technology of the postage stamp. The courts cameto rely on ink signatures on paper documents. The viability of various systemscame to depend to greater and lesser degrees on these opportunistic designs.

Furthermore, in a second tier of effects, other aspects of practice in theseother systems coevolved to support the primary adaptations: governmentprinting offices to produce stamps, legal form design processes with knowl-edge to create documents with blank signature lines per page, and so on. Am-plified efficiency of the original GDs, as well as embedded investment andinertia, result.

A few engineers’ ID of new electronic ways of presenting characters visu-ally was taking care of only one aspect of the paper medium, its role in only asmall number of systems, and with little regard to the second tier effects. Theexpectation that this simple electronic innovation would quickly supplant pa-per was fundamentally a naivete about the MoRAS. If paper becomes obso-lete, it will only be when most of its roles throughout the various systems have

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2. The abbreviations GD and ID are appended to references to “design” in the ar-ticle when the meaning might otherwise be ambiguous.

been otherwise accounted for. It is likely this will happen only as the respectivesystems work out alternative designs (GD). At best, in ++HCI, we can hope toidentify these systems and their uses of paper and augment their own respec-tive adaptive processes with our more mindful ID efforts.

A similar case could be made for the misprediction that telecommunicationtechnology, inparticularvideosubstitutionof face-to-facemeetings,wouldren-der airline travel unnecessary. Much more goes on in the process of face-to-facemeetings than the talking heads of televideo could capture (Olson & Olson,2000). Face-to-face meetings support the ability to see others’ reactions to thespeaker, to spawn off easy side conversations, to follow up fluidly, to have use-fully ambiguous casual encounters, to be able to see the environment the otherswork within and how it shapes their attitudes and actions, to see others in theirmore spontaneous natural modes, and to have physical influence (e.g., to com-fort or even to refrain obviously from the physical intimidation whichcopresencecouldallow). Individualbehaviors, business routines, socialbehav-iors and cultural practices all have developed around these less obvious aspectsof physical presence. Simply providing video links showing talking heads doesnot take care of these needs of other systems.

In these two examples of mirage, the claim in this article is not just thatthings are not as simple as they first appear. The claim is that things are compli-cated because there is a variety of specific systems involved, each with adap-tive mechanisms for designing (GD) to meet their respective needs. Easyvisibility to designers’ (ID) conscious thought has never been a prerequisite forthe development of all this other structure in the MoRAS—our intentional pro-cesses represent only one of the many designing (GD) components involved.The MoRAS framework helps remind us of those, often invisible, GD pro-cesses so we can work with them more effectively in our ID efforts for ++HCI.

3. SKETCH OF THE MoRAS FRAMEWORK

This section discusses some of the various systems in the MoRAS of interestto ++HCI, some of their dynamics, and issues related to how they fit together.

3.1. Parts of the MoRAS

Figure 1 presents a schematic of various representative subsystems in theMoRAS. These represent the players, the actors in the world of concern for thebetter design of IT for human needs. Some of these systems are more well de-fined than others. An individual person and some organizations (like firms)have crisp boundaries, whereas others, like communities, may not. It is usefulto keep even these looser systems in mind, as they too provide opportunitiesfor ++HCI and have dynamics that can affect other systems.


One dominant aspect of the figure is the successive layers of social aggrega-tion: person within work organization, neighborhood within community. Thisnested system of systems is essentially that presented in detail by Miller (1978)in his mammoth volume Living Systems, an excellent, if somewhat dated, over-view. Note that as presented here it is not a tree. There are multiple paths of ag-gregation, for example, focusing on personal and work sides of our lives.Although they are not indicated in Figure 1, there are critical important hori-zontal relationships: trust between individuals in a workgroup, reciprocity be-tween members of a community, competition between firms in a market, andsupply-chain relations between market subsectors (see Figure 2).

The structure of the MoRAS has other aspects useful to the ++HCI commu-nity not captured by Figure 1 but needed to tease out where IT is most criticalandwhereourunderstandinganddesign (ID)efforts aremost important.Manyof the systems in thisdiagramcomeasvariously specialized subsystemsplayingdiffering roles in the next higher aggregate system (Figure 2). There aresubcomponents of the individual human that take care of movement (muscles)or respiration (lungs) in service of the needs of the individual. Similarly, thereare departments in firms that do marketing and others that do finance and to-

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Figure 1. Some representative systems of the mosaic of responsive adaptive systems,with system–subsystem relations shown. Note that society can be subdivided inde-pendently into the market and community hierarchies, with people participating inboth.

gether with other groups serve the various needs of the comprising organiza-tion. Likewise, there are market sectors that manufacture goods and others thatprovide telecommunications services, serving the aggregate needs of society.For the purposes here it is useful to distinguish between those subtypes thathave a primary (generalized) IT focus and those that focus on other fundamen-tal concerns. The former would include the central nervous system of the hu-man body (IT “wetware”); the research and development, executive, and ITsupport groups in firms; and libraries, the media, and government in society.These subsystems focus on cognitive sorts of activities like information aggre-gation, evaluation, integration, storage, andretrieval, aswell asexploration,de-cision making, and decision implementation. Such subsystems are clearly fociof IT technology application and hence of ++HCI concern. The other sorts ofsubsystems are associated with the many other functions vital to the viability ofthe larger system, including muscles and digestive systems in the human body;purchasing, maintenance, and production units within firms; and the roads andsocial welfare departments within a society. Here, the generic roles includephysical resource accumulation, energy production, materials processing, anddistribution. These systems too have significant information infrastructure,particularly for communication, coordination, and distributed control. This ITinfrastructure in these non-IT components is what allows them, and hence thelarger system, to derive benefit from the more centralized IT and cognitive sub-


Figure 2. Sample specialization within subsystems and related nonhierarchical rela-tions in the mosaic of responsive adaptive systems.

systems. A brain is useless without a body with sensor and motor nerves; an ex-ecutive group is blind and powerless without links that couple it to the rest of thefirm. Thus, ++HCI work is needed in centralized IT subsystems; in support ofIT infrastructure in other subsystems; and, as appropriate, in coupling theseusefully to one another and to the center.

In another elaboration of Figure 1, note that many of the systems have asso-ciated with them a corresponding, larger system that is essentially that systemextended by artifacts and technology (Figure 3). Thus, a person extended by awell-designed computer system forms a human–computer system, the stan-dard focus of HCI. Workgroups are extended by technology aggregates to cre-ate group plus technology systems (e.g., the airline cockpit of Hutchins, 1995).Society is augmented by its transportation and telecommunications technol-ogy systems. Note that like human subsystems, artifacts similarly fall into thosethat are primarily aiding cognitive activities and those that are for other pur-poses, and that cognitive artifacts may be either tangible or intangible. For ex-ample, at the individual level we have the following: can opener(noncognitive) versus book (cognitive, tangible) versus concept (cognitive, in-tangible). At the societal level we have the following: power grids(noncognitive) versus telecommunications (cognitive, tangible) versus lan-guage (cognitive, intangible).

The goal of laying out all the systems, their connections, their technologicalextensions, and the loci of IT concentrations is to create a cognitive artifact tobetter enable mindful ++HCI consideration of the role of IT throughout thesphere of human concerns. As a simple example, a quick look at individualcomponents in Figure 1 shows that ++HCI efforts have had an uneven distri-bution over the MoRAS. Thus, there is considerable effort at the individuallevel (particularly on the work side) from 2 decades of attention in the tradi-tional field of HCI. Significant effort has also been expended at the level of theworkgroup (in the CSCW subcommunity). There is, however, little at the fam-ily level or community level. These are opportunities both for future researchand enterprise. Focus on supporting human activity at the geographic commu-nity level is a new research area (e.g., Carroll & Rosson, 1998; Cohill &Kavanaugh, 1999; Schuler, 1996, 1998). Similarly, there is an opportunity tofind new ways to help families coordinate, maintain awareness, communicate,and so on. There may also be opportunities for more work at the market level(e.g., supporting reputation and trust in the new e-commerce and e-auction ef-forts; see Friedman & Resnick, 1999; Kollock, 1999; Tadelis, 1999) and mar-ket sector levels.

The diagrams also suggest design opportunities by asking questions aboutpairs of components at the same or different levels. Are there benefits to begained by new real-time links between systems x and y (e.g., links between con-sumers and manufacturers for mass customization and inventory control; links

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from individual factory line workers to executive groups for quality control;links between communities and their individual children members for moni-toring health and safety)? Are there possible benefits by accumulating historyabout system w for use by z (e.g., health history of individual humans for use bythe Center for Disease Control; minority lending histories of banks for use byminority investors)?Whatare theneedsofpwithrespect toq (e.g.,Whatdoesanelder person need from a community? What does a community need from itselders?)? Can certain things computed about r be useful to s (e.g., market in-dexesareuseful to individual investors; correlations in individual consumptionare useful to marketers)? Note that these questions can be asked about not onlythe vertical links, shown in Figure 1, but also horizontal links (to structural sib-lingsandvariously remotecousins)anddiagonal links (toauntsandnephews).

3.2. Coupling in the MoRAS

The design opportunities for new links, or couplings, in the MoRAS raisethe topic of the existing couplings within and between systems in the MoRAS,important to ++HCI for several reasons. The existing couplings are responsi-ble for the rich dynamic of interactions in the MoRAS and explain why wemust pay attention to the larger picture when designing locally. Consider


Figure 3. Systems in the mosaic of responsive adaptive systems are augmented to vary-ing degrees by technology.

something as simple as the telephone feature, Caller ID, introduced in the1980s, where the phone number of the calling party is made available to the re-cipient of the call. This is a change in the structure of the information couplingbetween the caller and the called person and directly changes the way thesetwo systems can adapt to exploit the situation. For example, anonymity ismade more difficult for would-be harassing phone callers, and they adaptedby dramatically decreasing their activity (a big political selling point for thefeature at the time of its introduction). The loss of anonymity, however, alsothreatened police informant lines and disrupted other valued privacy customs.Various larger systems responded in turn. Motivated individuals hooked up tocreate special interest groups on privacy or convinced existing groups to takeon these new issues. These in turn lobbied legislatures at various levels of soci-ety, and new laws got passed requiring Caller ID blocking options. In the tech-nology sector of the market, new inventions like call screeners weredeveloped. New markets were created, making and selling those screeners.The newly available information about the caller allowed businesses tochange their internal processes. For example, service centers could pull upcustomer information instantly. Slowly, cultural expectations of caller ano-nymity changed. All these changes remind us that many of these different sys-tems are directly coupled: individual humans interact with each other or withtechnology; people take part in organizations; firms compete with each other;societies shape people.

The ripple effects, as changes and their consequences move from system tosystem, become quite complicated as the adaptive mechanisms of the othersystems along the way come into play. Tenner (1996) gave numerous such ex-amples in his discussion of “revenge effects” of technology. In particular, hisrecomplication, repeating, and recongestion effects can be construed as due toother adaptive systems in the MoRAS unexpectedly taking up slack gained byhuman intentional efforts that were aimed toward some other purpose. Effortsin ++HCI to anticipate such revenge effects would be helped by understand-ing these systems: their domains of operation and adaptive invariants theytend to converge on (the equivalents of goals that these systems pursue).

Coupling between different systems that are working together can allow theadaptive burden to be shifted around between them. Consider individualworkers and the organizational systems they work within to produce a car.They can use an assembly line, putting a heavy adaptive burden on the organi-zation (designing and structuring the roles of the line workers) with less burdenon the humans (de-skilling the workforce). Alternatively, they may use a teamapproach where there is less pressure to develop elaborate organizationalstructure, but individual humans must go through long training to acquire thenecessary, varied, and flexible skills. The choice affects the supportive use ofIT correspondingly. In the assembly line case, IT has a particular role support-

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ing the organization level, helping maintain the predesigned coordination ofactivities of the individual workers, gathering input on quality from them, andbringing problems to the attention of centralized management. In the team ap-proach, IT would respond to the just-in-time knowledge needs of the skilled la-borer; support the fluid management of more ad hoc team dynamics; andprovide cognitive artifacts to support a shared understanding of the big pictureof the project, its progress, and current needs.

