Review for Questioning the Technological Panacea: Three Reflective Questions for Designers

This paper investigates questions about the appropriateness of technological solutions to non-technical problems. Examination of several proposed technologies for social constructs leads to several questions that can be asked to evaluate whether or not a technological solutions is appropriate for various perceived problems.

This paper addresses an important series of questions that should be at the heart of all CHI work. The authors identify several recent research efforts that have proposed technological approaches to issues such as encouraging interaction in the workplace or at scientific conferences, physical exercise motivation, and scheduling problems for busy mothers.

In discussing these proposals, the authors of this paper note that the tTechnological approaches may not have been the optimal solutions, and that the perceived problems may not have been the appropriate problems, if indeed there were any problems to start with.

This leads to the identification of several problems that