Coupling within the MoRAS can also allow fast, efficient systems to bebacked up by slower, more flexible ones that handle problems and exceptions.For example, walking is typically an efficient automatic process in adult hu-mans. If we suddently find ourselves on ice, however, we respond to our initialslipping by resorting to higher attentional mechanisms, moving slowly andcautiously. When routines in organizations are disrupted by unusual cases, up-per management or consultants are brought in to deal with the problem.When fast, efficient software fails, it signals with an error message that a humanmust take some action (e.g., reboot). The fast–effective and slow–flexible sys-tems are coupled together to form a more robust, larger system. The design ofan effective handoff between these subsystems is important to their function-ing as a pair. Handoff from the lower system to the higher one would includehaving cortical attention be captured as a result of failed cerebellar events (e.g.,loss of balance leading to the pain of a skinned knee), by workers on the factoryfloor being able to bring problems to the attention of managers, or by helpfulerror messages to users. After the slower but more flexible system has finishedits work, there is often, for efficiency reasons, a handoff back down to the lowersystem. The handoff involves not just a return to the routine cases but often amore sophisticated process of altering the fast system to implement the newlyfound solution. Examples include the further training of cerebellar motor co-ordination under the careful supervision of conscious attention, the manage-rial invention and deployment of new work routines to handle the new case,and bug reports forwarded to developers thence to better next generation soft-ware. The handoffs in both directions tend to be information-intense events.The lower system has to convey important dimensions of the problem, and thehigher system later has to convey relevant aspects of the solution.

That this coupling involves information is quite common in the MoRAS.Coupling can have many roles—for example, the transfer of material or en-ergy, not just information. There is, however, an important sense in which aninformation role is always afforded by coupling. Coupling two systems meansthey can influence one another: The change of state of one changes the proba-bilities of states of the other—essentially an information event in the Shannonand Weaver sense (Shannon, 1948). This information role is exploitedthroughout the structure of the MoRAS, as systems have adapted to influenceeach other to enhance their own viability. Electronic IT allows systems to in-


fluence each other in new ways, across space and time, and via more comp-lexly computed contingencies. As a result, IT is fundamentally altering thecoupling structure of this mosaic, changing its very fabric. That is why ++HCIdesign must be particularly mindful of the MoRAS.

3.3. Outline of a Theory for the MoRAS

Understanding this system of systems that forms the real context for++HCI efforts requires knowing more than just its structure (e.g., as sketchedin Figures 1, 2, and 3) and some of the couplings. It requires knowing whatthese systems are about—what they need to be viable, how they serve eachother, and how they struggle against one another—in short, a theory of whatshapes the structure and dynamics of the MoRAS. Because the fundamentalgoal is to support the design (ID and GD) of more broadly valuable IT, anytheory must also strive to position usefully such grand concepts as design, value,information, and technology.

One candidate theory we have been exploring in doctoral seminars at theUniversity of Michigan School of Information is inspired by Dennett (1995).The theory makes a strong connection between adaptive processes (e.g., bio-logical evolution) and design. It takes as fundamental the challenge presentedby thermodynamics—battling entropy. That is, without the appropriate localexpenditure of energy to create and maintain organization, everything frommountains to cells to societies degrades, by the accumulation of small randomperturbations, to increasing randomness. Because of the basic march of en-tropy, moving the other direction, with an accumulation of design (GD), is anexceedingly nontrivial happenstance requiring a balance of preservation ofachieved structure and exploration of design space leading to improvementsin battling entropy. The very nontriviality of success in this search of designspace has profound consequences for structure and behavior that result. Inparticular, any place there is sophisticated structure (in the human body, in or-ganizations, in communities, in society), there are processes that have broughtit into being, processes that are still active and as a result playing a part in shap-ing the role of information technology. (Recall the various systems that capital-ized on paper.) The theory is not further elaborated here, except to sketch theposition of design, value, information, and technology.

Design

GeneralizedDesign is closely identifiedwith structure thatbothexhibits andsupports the escape from entropy. As in usual usage, the word design can refer toeither a process or a result: A design result is produced by a design process. Fur-thermore, design processes are themselves nontrivial and so at any point in

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time must be, recursively, one design result of earlier design processes. For ex-ample, biological evolution had to figure out (so to speak) not just the design ofour bodies, but along the way the mechanisms and processes that could pro-duce that design (called lifters and cranes by Dennett, 1995; e.g., DNA and sex-ual recombination).Organizationshavenotonly toorganize themselves,but tocome upon ways that lead to self-organization. Long histories can lead to con-siderable accumulation of sophistication. One point for ++HCI design is to un-derstand the role of IT, not just in the operation of systems in the MoRAS but intheir design and in the improvement of those design processes (including therole of IT in its own design). Improving design processes includes more thanjust the use of IT like CAD in the design of physical artifacts. It also includes theuse of IT to support subtle real-time communication in workgroups so as to en-able role negotiation and the corresponding design of group structure and pro-cess, providing infrastructure to communities for their better self-organization(read: GD). It also includes providing appropriate evaluation and feedbackmechanismswithin these systems so theycanmonitorhowtheirdesignsaredo-ing and iterate those design efforts accordingly.

Value

The concept of value is probably as essential to this discussion as it is politi-cally problematic. In a primitive form, it is implicit, if not explicit, in the coreHCI mission: We design to make computers more useful for humans, to makethe computer–human system work better; we evaluate the composite systemand iteratively redesign until the result is satisfactory. All these emphasizedterms rely on some notion of value. In the larger spheres of the MoRAS, at thelevel of firms, communities, or society, we are also concerned in ++HCI withmaking IT serve human needs in more valuable ways.

As a first approximation, the theory grounds the concept of value in contri-bution to the viability of a system (again, essentially how much it helps in thebattle against entropy). That is, adaptive systems will tend to act as if they valueviability. (More correctly, systems that act as if they value their viability aremore likely to be viable, and hence be disproportionately represented as timeprogresses.)

This definition of value, although simple, should not be understood simplis-tically. Note the definition given here is system dependent—a system valueswhat helps its own viability. Competing systems, therefore, may have values atodds with one another, if their paths to viability conflict. Another wrinkle isthat aggregate systems must have their viability linked to the participating sub-systems, and this may be imperfectly achieved. (A major challenge of manage-ment is designing incentive plans to link corporate needs to those ofindividuals.) Furthermore, the foundation set by escape from entropy can un-


fold in subtle ways, much the way the fundamental goal of checkmate in chessdictates in complex and nonobvious ways the shape of openings andmidgames. Thus, for example, self-interested agents can come to value things,like altruism, that are less obviously self-interested than one might have ex-pected (e.g., Axelrod & Hamilton, 1981; Bergstrom & Stark, 1993).

These complexities bring us to politics—as people debate the values theywish pursued. Many technologists want to duck such debates, and perhapsthey should. Such debates, however, are themselves part of an adaptive pro-cess. It was pointed out earlier that adaptive systems must act as if they valuethings that maintain and enhance their viability (their continued escape fromentropy), and pursue those. However, they must not only pursue the thingsthey value, they must figure out what those things are. In this way, naturaladaptive systems differ from what an engineer might call an optimizing sys-tem: Natural adaptive systems must figure out what to optimize, as well as howto optimize it (see, e.g., Ackley & Littman, 1991). Political debates are a mecha-nism at the societal level to explore what to value in the pursuit of viability.

Technology

The term technology is used in this article quite broadly. It includes the famil-iar physical artifacts of human ID, like bricks, cars, communication networksand computers but also includes both physical and nonphysical products ofother adaptive systems: biological technologies of bones, arteries, and nerves;the societal technologies of language, laws, and governments. What unifies allthese is that each is a reasonably well developed design fragment, effective inserving the values of the designing system, and available for broad use by thatsystem. Thus, when ++HCI efforts develop human-centered informationtechnologies, they are trying to create reusable design fragments in the sphereof information activities, fragments that are well developed and effective forhuman needs.

Information

Many volumes have been written in the last half century trying make senseof the term information (e.g., see Machlup, 1983, for a review). Here I merelymake a few comments to suggest how it might fit into a framework for design.

Information is related to the designed couplings within or between systems.By this conception, information always involves design and technology (in thebroad senses describe previously). Specifically, it involves technology de-signed to allow a system to have events in one place or time to have influenceat another. The form of the information is related to the mechanics of that cou-pling. The content or meaning of the information is directly related to its role in

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the larger design—the context of purposes (the value, ultimately derived fromviability). The meaning of a bugle call came from the fact that it was designedto coordinate the attack of a dispersed set of troops on the decision of a general.The meaning of an advertisement is related to its intended effect on the desiresof its audience. (Note that different systems may use the same coupling in dif-ferent designs, and hence different meanings—a soldier might use the buglecall to decide it is time to defect.)

The Role of IT

Such general characterizations of design, value, technology, and infor-mation seem to hold in a sensible and instructive way in many of the adap-tive systems in the MoRAS. Each system would have necessarily engagedin its own sort of GD processes or, in the struggle against entropy, it wouldnever have been able to come to its current level of robust complexity. Indoing so, it sets up many couplings using generalized IT to sustain and in-crease its viability.

Generalized IT plays many roles in the MoRAS. One, based on its commu-nication capabilities, is to act as harbinger of relevant developments that areremote in space or time. This role is played in many of the systems: Nerves tellthe brain about injury in the extremities; word-of-mouth rumors inpretechnological societies warn of coming invaders; and, of course, in modernmedia, televised news forewarns of distant spreading crises of insurrection,disease, or flooding. As harbinger, IT allows anticipatory responses, such aspreparing for the coming threats.

Another communication role of IT is information collection, bringing frag-mented and noisy information together so a more reliable picture can be cre-ated. The brain constructs its model of reality drawing information from manysensory sources. Insurance companies collect actuarial data from their manyclaims agents. Intimately related to information collection is a role for thecomputational capability of IT: its ability to support complex integration ofcollected information. The central nervous system constructs its model of theworld by a complex set of integrating calculations from its diverse inputs.

Another role of IT is for the coordination of action. Thus, the brain pro-duces coordinated physical action by the central computation of motor pro-grams followed by timed communication of signals, with some distributedganglia and feedback loops keeping muscular movement in control.

These general roles of IT, including harbinger, collection, coordination, aswell as integration, evaluation, and decision (among others), if broadly under-stood can provide both a broader understanding of couplings in the MoRASand of possible roles for electronic IT under the guidance of ++HCI design.


A Note on ++HCI and Adaptation in MoRAS

This article argues that GD (both the activity and the result) pervades theMoRAS. Each of these systems has associated design processes arising from itsadaptive mechanisms that have created often remarkable designs. Biologicalevolution helped shape the infrastructure of human cognition. Marketsequilibrate to find efficient resource distribution designs and foster innova-tion. Organizations diffusely design their daily operating routines. From thisstandpoint, human cognitive intentional effort is responsible for only a part ofthe design in the mosaic. On one hand, this means that, as illustrated with themirages of demise, there is much design there of which we are not easily con-scious. On the other hand, we may be able to better understand how to lever-age those other design processes (e.g., when to let the market settle this one,when to let organizational processes work out the details of that one, etc.).Without having to understand everything, we might learn how and when tohand off the design burden to different parts of the MoRAS.

4. USING THE MoRAS FRAMEWORK

With this basic introduction to the MoRAS in place, consider now twomore extensive examples of how the MoRAS framework can be useful for++HCI.

4.1. MoRAS and the SI Curriculum

The MoRAS perspective has helped shape teaching at the University ofMichigan School of Information. Amy Warner and I co-teach a required mas-ter’s-level course called Search and Retrieval. In part of that course we covervarious aspects of information retrieval (IR) as it has been developed in the li-brary and information science communities (information organization, index-ing, search engines). We also cover a broad variety of other topics includinghuman memory search, human visual search, organizational memory storageand retrieval, collaborative filtering, multiagent cooperative information gath-ering, advanced interfaces for information access, and problem space search.This broad variety has two MoRAS motivations.

MoRAS Motivation 1: Search Is More Than the One-Shot Query

First, in real life, much search and retrieval, even of the classical IR sort, ac-tually involves large portions of MoRAS. It follows that to improve search,there is a much broader set of opportunities for design than one might other-wise think. Trying to help human information gathering only by improving

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the query engine, a principal topic of IR in the1960s through 1980s, is tremen-dously myopic. Submitting a query is only a small part of the human informa-tion gathering activity for which we need to design. The systems of Figures 1through 3 can serve as a kind of checklist for thinking about the proper scopeof the problem.

To start with, the human brain is involved. Query execution by the systemis preceded by a memory search for keywords and then a problem spacesearch through the set of possible Boolean query structures combining thosewords. The query execution is followed by visual scanning of the return set. Ata larger temporal granularity are the extended and adapting individual searchactivities of which the query is a part (e.g., Bates, 1989; Belkin, Oddy, &Brooks, 1982). At a higher level of social aggregation, there is the organiza-tional information gap and corresponding organizational memory processesthat often define and scope the individual’s search. There are social networksto be leveraged for finding things. At the market level there are abstracting andindexing services, and software companies designing search tools and infor-mation-gathering environments. At the societal level are whole cultural insti-tutions, like libraries and archives, to facilitate the saving, finding, andgathering of information.

The implication is that appropriate design of IT in support of search and re-trieval should be mindful of all these many components of the MoRAS. First,students must be reminded that all these pieces are relevant parts of the pic-ture. Then they must learn a bit about how the individual pieces work and howthey work together. One integrating principle is why IR is valuable through-out the MoRAS—basically, increasing the viability of any system (a person, aworkgroup, a firm, a society) by making information created in one contextavailable to another remote in time. IT can help couple these contexts in newand better ways, with a general ++HCI strategy of strengthening couplingsthat make a web of processes work better.

At the level of the individual brain, for example, the semantic and lexicalmemory search for query terms can be supported by aids that suggest relatedterms or allow users to browse through thesaurus structures (Wallace et al.,1998), or by latent semantic indexing (Deerwester, Dumais, Furnas, Landauer,& Harshman, 1988) or adaptive indexing (Furnas, 1985). The search throughthe design space of Booleans appropriate for the query can be aided by structur-ing interaction, for example, with form filling for faceted retrieval (e.g., Hearst,1995). The visual search through return sets can be improved by using variousvisual “pop-out” features (Treisman & Gormican, 1988) to speed finding rele-vant parts of the return set information (e.g., highlighting keywords in the origi-nal texts, done, e.g., in the Superbook system; Egan, Remde, Landauer,Lochbaum, & Gomez, 1989). These examples support human cognition by ap-propriately tightening the coupling between the user and the computer artifact


to create a more coherent larger cognitive entity (cf. Hutchins, 1995)—a generalgoal of HCI.

The second cognitive processes are integrated, as the whole individual en-gages in ongoing activities of berry picking, foraging, and sensemaking. Theseactivities can be similarly supported with IT (e.g., Bates, 1989; Pirolli & Card,1995; Russell, Stefik, Pirolli, & Card, 1993).

At the level of the workgroup, there is a growing literature on cooperativeinformation gathering (Karamuftuoglu, 1998; Oates, Prasad, & Lesser, 1997;Prasad, Lesser, & Lander, 1998). At the organizational level, there has beenmore than a decade of increasing interest in organizational memory and itstechnological support (Ackerman & Halverson, 2000; Stein & Zwass, 1995;Walsh & Ungson, 1991). At several social levels, there is collaborative filtering(Resnick & Varian, 1997) to better link people who know things to those whodo not.

Various businesses are competing at the market level to provide search ser-vices to particular content or search engine software for use by others. Variousdigital library initiatives and international metadata standards and related pro-tocols (e.g., Z39.50, XML, Dublin Core), for example, are at the societal level.All of these could use stronger ++HCI focus, paying attention to the humanneeds, not just the technological ones.

MoRAS Motivation 2: Exploiting Analogies for Design

The second motivation for the broad variety in the Search and Retrievalfoundations course derives from the instructive analogies between search inthe different parts of the MoRAS. To be viable, each of the systems in Figure 1must respond and adapt to external events in ways that are in some sense ap-proximately appropriate to their environments. As a result, there are oftenstriking similarities between them.3 For example, each must be able to “sense”its external environment, “remember” the past and bring it to bear usefully onthe present, make reasonable decisions, and implement those decisions effec-tively in its environment. These similarities can provide inspirational analo-gies for cross-disciplinary dialog leading to deeper understanding andconcrete design (e.g., as distributed artificial intelligence research looks to so-ciology).

For example, in the course we draw the analogy between an old occurrencein biological evolution and a current one in the marketplace of search engines.In nature there was a presumed coevolution of the visual pop-out effect of red

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3. Typically, the more cohesive the system, and the longer its adaptation and de-sign process has been at work, the more likely the following description is to hold.

on a green background in animal vision systems and the development of redripening berries by fruiting plants when their seeds were ready for dispersal(similar to the coevolution between bee vision and flower ornamentation).Following foraging theory, the value to the animal is discussed in the course interms of being able to front-load the payoff in extracting food value from theplant. (Being able to distinguish sweet from unsweet berries by sight, the ani-mals can get the valuable berries from the plant more quickly and shift to an-other plant without trying all the green unripe ones.) The plants werecompeting with one another to provide this “foraging enhancement service.”The animals, following foraging theory, can extract nourishment faster fromthese enhanced plants, prefer them, and hence visit and eat from those plantsdifferentially. This system increases of the effectiveness of that plant’s seed dis-persal mechanism and hence the viability of that germ line. Similar plants thatdid not adopt a comparable strategy were evolutionarily threatened.

In a similar effort, around 1997 to 1999, search engines on the Web werecompeting to front-load value in the information “fruits” they had to offer tothose who came foraging. In part, this involved starting to present the resultsordered by presumed relevance to the query. It also involved “painting theripe berries red,” so to speak—showing highlighted search terms in context,thereby better aiding human visual search for the potentially most valuableitems. Information foraging theory (Pirolli & Card, 1995, 1999) says that userscan extract more information value at a higher rate from such sites and that us-ers thus should prefer them in their information diet selection. Those sites getvisited more often, a matter crucial to those sites’ viability, and others that donot adopt comparable strategies can disappear from the marketplace. Weteach this analogy to help understand changes in the search engines, how themarket forces some of these design optimizations, and how they as ++HCI de-signers might further this effort.

For another example, the course also explores an interdisciplinary analogybetween libraries and human memory, both to understand each better and forits useful design implications. The analogy presumably exists because the via-bility of sophisticated systems is significantly enhanced when they have mech-anisms for bringing past experience to bear on the future in an organized way.Because the brain and current western society have benefitted from long adap-tive processes, the analogy can be taken quite far.

The biological evolution of our memories corresponds to the cultural evo-lution of the institution of libraries. The filling of an individual library corre-sponds to the filling of an individual’s brain. There are collection developmentstrategies in libraries for deciding what to acquire and what to get rid of. Thesecorrespond to human attentional and forgetting mechanisms. There are cul-turally evolved general strategies for collection development, which are tai-lored locally by organizational learning processes to the circumstances of an


individual library. So it is also with a human. The corporate library at theDuPont chemical company will tailor its acquisitions and holdings just as thechemists working there will tune what they attend to, encode, ignore, or forget.Information is important in making decisions, and quality, balanced informa-tion is important in making good decisions. This is true at the individual hu-man level and at the societal level where, in the United States, decisions aremade by democratic process. Thus, following Jefferson and Dewey, in the ser-vice of good democratic societal decision making, the collection developmentand access policies of public libraries place strong emphasis on freedom of in-formation and avoiding certain biases (e.g., making both sides of importantpolitical issues available for evaluation).

Understanding how these analogies can aid design requires going a bitdeeper. For example, the eminent cognitive psychologist, John Anderson(1990; Anderson & Milson, 1989), has done some seminal work on a rationalanalysis of memory. A rational analysis tries to explain not how memoryworks (its mechanisms and processes), but why it does what it does, using thebasic conjecture that its design is approximately rational (i.e., its structure andprocesses are optimized to serve the needs of the organism). Such rationalanalysis is of specific use to ++HCI because it amounts to a kind of reverse en-gineering and task analysis for the design of the human brain —and as such isquite instructive for the design of other information systems similarly con-fronted.

Anderson’s (1990) analysis of human memory took as central the idea thatthe main goal of memory was not just to save things, but to continually esti-mate the probability that each thing was going to be needed at the next mo-ment (the need probability), and make those items with the highest needprobability most available.4 This need probability was analyzed further interms of temporal components (recent or frequently used items were morelikely to be needed next) and contextual components (associative structure ofthe world reflected in associative structure in memory). His analysis explainedqualitatively, and often quantitatively, the character of much of the vast cogni-tive psychological literature on memory.

This rational analysis extends directly to instruct ++HCI and the design ofinterfaces to artificial information systems. First note that the typical libraryhas a reference section for frequently used materials and a current periodicalssection for recent journals. These represent the temporal components of theuser population’s need probabilities. Public libraries also often have thematic

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4. Fittingly, Anderson’s (1990) analysis was inspired in part by work in informa-tion science on the statistical patterns of book usage in libraries—the probabilitiesthat a social aggregate of users would need the various holdings in this cultural mem-ory institution.

displays based on current topical content—for example, books on witches andgoblins around Halloween. Similarly, in computer-based technology, infor-mation objects can be made more available by designers explicitly trying to es-timate need probabilities. Web browsers are trying to make recently orfrequently visited sites more available (via better history and bookmarkingmechanisms respectively). Site designers are paying more explicit attention toputting items that are frequently used or of current topical interest up front.Microsoft® is trying to put recency and frequency into its multitieredpull-down menu structure in Windows® 2000. The Anderson (1990) analysisgives explicit insight into these design trends.

Exploring these analogies between information systems in different parts ofthe MoRAS leads to deeper understanding of the phenomena, their processes,and their motivations. As a result, they suggest directions for design.

Although we make use of such MoRAS analogies in class, it is important tonote also that there are critical differences between the systems in differentparts of the MoRAS: in the scale at which they operate in time and space andin the particular mechanisms involved. These differences, too, can feed in-structive comparisons. For example, following Brand’s (1994) ingenious workon how buildings adapt over time, the different time scales at which differentsystems change determine where various burdens should be carried andwhere to look for “shearing” stress as the different time scales conflict.

Similarly, it is important to note that there are analogies between the market-place and biological evolution—both involve decentralized competitivemultiagent exploration of a rich globally unknowable design space using a gen-eral replicate-success-with-variation strategy, optimization with resource con-straints aspects and many consequential similarities. Design information in themarketplace, however, is contained in memes (Blackmore & Dawkins, 1999;Dawkins, 1976) and artifacts, both of which have different recombination to-pologies than genes. The result is that innovations can spread differently (andbe supported by IT differently). Further, the marketplace has (by the standardeconomic approximation) a global variable called price, which results, by theFirst Law of Welfare Economics, in the satisfaction of a global, society-wide al-location efficiency constraint (see any introductory microeconomics text, e.g.,Mas-Collel, Whinston, & Green, 1995). There is no such global variable or effi-ciency result in the biological case. This difference, too, can be understood andsupported by IT, as communication technology can make price informationmore globally shared, making markets more efficient.

Thus, in summary, there are two motivations for the broad, MoRAS, scopeof the Search and Retrieval foundations course. The first is to lay out for thestudents the network of systems and processes that are relevant to design of hu-man-centered, information-rich technologies. The second is to exploit themany resulting analogies to bring the clever design accomplished in one


sphere to bear in others, modified as necessary with an understanding of thedifferences.

In the information age, any jobs our professional masters students engagein will have parts that touch on this network of search- related activities,whether, for example, they design the ever more information-rich user inter-faces of the future or the collaborative technologies in information intense or-ganizations. Whether they take traditional jobs, become consultants, or formnew IT startups, the students need this bigger MoRAS picture—both to choosetargets for their own special efforts, and to understand how those efforts mustfit with the efforts of others. Thus, this generalized Search and Retrieval courseis, along with three others of similar broad perspective, a required foundationscourse for the SI master’s curriculum.

4.2. Needs Versus Wants

The second example of the relevance of the MoRAS framework to ++HCIconcerns the role of technology and the marketplace in creating a schism be-tween human needs and human wants. It is a MoRAS tale because it involvesthe interplay of several different responsive, adaptive systems: biological evo-lution of the human body and brain, the cultural evolution of science and tech-nology, and the economic optimizations of the marketplace. It is of specialinterest to ++HCI because it represents a broad class of serious problems fac-ing us in the modern age and fundamentally involves generalized informationtechnologies and their alignment with human needs.

A First Look

This general phenomenon is introduced in two passes. The first sketchesout the basic concepts and dynamics in a simple form. The second looks at fur-ther subtleties that may lead to solutions. The basic structure of the first pass in-troduces the phenomenon using the analogy of a crack being split apart by awedge driven by a hammer. The crack is an opening left by a general and cleverevolutionary biological IT design. The wedge inserted in that crack comesfrom cultural advances in science and technology. The hammer is the force ofthe marketplace.

The Crack: The Merely Heuristic Connection Between Wants and Needs

A Simple Example of Needs and Wants: Breathing Lessons. I f youhold your breath at the bottom of a swimming pool for a long time, youeventually experience an intense suffocation panic. As you find yourselfdesperately wanting to breathe, you stop thinking about anything else, push

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off from the bottom and swim with all your might to the surface, whereonyou gasp for air. Your need to breathe (actually a dual need to obtain oxygenand get rid of CO2) is addressed by mechanisms that commandeer your at-tention, organize your behavior, and recruit your physical energy in waysaimed to satisfy the corresponding need.

For the purposes here, a need is something that actually matters to the viabil-ity of the organism (i.e., helping its battle against entropy). Mechanisms thatfocus attention, organize behavior, and recruit resources in service of someneed will be called want mechanisms. The idea is that in organisms that haveattention and behavior, evolution has provided want mechanisms (wants) toput them in service of needs.5 To “put them in service of needs” really meansto couple the behaviors to states of the organism and the world. Your struggleupward for air has been coupled jointly to your respiratory need becomingacute and to your being underwater.

Note that needs (e.g., for respiration) can be related to the viability of any(or in this case, all) parts of a system (heart, muscles, brain). Wants, aprototypical example of coupling, deeply involve the system’s generalized in-formation technologies. The detection of advance signals, internal and exter-nal, of future serious problems (hypoxia, hypercarbia leading to death,unavailability of air when under water), bringing those signals to central mech-anisms that control attention and make decisions, the subsequent organizationand coordination of appropriate behavioral responses—these are characteris-tic IT functions. Not accidentally, those functions are implemented with thebody’s wetware IT—special neural mechanisms, both peripheral and central.

Other Needs and Wants. There are many other examples of needs andassociated want mechanisms. The general modus operandi in finding suchcandidates is to notice some behavior where attention is being drawn, re-sponses are being organized, and resources being expended and ask, “Whatare the responsible stimuli?” “What are the mechanisms involved?” “Whatneed might they be in service of?”


5. Common usage of these words seems to confound two dimensions importantto distinguish here—seriousness or intensity, and fact versus affect. Aristotle (1926),for example, in Rhetoric, stated “By needs [italics added] I mean longings, especiallyfor things the failure to obtain which is accompanied by pain; such are the desires,for instance, love; also those which arise in bodily sufferings and dangers, for when aman is in pain or danger he desires something” (pp. 221–223). In this article, thefact–affect distinction matters most. That is, needs are things that have some real con-sequences on viability, whereas wants are the behavioral mechanisms designed tolook after needs. (One such want mechanism is the affective “longing” evoked byAristotle’s more familiar usage.) Note that, in the sense used here, needs can vary inseriousness and wants in intensity.

For example, it does not take much observation of people around food tonote a strong sweetness-based want mechanism. The underlying need is forglucose, needed in largish quantities to meet the body’s fundamental energyrequirements. Similarly, salt is essential for our electrolyte balance and not al-ways easy to come by, so we have detectors and appetites for salt.

Many poisonous plants contain chemically basic (low pH) compounds, likethe alkaloids, and we have sensitive detectors at the back of our tongues thatrespond to these by giving us a bitter sensation. Higher mechanisms respondin turn with a desire to spit such stimuli out and avoid them in the future. (Theopposite of the sweetness mechanisms.) We need to avoid such compounds,and we have want mechanisms to organize behavior accordingly.

This discussion of needs and wants of individuals has analogies in otherparts of the MoRAS. Corporations have needs: For example, their viabilitytypically depends on staying profitable. They also have want mechanisms:mechanisms for focusing attention, recruiting resources, and organizing orga-nizational behavior in service of these needs. Thus, accounting departmentsare formed to monitor expenses, raise red flags, and warn higher managementif costs suddenly soar. Sales and marketing departments identify and targetpromising client groups. These want mechanisms are implemented in organi-zational structure supported by IT for record keeping, communication, analy-sis, and coordination. Note that these corporate want mechanisms also involvea critical coupling to employee want mechanisms via incentive plans. Thesetoo involve IT: Corporate communications are used to set a general culturalexpectation (“quality is king,” “shorten time to market”), record keeping isused for performance evaluation, and computation is used for comparison ofemployees and the determination of raises.

Information Needs and Wants. Because information and IT play arole in the implementation of general want mechanisms, they in turn engen-der derivative information needs and information wants. Major localizedlighting changes in the physical environment used to occur in our evolu-tionary environment mostly when large and significant physical eventswere taking place close to the observer—another person coming close, a lioncharging, a branch falling, prey running off. These events are significant fora variety of other material needs, so tracking them becomes an informationneed in itself. We presumably have a need to get more information aboutsuch events. In service of that need we have very fast visual mechanisms,mediated in part by the superior colliculus, that orient our perception (eye,head, selective visual attention) to such stimuli.

Similarly, curiosity is an information want mechanism that organizes atten-tion, behavior, and resources presumably in service of the information needsof exploring for new opportunities in a variety of spheres of material need.

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Heuristic Nature. A critical property of want mechanisms is that they areonly heuristic; they are effective design hacks. They do not guarantee satisfactionof the associated needs under all circumstances. They only had to be sufficient inthe correlation structure of the environment in which they were designed.

For example, although humans have a double respiratory need (out with theCO2, in with the O2), our want mechanisms are actually much more sensitive tothe CO2 problem than the O2 problem (see, e.g., Banzett, Lansing, Evans, & Shea,1996; Brackenbury, Gleeson, & Avery, 1982; Guz, 1997; Oku, Saidel, Chonan,Altose, & Cherniack, 1991). If you put a person in a specially designed room withan atmosphere containing enough O2 but too much CO2, they would feel aboutthe same level of suffocation panic as if there were no O2. They would do a lot ofhard work (e.g., yell, pound, try to knock down the door) to get out. On the otherhand, if you were to put them in a different specially designed room where theCO2 is nicely removed, but there is little O2, they would perhaps feel vaguelyflu-ish, fall asleep, and die. This is why, for example, carbon monoxide poisoningis so insidiously dangerous: It interferes with O2 uptake, but not with the CO2

elimination, and one would rather blithely fall asleep and die. It is also why it canbe dangerous for swimmers to hyperventilate before swimming underwater. Hy-perventilation will get rid of extra CO2 in advance and the swimmers will feel fineas they still deplete their O2 supply, pass out underwater, and drown.

The heuristic, “Pay attention to CO2 and you will be okay” usually workswell, however, because it turns out that large terrestrial animals typically mustuse lungs in which the buildup of CO2 becomes a serious concern.6 In con-trast, oxygen is relatively abundant and accessible. Thus, if the terrestrial ani-mal takes care of getting enough fresh air to get rid of the CO2, it is almostcertain that the O2 problem will be taken care of at the same time—essentiallyfor free. (It is interesting to note that for fish the environmental situation is re-versed. CO2 is much more soluble in water than O2, and so getting O2 is hardwhereas unloading CO2 is easy. As a result, fish have want mechanisms that fo-cus most strongly on getting O2; e.g., Burleson & Milsom, 1995; Kalinin,Severi, Guerra, Costa, & Rantin, 2000; Milsom & Brill, 1986)

Although the two respiratory needs are distinct, their satisfaction is corre-lated in the environment to such an extent that a very effective design heuristicwas possible. Evolution, in heuristically engineering a terrestrial want mecha-


6. Professor Paul Webb, University of Michigan, Department of Biology (per-sonal communication, February 24, 1999); see also Randall, Burggren, and French(1997). Terrestrial animals must always be concerned with drying out. So as not tolose moisture in their breathing process, terrestrial animals therefore tend to usetidal breathing mechanisms (lungs that breath in and out, instead of, say, gills withwater flowing by). Unfortunately, this not only retains moisture, it also allows CO2to build up, and so CO2 must be more carefully monitored.

nism focusing on CO2 elimination, was able to satisfy both needs. The heuris-tic works just fine in natural terrestrial environments, even though it can bethwarted in the specially designed rooms described previously.

Therefore, it is in general that adaptive mechanisms, in a given stable envi-ronment, will try to tune want mechanisms to underlying needs. (The searchfor what to value, mentioned in the section titled “Value,” represents such atuning.) If, however, the relevant correlation structure of that environment ischanged, the designed want mechanisms may no longer succeed in taking careof the needs. This merely heuristic relation between needs and wants is a vul-nerability with consequences discussed shortly, but first consider the ubiquityof this vulnerability of heuristic need–want mechanisms.

In the case of sugar, too, we have multiple needs largely taken care of by asingle want mechanism. We need both sugar in largish quantities for energyand vitamins in smallish quantities to catalyze various biochemical life pro-cesses. In our natural evolutionary environment, however, these were pack-aged together in fruits and vegetables. Thus, we have no special wantmechanisms oriented to vitamins. We have a strong sweetness-based wantmechanism (the brain monitoring blood sugar and the tongue sensing sweet-ness) that would have us gathering fresh ripe berries for hours and satisfyingour vitamin needs for free at the same time. Here again the heuristic is “takecare of one need (sugar) and the other (vitamins) will be fixed for free.” Thisheuristic can be defeated by providing sweets without the evolutionarily ex-pected other accompanying nutrients.

Recalling the video teleconference myth noted earlier, some of our so-cial interaction needs (e.g., in organizations, families) are in part linked toseeing the other person’s face (an information want?), and so simple videoconnections seem to be what we want. However, there were many otherneeds (informational and otherwise) being taken care of by physicalcopresence that we are not as aware of. Similarly for the paperless office,the obvious wants for paper underestimated the needs in various systemsthat paper was addressing.

HCI designers are familiar with this schism between needs and wants in try-ing to work with user groups. It is important to listen to what users say theywant, but such reports only partially indicate of their fuller want mechanisms(e.g., verbal reports of willingness to buy are not always borne out in behav-ior), and they are only heuristically related to their underlying needs. Respon-sible designers not only look at additional behavioral indications of wants, butalso examine task situations to address the underlying needs in the design.This is especially essential in design, because the introduction of new technol-ogy is changing the structure of the user’s world, and their current wants mayno longer be as relevant or aligned to the new world.

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The Wedge—Science and Technology

Changing the correlation structure of the environment (e.g., the naturalevolutionary one) is, in a sense, one of the principal roles of technology. Itputs a roof over heads that would otherwise be unsheltered and clothes overbodies that would otherwise be cold. It also, however, gives us the capabilityto dissociate correlationally the thing wanted from the thing needed. Thus,we can use technology to design the deadly rooms mentioned previouslywhere the want for CO2 is taken care of but O2 is undetectedly but fatallymissing. More familiarly, it gives us the power to refine sugar, separating itfrom its traditionally correlated, vitamin-rich packaging. It also gives us theability to refine and concentrate tasty salt and fats. Scientific advances cangreatly empower the relevant technology, enabling, for example, the synthe-sis of artificial flavors.

It is technology that allows us to show people each other’s faces viateleconferencing, without the other correlates of physical copresence that usu-ally accompany it. It is technology that allows us to duplicate some of the prop-erties of paper without others, and thereby please only some of the wantsdriving the MoRAS, whereas ignoring other needs fulfilled by the older tech-nology.

There is a concept from animal behavior literature called the supernormalstimulus (Tinbergen, 1972). The Oyster Catcher bird can be fooled by a larger,more perfect-looking wooden egg, into sitting quite contentedly on that falseegg rather than its own real egg. This contrived artifact, the “bigger, better”false egg, superstimulates the “sit on the egg in your nest” want mechanismsthat evolved, and in nature served quite well, to organize attention and behav-ior in service of the bird’s need to incubate its embryonic offspring. Similarly,you can put more refined sugar in a frosted cupcake than can be found in fruitand get people to prefer the frosted cupcake to the fruit. In the IT sphere, tele-vision allows us to have the pleasure of seeing attractive, witty, and friendlypeople without actually giving us any opportunity to become their friends. In-deed, people now spend 30% of their leisure time watching television, morethan socializing with their real friends (Spring, 1993).

In general, then, the cultural institutions advancing science and technologyhave given us the capability, should we so desire, to separate the satisfaction ofwants from the fulfillment of needs. They conceivably make it even possible tosuperstimulate the want mechanisms (i.e., trigger them even more stronglythan the evolutionary context ever could). What gets done with the technolog-ical capability to separate wants from needs is determined by yet another partof the MoRAS, the marketplace.


The Hammer—Free Market Competition

A business makes money basically by giving people what they want. Bydefinition, organizing the expenditure of attentionally focused effort is whatwants are all about and it is what money is the proxy for. People work and earnmoney and use it to buy something they want. As a result, in a competitive freemarketplace there is strong pressure to cater to wants as far as possible. A com-pany makes more money insofar as it can better service people’s wants. If itfails at this mission, it will go out of business.

Note that the driver here is wants, not needs. People will not pay for whatthey need, except insofar as their want mechanisms mediate it. If the wantmechanisms are appropriately tuned to needs for that environment, the pur-suit of wants is (by definition) just fine—it also gives people what they need. If,however, technology allows the dissociation, there can be trouble.

The reason is that economic forces can bring technology to bear to satisfythe wants ever more effectively, regardless of the preservation of thewants–needs correlations. For example, suppose Business A gives people whatthey want, regardless of need (think “frosted cupcake”). Consumers will workfor Business A’s product—that is, earn money and give some of it to BusinessA—and A can thrive. Suppose Business B gives people what they need, regard-less of want. Insofar as the want is no longer correlated (think “desiccated soyprotein”), people will not want to give B as much of their hard-earned money.Thus, to a first approximation (to be refined a bit later), a needs-focused com-pany like B cannot compete well with a wants-focused company like A.

Next, consider Business C that tries to take care of both needs and wants asmuch as possible. Now, insofar as these needs and wants have become techno-logically cheaply uncorrelated, providing for both requires solving two con-straints, almost always either more costly or suboptimal in satisfying both.(Those health food cookies, although healthier, are more expensive and lesstasty than frosted cupcakes.) Business C will not do as well as A. Hence, firmslike A that satisfy wants without regard to need will dominate the marketplace.(Insofar as it can figure out, with good research and development, how tosuperstimulate the want mechanism, the firm can do even better.)

Note two more points: First, to a first approximation, a corporation has aneed to pursue consumers’ wants without direct regard to their needs. This, inturn, implies that corporations will be pressured into developing correspond-ing corporate want mechanisms, mechanisms that organize corporate re-sources toward consumer wants, regardless of true needs. Second, forconsumers in a world of increasing entropy, “regardless of needs” means dan-ger: A blind, random walk in the design space unconstrained to the satisfactionof needs will tend eventually to lead to those needs not being satisfied.

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Further Examples of the Needs–Wants Problem

There are many other examples of the market-driven technological wedgebetween wants and needs. The most egregious example is the black markettrade (read: renegade free market) in illicit psychoactive drugs like cocaineand opiates. These drugs hook directly into the neurophysiology of wantmechanisms, the pleasure–pain, motivational machinery of our central ner-vous systems. These are the neural pathways of the machinery that is supposedto be stimulated in service of needs (Brick & Erickson, 1998; Kolb & Whishaw,1996). Instead, drug technology has short circuited that design, and peoplewill all too often pay to have those want mechanisms directly satisfied, in obliv-ious disregard of the havoc wreaked on their true needs.

Want mechanisms for sugar, fat, and salt are built on top of these central neu-ral ones. They include more peripheral sensory components designed heuristi-cally to get needed nutrients. Our sweetness and flavor mechanisms weredesigned not just to get tasty sugar packets, but on the presumption that vita-mins, enzymes, and other nutrients would come along as well. They, too, havebeen thwarted by technologically spearheaded market forces, as the marketfills groceries with refined sugar, artificial flavorings, and cosmetic color addi-tives to hook into our want machinery with little regard for related needs.

Another broad class of examples would include the symptomatic treatmentof human medical problems. We do not like to have runny noses, fevers, or in-digestion, so we take decongestants, antipyretics, antidiarrhea, and antinauseamedication. Growing evidence (for an accessible review, see Nesse & Wil-liams, 1998), however, indicates that these symptoms are often part of effectiveresponses to real problems, and suppressing the symptoms can lead to moreserious problems. Fevers and mucous secretions help fight infection.Antidiarrhetics used with nonviral diarrhea can keep the body from expellingthe infection, with serious consequences. Antinausea medication for morningsickness may increase maternal consumption of questionable food resulting infetal abnormalities. These treatments are a bit like responding to the annoyingsound of a smoke alarm that is signaling an unseen fire by turning off thesmoke alarm (fixing the annoyance) and ignoring the fire.

One might also make a similar case for high levels of consumerism and ma-terial acquisitiveness. The acquisition and possession of certain material goodswith desirable properties might have been difficult enough in our evolutionarycontext that it was heuristic to make mechanisms that could be interested insaving whatever they could get. Now, that want can be satisfied without muchregard for relation to underlying needs. Another speculative case can be madefor leisure. The minimization of physical effort was a reasonable goal when itssatisfaction was constrained by the reality of a world that would ensure thatsome level of activity would be maintained by the pursuit of other wants. The


rest of the body could be designed (GD) opportunistically to rely on a resultingbalance of activity to maintain muscle tone, bone strength, and cardiovascularhealth. If modern technology makes the pursuit of inactivity all too easy toachieve, these other needs are neglected.

One might conjecture that designs in the MoRAS that involve opportunisticmultipurposing are particularly vulnerable to these splits. The idea would bethat as some design process created new structures with new primary needs, cor-responding want mechanisms had to be created and kept in tune. Originally in-cidental aspects of the new design became available for opportunisticexploitation by other design processes and became needed by them. These,however, did not need their own want mechanism because one already existed.If, however, something changes the correlation structure of the world so thatthese once jointly satisfied needs are split apart, the opportunistic designs are leftunattended. This description fits the cases of the paperless office, vitamin-freefrosted cupcake, and the health consequences of leisure. The implication for++HCI design would be that special care is needed to look for unnoticed oppor-tunistic designs depending on features we are about to change—they can easilyexist without guardian want mechanisms, yet be quite important.

Splits Elsewhere in the MoRAS. It is worth noting that the effect of fo-cusing resources on wants that are out of balance with needs can be foundwith other adaptive systems in the MoRAS. For example, established firmscan get into trouble when the environment changes and their old proximategoals (part of their want mechanisms) are no longer validly matched to theenvironment. It is a fundamental need of a company to satisfy the wants ofits customers. For decades, American consumers had wanted big, powerfulcars. The “big-three” U.S. auto companies, in needing to respond to this,had eventually come to want to make and sell such cars. The corporate out-look, design, and production were all focused on big cars. This worked fineuntil the oil crisis in the 1970s. As oil prices went up, the consumers sud-denly wanted smaller, more fuel-efficient cars like those the Japanese weremaking. Although the corporate needs of the big-three manufacturers hadchanged, their wants stayed the same and they suffered huge market-sharelosses. Similarly, a new startup company may want to promote some pet in-vention of the founder without regard for the profitability needs dictated bymarket realities.

In interface design, or HCI consulting, the often encountered split betweenwhat user groups want and what they need (mentioned at the end of the Heu-ristic Nature section) is typically accompanied by economic tensions—a ham-mer of sorts. Clients are more willing to pay for what they want than what youcome to know they need. In fact, they often do not even want to pay for findingout what they need beyond what they think they want. Many programmers

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without HCI training in years past competed more successfully, for jobs andinternal corporate funding, by providing high-level project managers withwhat they wanted (nominal functionality over usability) at lower cost and withquicker time to market. It has taken quite a bit of work, both culturally and inindividual cases, to overcome the force of this hammer.

Note that there are other hammers than the marketplace. Wants were char-acterized as a coupling mechanism in the MoRAS between a system and its en-vironment: Powerful recruitment of behaviors and resources are coupled toexternal states of the world. As such, they are a primary place for other systemsto engage. By manipulating the environment appropriately, one system canget another to organize its behavior in a reliable way. Recall that corporationsmust couple the corporate needs to employee wants through the design of in-centives. They can set up hourly wages to encourage people to put the timeinto the job. These are corporate want mechanisms and are only heuristicallylinked to the real corporate needs. Individuals can adapt to game this system,supplying the corporate want of hours worked by unproductive time on thejob, yet not satisfying the corporate productivity need.

IT Splits. As the marketplace has increasingly focused its technologyefforts in the realms of information (communication, computation, infor-mation content), we should expect increasing need–want splits in the IT do-main as well. A reasonable case can be made about television. At a verybasic level, television captures the midbrain want mechanisms controllingvisual attention. The critical variable is the rate of special visual effects likecuts, zooms, or text overlays. These types of effects can be seen even bylooking at the light cast by the television on the wall opposite it—large,abrupt, overall lighting changes. As mentioned in the Information Needsand Wants section, such lighting changes used to occur only when rathermajor significant physical events were taking place close to the observer.Television, however, can present such changes uncorrelated with their orig-inal physical import. The more commercially intense the programming(from public television, to commercial programming, to commercial ads),the higher the rates of special effects (Mander, 1978). The hammer of themarket place strikes the wedge ever harder as these visual changes tend torivet our attention mechanisms to the screen, regardless of the content.Again, a want mechanism is being captured by market-driven technology,in this case an IT, without regard to the original underlying need.

At a higher cognitive level, it can be argued that the content of televisionco-opts social needs–want mechanisms. People are drawn, for example, towatch action, violence, sex, and interpersonal drama on television. The factthatviewerbehavior is recruitedandorganizedby these stimuli ina regularwaysuggests that some want mechanisms have been captured. It is not too far


fetched to think that in theiroriginal context, if anysucheventswere transpiringin real life in your vicinity, those events would warrant your attention, particu-larly if they could be observed with some sense of safety. We probably haveattentional mechanisms designed with this practical reality in mind. Televisionshowsareexploiting suchmechanisms,much like sugar ina frostedcupcake. Infact, one could argue that the television is providing a supernormal stimulus,not just by using enhanced special effects but by simply editing all boring partsout. Why? Exactly because otherwise fewer people would want to watch theshows.Putnam(1995)hypothesized that the social attentionand timeresourcestaken by watching television has been directly siphoned away from one of itsoriginal purposes: the needed construction of social capital.

The low-level visual attention and the higher behaviorally and socially ori-ented attention captured by television are based on the premise that we evolvedto have certain information needs (finding out more about major lighting changesand significant personal or interpersonal activities around us). One might conjec-ture other information needs and associated want systems, perhaps tuned to get-ting information about novelty, or for sending signals that try to exercise control(perhaps tapped by video games and casinos). Perhaps there are general purpose“put it in the knowledge bank for a brainy [sic] day” information needs and wantsthat can or will be captured to produce information junkies.

There are also IT examples at other levels of the MoRAS. In the case of thepaperless office or travel-free video collaboration, just as for frosted cupcakes,one can distinguish between wants and needs. Certain needed but unrecog-nized couplings existed mediated by paper or face-to-face presence. Design,however, was being driven by the simplistic wants.

Insofar as such information needs exist and we have want mechanisms thatwere tuned to them in our evolutionary environment, we have a vulnerability,a crack that the hammer and wedge of market-driven IT may exploit. Part ofthe mission of ++HCI will have to be to watch for this effect and try to con-tinue to determine what people need, not just what they want, in the informa-tion arena, and design accordingly.

Lessons

Let me summarize the lessons of the first pass through the needs–wants ex-ample. First are basics about needs and wants. Systems at various places in theMoRAS have needs that must be satisfied to keep them healthy and viable(battling entropy). Want mechanisms are designed (GD) technology that re-cruit resources, focus attention, and organize behavior in service of thoseneeds using heuristics that rely on the correlational structure of the world inthe design environment. These want mechanisms have a dominant IT compo-nent, as they detect and collect signals of future problems or opportunities,

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then structure and coordinate behavior in response. There are wants andneeds in both direct material spheres and, derivatively, in informationspheres. Second, science and technology provide the tools for changing thatstructure, making it possible to address needs and wants separately. Third,market forces have driven this dissociation in the direction of giving peoplewhat they want regardless of the satisfaction of their underlying needs, leavingthe needs prey to the vagaries of entropy.

The net effect of these three is that individuals (or other systems in theMoRAS) would be getting more and more of what they want but not necessar-ily more (and likely less) of what they need. On the face of it, the alignment ofwants and needs seems particularly important for ++HCI. Want mechanismsare fundamentally generalized IT, the core of the ++HCI content domain,and are fundamentally related to human viability and value, the heart of the++HCI mission. What avenues are possible?

A Second Look

The preceding discussion of needs and wants treated them each as fairlysimple, well-defined entities. In this second pass, a richer treatment suggestspossible solutions, most notably ++HCI efforts in IT.

Webs of Needs

Needs are not really so well defined. Do you in fact need to breathe? Well,no, not if you can be hooked up to a heart–lung machine that will artificiallyexchange O2 and CO2 in your blood. And, do you even need that? Well, not ifthere were some other way to bypass your circulatory system and get thosegasses directly to your tissues (as is done by bubbling gases through nutrientsubstrates in tissue cultures). Looking outward rather than inward, do youneed ventilation in your room? Well, not if you get a CO2 scrubber and oxy-gen tank. The idea is that your viability is dependent, in some particular re-spect, not on a single needed thing but on the integrity of a whole causal chainor the availability of some adequate alternative chain converging on still lowerlevel constraints (e.g., that O2 be made available to the metabolic Krebbs cycleand that CO2 be taken away). In any particular world situation, that core needis, in turn, dependent on a chain, even a web, of causal events that you need tohave intact, or if not, need some sufficient alternative web.7 You need to havesome alternative web intact or else there will be consequences for viability.


7. The appropriate representation of this web is probably closer to an and–or de-pendency graph (“You must have a window AND it must be to the outside AND youmust be able to open it, OR you must have an oxygen tank AND a CO2 scrubber,OR … ”).

The nature of such consequences is another issue for refinement. Is it a needonly if its neglect results in death? Is decreased health sufficient? Decreased re-productive success? The answer is unclear, related diffusely to some ill-de-fined notion of long-term viability, which translates probabilistically intoseveral of the aforementioned in different degrees. The disconcerting degreeof latitude in this definition is intrinsic to the problem. It echoes the fundamen-tal difficulty in defining fitness in evolution, except after the fact by long-termoutcome. It is sufficient to note that the neglect of needs can often lead to slowand multiple consequences on the way to affecting ultimate viability. Thesemultiple consequences can provide a kind of feedback, albeit diffuse, for reme-dial design.

Want Extension Mechanisms

These two complications about needs—that they involve an and–or net ofcausally linked events and that they are defined in terms of long-term viabil-ity—both relate to corresponding complexities in a more careful discussion ofwants mechanisms. The first relates to what can be called here want extensionmechanisms. A child may be born with a want mechanism for sugar, but aftertasting a lollipop, the child learns to want lollipops. After several times experi-encing that she gets one whenever she sees Aunt Sally, that child may come towant to see Aunt Sally. The child has not only cognitively learned some factsabout this causal chain, but the defining characteristics of a want have alsobeen passed along.8 The child’s behavior, resources, and focus of attention be-come organized around the satisfaction of that new want. The set of wantmechanisms has been, in this sense, extended.

The extension of the want mechanisms exactly traces back up the chain (orweb) of needs described in the previous section. Presumably, this is one oftheir design purposes: to tailor the organization of behavior in service of thoseaspects of the web of needs that may change at time scales faster than those thatcan be addressed in fixed hardware by evolution. They include simple mecha-nisms like Pavlovian and operant conditioning, as well as higher rationallearning processes. For example, if someone describes the horrors of lung can-cer and tells you that smoking will cause it, you may learn not to want tosmoke. In some similar fashion, you learn to want to take vitamins or eat thoseexpensive, tasteless, but healthy cookies after all. (Of course, these want exten-sion mechanisms can also be hijacked as Madison Avenue tries to sell you acar by associating it with an attractive member of the opposite sex.)

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8. These become what are called secondary reinforcers in the psychological litera-ture (e.g., see Mazur, 1990).

Want extension mechanisms also exist at other levels of the MoRAS. Re-search and analysis departments and consulting firms help corporations figureout what they want. They do so by tracing back up the web of needs (task anal-ysis, business case analysis) and then helping to set up organizational mecha-nisms to focus attention and organize behavior accordingly. It is an interestingquestion whether these want extension mechanisms exist adequately at otherlevels of the MoRAS we might care about.

Like the want mechanisms themselves, the want extension mechanisms arefundamentally information technologies. Specifically, they are adaptation-fo-cused IT (generalized learning mechanisms) that detect consequential struc-ture in the environment and couple the appropriate signals to existing wantand behavior mechanisms. It is their IT nature and their role in fixing and re-fining preexisting want mechanisms on a shorter time scale that make themimportant concerns for ++HCI.

The second complication of the picture of needs was that their neglect oftenleads to slow and multiple degradations of viability. This results in a corre-sponding partial redundancy of want mechanisms. For example, although youmay not have a potent first-class want mechanism for vitamins, the way you dofor sugar, if you go long enough without vitamins your health will start to dete-riorate and various existing want mechanisms will actually be impacted, ifonly in a secondary, nonspecific way. For example, obliviously lacking vita-min C for a prolonged period, your gums will start to hurt and bleed fromscurvy. As another example, it turns out that oxygen deprivation does causedizziness, nausea, and headaches (found both in CO poisoning or high-alti-tude sickness). All of these consequences are ones we have want mechanismsfor avoiding (people will work to change or avoid them). They are nonspecificin that the want mechanisms may not be well tuned to focusing behavioraround the actual relevant causal chains. They do, however, provide an open-ing for want extension mechanisms to start to engage. If eating limes stopsyour gums from bleeding, you will come to want limes (whence the epithetLimeys for British sailors who found this remedy for their faulty sea diets).

Similarly, the want in the 1970s U.S. automotive industry to make big carslead ultimately to declines in sales and market share (threats to viability) thatwere felt with pain in the companies (layoffs, plant closings). As a result, thewant mechanisms there provided feedback for redesigning want mechanismsfor what kind of car to make.

Reviewing the MoRAS aspects of this tale, we have biological evolution ofthe human want–need mechanisms. We have markets adaptively driving so-cial technology institutions to invent new ways to satisfy wants. To this wehave now added want extension mechanisms of learning within the individualbeing brought into play.


The market-hammered technological wedge splitting wants from needs isarguably a pervasive, serious, and growing problem. It has powerful forces atwork and leaves us with the distressing puzzle of what to do about it. Want ex-tension mechanisms and the redundancy of wants may hold a key for combat-ing the needs–wants split.

Possible Solutions and the Role of ++HCI-Guided IT

The fixing of want mechanisms that are out of balance with need structuresis a very old problem. Evolution has been working on it for hundreds of mil-lions of years, designing and maintaining the want mechanisms in the firstplace. Failing all else, evolution will fix the current incarnations of the prob-lem, insofar as they really need fixing, in its own good time. However, time isone of the dimensions that distinguish different parts of the MoRAS. The cur-rent pace of disrupting the existing mechanisms is much faster than the rate offixing them evolutionarily, and so the crunch is likely to get more acute in theshorter time scale. The task must be taken up by other, faster moving parts ofthe MoRAS.

As noted, generalized IT plays a critical role in the implementation of wantmechanisms—sensing, transmission, integration, decision, coordination, alldesigned in service of underlying needs for viability. Increasingly, we are us-ing modern technologies to extend the reach of our want mechanisms. Wecome to want to turn on a radio if it looks like really dangerous weather. Thisextended want mechanism relies on massive IT in the weather bureau to col-lect, model, predict, and disseminate information.

Note also that IT plays a role in the adaptive mechanisms that create, shape,and extend want mechanisms. It requires accumulating experience and identi-fying proximal signals of consequential events remote in space and time. (Ac-cumulate and identify are used in a very generalized sense here—evolution doesthese with the genome population and natural selection, respectively.)

How then, as a ++HCI MoRAS design question, can we use new IT, mind-fully deployed, to try to resolve the needs–wants split problem in any of itsvenues? Consider the brief list of roles IT can play, as discussed in its introduc-tory description in The Role of IT section.

In its harbinger role, IT can address the needs–wants problem by commu-nicating the problem from places where it is being noticed to places where itcan be preemptively addressed. For example, the media can inform people ofthe remote consequences of short-term actions (e.g., smoking) and thereby re-cruit the want extension mechanisms to align them with needs. We can use ITto address more of these cases and make the messages more salient.

In its role of information collection, communications IT can assess of thestate of needs, as picked up by hints from many formerly unlinked cases, and

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enhance their value by bringing them together. For example, the ability to ac-cess and thereby pool appropriately anonymous medical records for researchexamination should make it possible to detect more patterns of unnoticedmedical needs much earlier.

The computational capability of IT—that is, its ability to support complexintegration of collected information—would allow collected data to be cou-pled with systems that can do analysis, statistics, modeling, pattern recogni-tion, and so forth. These systems would involve not just computers, buthuman–computer dyads embedded in whole organizational structures (see,e.g., the SPARC/AIDS collaboratories; Olson et al., 1998). They would al-low scientific communities to identify needs and alternate causal webs to sat-isfy them.

The communication links can also support social computation relevant tothese problems. Lay and expert people alike could work collectively using ITto identify, discuss, articulate, evaluate, compare, and prioritize agenda inpreparation for public policy and legislative action. Social action can be or-chestrated with IT to allow interest groups (government or nonprofit) to coor-dinate effective action in pushing for reform of, in this case, needs–wants splits.For example, such efforts could put more effective pressure on corporations,whose pursuit of satisfying wants has caused egregious neglects of needs(changing their corporate want mechanisms), or on legislators to design publicpolicy.

In all, a better understanding of the MoRAS should allow one to use IT toinform, empower, harness, and coordinate its various components in pursuitof solutions to the splitting of needs and wants.

5. THE MoRAS AND ++HCI DESIGN

This section draws together and amplifies the implications of the MoRASfor ++HCI design, beginning with a summary of the major points of the articleso far. Drawing on those, the second subsection proposes specific design rec-ommendations and provides a design example.

5.1. Summarizing Where We Have Been

The introduction of this article noted the triply expanding scope of HCI:from the individual to larger social aggregates, from an isolated computer tobroad webs of ubiquitous generalized IT, and from interaction with a com-puter to activity enabled and mediated by IT. This broader scope, ++HCI, en-tails a larger context for design, a whole system of systems, here called theMoRAS. Human ID efforts need a framework to understand that context, fo-


cusing on the ubiquity of design processes, the role of information, and the dy-namics of change.

Concrete motivation came from the mirages of the paperless office andtravel-free remote collaboration. These illustrated how GD mechanisms invarious parts of the MoRAS capitalized on less obvious properties of oldtechnologies. The viability of these other systems came to depend on thoseopportunistic adaptations. Technologists, ignoring the other systems in theMoRAS and their mechanisms, predicted the premature demise of paperand travel, and lead to, among other things, large, underinformed eco-nomic investment.

To help ++HCI efforts be more mindful of these systems and mechanisms,a framework was next presented for design in the MoRAS. A general structurewas sketched (Figures 1, 2, and 3), which included many layers of system ag-gregation (ranging from human memory and perception, through individuals,families, workgroups, markets, communities, and society) and multiple pathsof nesting (e.g., personal and work). Further, many of these systems have a cor-responding technology-extended version (e.g., human → human + com-puter). At any level, some systems may specialize in generalized IT functions,whereas for others, generalized IT is a secondary infrastructure supportingother functions. The grand MoRAS structure of systems, with the place of gen-eralized IT identified, defines the basic players in the ++HCI enterprise. Indi-vidually, they become a checklist for targeting human ID opportunity, forharnessing in service of those design activities, and for anticipating reactive ad-aptation responses. Considering the players in pairs can suggest opportunitiesfor creating value with new, electronic IT couplings.

In the framework, the dynamics of the MoRAS were first discussed in termsof the roles such couplings play—ways systems work together, for example.Then, referring to the relentless Second Law of Thermodynamics, the exis-tence of rich structure in the MoRAS was seen as necessarily nontrivial—manydesign (adaptation) mechanisms exist throughout the MoRAS, each of which,to some significant extent, must act as if it values its viability. This deceptivelysimple dynamic provides a general orientation to understand the other designprocesses with which individual human designers must work. It also providesa working orientation for understanding design, information, technology andvalue—central concepts for the ++HCI enterprise.

Two longer examples then illustrated how the MoRAS framework can beuseful. As one part of a curriculum for ++HCI, the SI foundations course castsearch and retrieval as a broad web of integrated activity throughout theMoRAS. This meant first that there was a larger pattern that could be sup-ported by ++HCI design efforts if appropriately understood, and second thatanalogies between components of the MoRAS could inspire the needed

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++HCI invention, basically by reverse engineering and reusing design ac-complishments of other adaptive systems.

The needs–wants example represented a new class of problem, or perhapsa broader way to integrate known problems, in terms of the interaction of vari-ous systems in the MoRAS (human need and want mechanisms, achievementsof science and technology, and forces of the marketplace). The example wasparticularly important for ++HCI because want mechanisms are fundamen-tally generalized IT, the core of the ++HCI content domain, and are funda-mentally related to human viability and value, the heart of the ++HCImission. In addition, the description of want mechanisms identified a canoni-cal and powerful coupling mechanism between systems in the MoRAS, form-ing an important dynamic consideration for ++HCI design efforts.

5.2. Design Recommendations

Drawing this together allows for the proposal of some specific design rec-ommendations based on the MoRAS framework. The samples presented hereare in two forms. First are some general principles of design found in theMoRAS that can be brought to bear in ++HCI contexts. Second is a set ofquestions to aid ++HCI design.

Sample MoRAS Design Principles

One general principle of design in the MoRAS, and not unknown to gooddesigners in general, might be called “smarten up to dumb down.” It involvesrecognizing the different capabilities of different systems and using the expen-sive, clever ones to figure out how to offload things onto the dumber, cheaperones (leaving the expensive, clever ones free for other work). A premier exam-ple in HCI is the Information Visualizer work (Card, Robertson, & Mackinlay,1991), where there was explicit effort to use higher human ID skill to design sothat the various cognitive tasks could be offloaded from the cognitive to theperceptual system.

Another MoRAS design principle would be that robust systems have cas-cades of backup mechanisms for breakdowns, and these should be designedfor. In HCI, for example, when software fails the problem lands in the user’slap, and if there is no better success there, moves to the user’s system adminis-trators, thence to the service organization of a vendor. This series of handoffscan be made more or less graceful by design: helpful error messages to usersand logging information available to hand to system administrators.

A whole set of additional principles, particularly for use within variouscomplex adaptive systems that populate the MoRAS, can be found in a bookby Axelrod and Cohen (2000) called Harnessing Complexity. The authors


looked at various kinds of interventions in such systems to enhance theirlong-term viability, focusing on the control of variability, of interaction topol-ogy, and of selection mechanisms.

MoRAS Design Questions

In addition to general design principles like those just mentioned, there arenumerous questions motivated by the MoRAS framework that can help guidedesign. Samples are offered in the following and used in the next section in aconcrete design example.

• Choosing a design focus:• In the absence of an externally given design focus …• Look at the whole MoRAS diagram (cf. Figures 1–3). Do any in-

dividual parts look ripe for design efforts?• Consider two or more places in the MoRAS at once. Do any

such groups look ripe for changes in IT coupling?• If there are specific processes you are interested in (e.g., search

and retrieval), how do they weave throughout the MoRAS? Canyou support them more generally?

• MoRAS analyses:• Where do the relevant components fit in the structure of the

MoRAS?• What dominant processes operate in those components?• What are dominant needs of those components that might be

better met?• How do those needs depend on other components?• What want mechanisms are in place, and how do they satisfy

needs in the changing environment?

• MoRAS design goals:• How can you extract value with new couplings across space,

time, or situations?• Consider basic IT roles like harbinger, collector, integration, re-

use, synthesis, computation, planning, action, coordination,and feedback. Are there ways to apply them in new places in theMoRAS?

• Are there new ways to identify needs or to align want mecha-nisms to needs?

• Are there new methods for accumulation of the GD work beingdone by these systems?

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• What is the desired balance between exploration and exploita-tion? How much variation should you cultivate? How might youalter interaction topologies? What selection criteria seem mostappropriate?

• MoRAS design ideas:• Are there ways to shift more stable, identified burdens down-

ward into infrastructure (fast, less flexible)?• Are thereways tosetuphandoffsandfeedback loopsbetweensystems?• Can you encourage adaptation of other systems to support your

design efforts, for example, by the constructive engagement oftheir want mechanisms?

• Are there useful analogies for what you are trying to do else-where in the MoRAS?

• Are there incidental aspects of the existing system (structure, ar-tifacts, or behavior) available for use by other systems?

• MoRAS design evaluation:• One set of questions for evaluation would basically ask

whether any of the direct design efforts resulting from the in-spirations aforementioned are having their intended success.These would largely be of a sort familiar to HCI practitionersand social scientists, and are omitted here.

• Special MoRAS evaluation questions:• What is the impact of a proposed design on other parts of the

MoRAS? (Use diagrams like those of Figures 1–3 as a checklist.)• Howarecomponents couplednow,andhowwill thatbechanged?• What adaptive processes in the MoRAS will respond to your

first-order design efforts?• What incidental aspects of the world are being changed that

may have been used opportunistically by other systems?

5.3. Design Example

The example here roughly follows the structure of categories of questions inthe previous section, with comments from other categories intruding as appro-priate. The time of the design scenario is somewhere in the future, and hypo-thetical advancements in available technology and practices are assumed, asneeded, to explore the design possibilities. The goal here is not a detailed de-sign but a sketch of a design space, and the exposition is more to show theMoRAS considerations than to provide the sort of coherent exposition of theresulting system that might be given in a design review.


Choosing a Design Focus

Looking at Figure 1, we note that the personal and family spheres havebeen underexplored in ++HCI. We choose a focus there, somewhat arbi-trarily starting with an existing artifact: the refrigerator. This might at firstseem an unusual choice, but it is representative of a growing class of design op-portunities, as IT moves into more subtle positions in our lives, becomingmore embedded and networked.

This example is not without precedent. One notable precursor can befound in Kellogg, Carroll, and Richards (1991), where they use a kitchen ex-ample to explore the integration of real and cyber worlds, emphasizing princi-ples of richness, connectivity, persistence, and direct interaction in the designof future IT-intense physical environments. At least the first two of these prin-ciples have much of the MoRAS flavor, and both the general spirit of their ex-ercise and several of the particulars of their example are echoed here. Inanother precursor for this refrigerator example, Norman (1992) noted the so-cial communication role of refrigerator doors, discussed in MoRAS terms be-low. The purpose here is to bring these and other ideas together to illustrate thepossible role of the MoRAS framework in design.

Analysis

The first step is to note where the refrigerator currently fits in the MoRAS assketched in Section 3.1. It is an artifact focused at the individual or family level.(Recall that this personal sphere is an underexplored area of ++HCI.) Also, be-cause the nominal function of a refrigerator is to preserve food, it is primarilynot an IT. As a result, a typical design opportunity will be to support its primaryfunction with IT infrastructure, for example, by adding various couplings in theMoRAS, in service of various needs. Such needs at the individual–family levelinclude nourishment and familial and social affiliation. Processes related to theformer include acquiring, preparing, and consuming food and depend on mar-ket institutionsofgroceries and foodproducers, cookingandpreservation tech-nologies, and coordination with other family members.

Design Goals and Ideas

Couplings

Coupling Individual Activities to Technology. With scanners on thedoor (UPC bar codes, video, or perhaps with a little voice input when putt-ing away leftovers), the refrigerator can keep track of what goes in and out,keeping an inventory of its contents. It can know what is getting old and

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warn the family to “use it or lose it” (couple to time keepers, databases ofperishability, and human users).

Coupling of Individual (and Individual + Technology) With Self AcrossSpace, Time, and Contexts. The refrigerator can integrate with your cal-endar and let you know if you have time and if there is enough food in it forinviting your close friend over for a spontaneous dinner (harbinger of op-portunity at friend level), and it sends you notification via e-mail at work(coupling across space), including possible quick recipes for what you haveon hand, perhaps even knowing that your friend is a vegetarian (integration,computation, decision support). On approval, it makes the recipes avail-able to your kitchen countertop display, and at 5:30 p.m. preheats the oven.

Integration With Shopping (Coupling to Individual Activity Remote inTime and Space). Your refrigerator knows what you usually keep onhand and makes provisional default shopping lists (adaptive technology,offloading your cognitive task to infrastructure). With those it can set up de-fault orders for online ordering of certain staple goods, pending your ap-proval.

It can signal your grocery store what you are likely to want and when, help-ing their inventory control, and perhaps can have them prepare your defaultshopping ahead of time (diagonal uplink in the MoRAS: individual to organi-zational level). It gets back to you about items currently unavailable at your fa-vorite store (diagonal down link), checks the current stock of alternative stores(gathering information from diagonal up and down), and notes that you go byone such store on your way home from work.

Later at the grocery store, you wonder whether you have enough fresh eggsat home. You ask your refrigerator and it answers, “Yes.”

Couplings Allowing Helpful Computation. Linking the refrigerator toyour electronic recipe book, it checks ingredients for you. It can make upmeals based on your food available or devise weekly meal plans. Laterwhen you are at the market (or shopping online), it could suggest over timethat if you would also buy X you could make Y. It could provide collabora-tive filtering of recipes to make recommendations for you, or again, figureout what you can make fast with what you have.

Considering Other Levels

Individual + Artifacts. When the last bottle of soda is taken out, the re-frigerator gently encourages you to put more in to chill. It does not let youforget the wine bottle you put in the freezer.


At the Family Level. Your refrigerator helps keep track of who likeswhat (Dad gets upset if we run out of pickles; Jimmy does not like peas).

Implied Marketplace Opportunities. The scheme so far also impliesnew business features for competition in the marketplace. For grocersthere are opportunities for offering online stock availability, for shop-ping assistance services (when you get to the grocery store, your cart ishalf full of known needs), and for home delivery of online orders. Thereare also third-party market opportunities. For example, industry prefab-rication, and building contractor installation, of secure through-the-wallhome delivery of perishables (like pre-1960s milk chutes). There are op-portunities for retail organizations to use the information garnered to im-prove their inventory control or make special offers based on menu orshopping ideas.

New Technology Infrastructure–Social Level. Refrigerators begin toform consortiums as software infrastructures allow refrigerators to talk toone another in neighborhoods and propose a cooperative buy of certainstaples on behalf of their owners. Refrigerators open an asynchronouscommunications link between owners and their friends to discuss theidea.

Computation and Adaptation. Your refrigerator learns consumptionpatterns, does needs probability prediction à la Anderson (1990): frequent,recent, and contextual (cf. Anderson’s need probabilities)—“Thanksgivingis next week so do not forget to order the turkey and buy cranberry relish,”or “It is Saturday night and you are likely to eat out.” It uses these to makeshopping and menu suggestions.

Connection to Societal Non-IT Technology Infrastructure. When thepower goes out, a local battery backup keeps the electronics going and doesnot let you open the door frivolously (“Power out, important to con-serve—are you sure you want to open the door?”). It tracks the internal tem-perature for you and informs you what current contents may have gone bad.Possibly it even communicates general statistics on probable spoilage to thehealth department.

Vertical Links to National Institutions. Consumption data (eitherfrom shopping or fridge) is coordinated with health data anonymously for anational health department study.

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Needs and Wants

Inventory. You have a “need” not to run out of food, so the refrigeratorhelps recruit resources and organize behavior (its and yours) in service ofthose needs. By keeping track of your food purchases and consumption, itgives assistance in shopping and meal planning.

Nutrition. You, in fact, have detailed nutritional balance require-ments, so it helps, for example, by notifying you that your green leafy vege-tables are getting old, saying, “Use them now or get some more.”

Social. You have food-related social needs in connection with the din-ner party you are having Saturday night, so it locks the chocolate trufflecake away from the kids (and you) until then.

Want Extension and Alignment to Needs. The refrigerator can alsohelp with shaping your own want extension mechanisms. For example,tallying total ingredients in your fridge, or in particular recipes, it givesyou the good news (nutritional value) and the bad news (fat, artificial col-oring), letting you know “if you eat everything here you will have con-sumed … ,” comparing that to norms for you and to standardrecommendations.

When you take fattening food out, the refrigerator asks if you really want todo that, or says, ”How about an apple instead? There are fresh ones there.” Itcites studies on consequences of fat or reminds you of the family gatheringcoming up that you were hoping to look your best for.

In the spirit of popcorn and soda ads in movies, but in the interests of par-ents for their children, it organizes suggestive “yummy vegetable ads” andgood nutrition guideline promotionals.

Coupling to Markets, Social Organizations, and Research Institutions.As consumer interest in want extender mechanisms grows, the market-

place responds by producing software and content for people to do so, ac-cording to their own choices. To support individuals in their choices ofbetter needs–wants alignment, schools, churches, consumer groups, andextended families organize to provide guidance and make recommenda-tions about software and content that will encourage good nutrition. This ishelped by feedback from families via their refrigerators, about how wellvarious systems are working. Such feedback is also given to research organi-zations, like the National Institutes of Health.


Incidental Opportunism

The design ideas so far have been focused on the refrigerator as a food cen-ter. The MoRAS framework says, per the paperless office example, that weshould also look at the opportunistic exploitation of other aspects of the cur-rent device. Here we focus on one in particular, namely the refrigerator door,and discussion draws liberally from the various design questions.

Individual + Technology Level. The refrigerator door presents a verti-cal surface that individuals look at several times a day and hence has cometo be used as a place to hang calendars and reminders. The door can be-come an electronic display surface personalized for the current approach-ing user showing personal reminders, e-calendar, e-news, or weatherforecasts.

Family + Technology Level. Because members of the household sharethe same refrigerator surface, the surface can be used for communicationand sharing among family members.

Putting the food and display roles together we can have notes on the fridgeabout the food inside like,“Dad says, ‘I bought fresh strawberries for all youkids, help yourself’” or “‘The pie is reserved for Saturday dinner party! Eat itand die!’”

Social Sphere. Because the household often has shared external sociallinks—say, to relatives and family friends—these connections can bestrengthened by Web page presentations from cousins or grandchildren onthe refrigerator door. In addition to Web art of cousins and grandchildren, itmight even maintain real-time awareness portals to such people. It mighteven know that Aunt Sarah is very dear to your family but you have beenout of touch for a long time, and so it moves their Web page to the refrigera-tor (extended family and friend coupling).

Second Order Effects. Thinking in adaptive terms, if this informationand social use of the refrigerator door becomes too successful, people willchange their behavior to hang out around the refrigerator and get in the wayof those wanting food. We can use the adaptive processes of ID to coevolve(in anticipation) the artifact design as well. For example, we might designeasy ways to migrate content from the refrigerator to displays on the sharedkitchen table surface. That capability should in turn affect the content onthe door—becoming more like headlines to be followed up on secondarysurfaces.

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5.4. Discussion of the Design Example

It is critical to note that this MoRAS approach to ++HCI design did not pri-marily emphasize making the refrigerator user friendly (e.g., Davison &Sebrechts, 1992). It did not focus on the narrower scope of the device and di-rect human interaction with it: Is the thermostat easy to read? Is the humiditycontrol of the crisper drawer self-explanatory? Although such efforts are valu-able, here I have undertaken a larger ++HCI exercise, considering this simpleartifact with the MoRAS more in mind: the various roles that IT can playamong the mosaic of human and technical systems that we want to bring intoalignment with human needs.

In the process, we ended up with something that was no longer just a refrig-erator. Indeed it may seem that some of the functionality proposed should re-side in a more general kitchen IT center. The blurring and renegotiation ofsuch boundaries is a likely trend, as we knit more cohesive IT infrastructure.

6. DISCUSSION

This closing discussion begins with a sketch of a MoRAS agenda for futurework and concludes with parting caveats and an invitation.

6.1. Agenda for the Future

The MoRAS framework suggests there is plenty of work to be done by thegrowing assembly of interdisciplinary ++HCI researchers converging on theenterprise of bringing people, information, and technology together in moreeffective and valuable ways. Specifically, efforts are needed in research, edu-cation, and design.

Research Agenda

The basic research agenda involves furthering our understanding of theMoRAS and its relation to design. There are theoretical and empirical aspects,and there is substance both at the level of general systems theory and with re-gards to the specific subsystems involved.

One goal is to advance a unifying understanding of the structure and pro-cesses of the MoRAS, perhaps along the lines sketched in Section 3.2 (the ac-cumulation of design in the battle against entropy). Working toward thatwould require continuing incorporation of classical cybernetic systems theory(e.g., Bahg, 1990; Bertalanffy, 1969; Buckley, 1968), and the theory of com-plex adaptive systems (e.g., Holland, 1992, 1998). It may also benefit from theless traditional theory of living systems such as autopoietic theory (Maturana


& Varela, 1980; for relevance to HCI, see Winograd & Flores, 1987), wherenotions of structural coupling, for example, may be instructive for ++HCI de-sign. New focus is also needed on how coupled adaptive systems of rather dif-ferent types work together (e.g., Ackley & Littman, 1991; Hutchins &Hazelhurst, 1991).

Within the separate disciplines, there is a need not just to understand the in-ternal structure and dynamics of their corresponding particular systems(heads, organizations, markets, culture) but to understand more of how each issituated within the MoRAS. Critical questions will be, How does this systemrespond and adapt to its circumstances? In what ways does the system of focustake for granted the operation of other parts of the MoRAS? How does it relyon the responsiveness or adaptiveness of other components? How does the re-sponsiveness or adaptiveness of other components affect the way this systemfunctions internally? With what other components does it operate mostclosely? What is the relation, and what is the possibly emergent result? Whatother systems rely on what properties of this system? For what?

Toward this end it will be important to try iteratively to identify within dis-ciplines the critical aspects for other parts to know about as they answer thequestions just posed. Is there a simple first-order model of a given system thatcould be exported to others for purposes of MoRAS considerations?

Whatever candidate aspects of the MoRAS framework are proposed, sev-eral approaches to validation will be needed. In several seminars, both mas-ter’s and doctoral students at SI have gained valuable insight by trying to usethe MoRAS framework to analyze case studies that they find in the literatureor examine firsthand. This is a minimal criterion for a framework—that itmakes sense of significant events in the world and generates reasonable hy-potheses. Hypotheses about the MoRAS of the form “basic processes XYZ aresufficient to generate behaviors ABC ” can perhaps be tested by simulations ofan approximate model. Specific empirically accessible hypotheses, for exam-ple, concerning the nature of information want mechanisms, or the effective-ness of various want extension mechanisms, could be explored withexperimental methods.

Research on the application of a MoRAS understanding to ++HCI designhas several components. First, completely consistent with the HCI tradition, isa focus on needs, but on understanding the needs of the many systems in-volved and how they relate. The needs–wants discussion pointed at placeswhere there can be complicated interactions between systems that ++HCIshould be addressing. Methodology will be needed for identifying and docu-menting needs in this larger sense than is customary for HCI, and then for de-signing to align want mechanisms accordingly.

A second component for design research is improving an understanding ofthe places of ++HCI leverage in the MoRAS. This includes not just options for

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placing IT but also how to influence other design mechanisms in the MoRASto respond and adapt appropriately (e.g., by coupling to their want mecha-nisms). From these follow design effectiveness issues: trying different sorts ofinterventions, watching the results in case studies or quasiexperiments, and it-erating the design efforts based on outcomes. IT, of course, will be part notonly of the interventions but also of their efficient design (e.g., CAD) and as-sessment (e.g., prototypes instrumented for evaluation).

Educational Agenda

It is not clear that we can forward a research agenda and take it into practiceuntil we educate a group of people appropriately. An education appropriate tothe MoRAS would have three principal intellectual domains. The first domainwould be an education in systems theory. This education would help under-standing the overall structure of the MoRAS as a system of systems. By sketch-ing properties of many systems in general, it would also ease theunderstanding of specific systems. The second domain would be a general ed-ucation about the component systems. What are their domains, structure, andprimary adaptive and responsive features with respect to the MoRAS? Whatdo outsiders really need to know about them? The third domain would be amore special focus on one or two specific systems of key interest to the stu-dent—the place where they will do most of their work, mindful of the web of theMoRAS. Although high-level characterizations may suffice for the other partsof the mosaic, the details of the part you tinker with are still important.9

Together these three form a kind of fisheye view curriculum. Focus comesfrom this last component: the specialization of the student (say, in CSCW).Context comes from the systems theory that helps organize the whole MoRASview and from some basic knowledge about the most important aspects ofother parts of the MoRAS. This mix gives more meaning to the component ofspecial interest, provides triggers for seeking expertise in other disciplines,plus a minimal common ground for the ensuing interdisciplinary conversa-tions.

The general flavor of the education would be a kind of applied theory, inte-grating both fundamental understanding and design implications. A doctoralagenda emphasizes the theory and its integration, in support of a mastersagenda that emphasizes its application.


9. See, for example, Simon’s (1996) theorem on nearly decomposable systems, whichstates that (a) short-term behavior is dominated by local components, and (b) moreremotely coupled components have an effect only in the long term and only in an ag-gregate way.

Design Agenda

The real design agenda is to carry on with the ++HCI mission, making ITmore valuable in more human ways throughout the MoRAS. Being more mind-ful of the MoRAS highlights opportunities for design as well as strategies andtechnologies to bring to bear. It involves taking principles extracted by researchabout the MoRAS and its design systems and putting them into practice, gainingexperience with this sort of design, accumulating case studies and examples oftools, tactics, and strategies, and then developing design methodologies.

6.2. Caveats

This article represents a hopelessly ambitious effort. By its own premises, itrequires coming to terms with a vast array of mechanisms in a broad mosaic ofcomplex systems. Although unquestionably daunting, the effort has not beenundertaken here in naive belief that anyone or even any group could claimmastery. Rather, the effort is in simple response to the pragmatic conclusionthat, regardless of its tractability, it is the problem we face when we design ITin the MoRAS. Any progress may help.

Two particular shortcomings in the this article should be recognized to helpdirect future efforts. Most obvious is the incompleteness. Figures 1 through 3are only schematic—there are more systems and many more relations of im-port. The theory is still minimal, and its ontological entities (systems, cou-plings, response, adaptation) are underdeveloped. Elaborating the systemsand their relations and mechanisms is probably possible (much of this wouldbe an update of Miller’s, 1978, work with a focus on ++HCI concerns). Theexistence of further powerful theory is an open question and topic for research.

There is another sort of shortcoming, however. Much of this article has hadwhat Postman (1992) might have called a technopolistic bent—the belief that in-formation is at the heart of all problems and new IT the key to all solutions.Part of that bias probably comes with the ++HCI territory, but the MoRASframework really should aspire to be more enlightened. Much of the danger oftechnopoly comes from the explicit, reductionist, and unsubtle notions of in-formation and its technologies. The results are, for example, “bricks and buck-ets” notions of information and people’s heads (Harris & Dewdney, 1994) andtyrannies of the explicit (Grudin, Horvitz, & Czerwinski, 1999), as well as thepaperless office and travel-free remote collaborations examples I began with.One of the lessons of the emergence of ++HCI, and motivations for theMoRAS perspective, is that richer models of activity, information, and cou-pling are needed to capture the subtle but profound multiply interwoven cur-rents of design that are often not very explicit in the MoRAS. The ++HCI goalis to see whether technologies are possible that are more congenial to the var-

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ied and subtle needs throughout the systems involved: to build trust in remotecollaborations, foster social capital in communities, produce better stu-dent–teacher identification that grounds eager learning.

6.3. Concluding Remarks

The goal of this article is to lay out the MoRAS in a preliminary frameworkto support the broader scope of design implicit in the ++HCI mission. Al-though the scale of the MoRAS is daunting, this article represents the beliefthat ++HCI will benefit from participants in the converging disciplines fore-going some of their specialized focus for a valuable overview of other parts ofthe MoRAS and how they work together. Such an overview could providesanity checks on our local views, give us a way to know whom to consult aboutother matters that arise, and create a shared framework for those conversa-tions. Clearly, an extended formulation of any such framework can beachieved only by a prolonged, interdisciplinary community effort. This articlestrives primarily to stimulate the interest that might engage such an effort.

NOTES

Acknowledgments. The ideas presented here owe much to many people. I thankDan Atkins for bringing together the team here at SI; my colleagues here, particu-larly Michael Cohen, for coteaching a course where we explored some of these con-cepts; and the several dozens of students that have helped identify readings and casestudies and discussed them in seminars. I thank Wendy Kellogg, Maria Slowiaczek,Jeff Mackie-Mason, Paul Resnick, and the several anonymous reviewers for theirvery helpful comments on drafts of this article. The knowledge, wisdom, and inspi-ration come from these many; the mistakes, shortcomings, and general folly aremine.

Author’s Present Address. George W. Furnas, School of Information, 550 EastUniversity Avenue, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109–1092. E-mail:[email protected].

HCI Editorial Record. First manuscript received March 23, 1999. Revision re-ceived February 29, 2000. Accepted by Wendy Kellogg, Clayton Lewis, and PeterPolson. Final manuscript received May 2000. — Editor

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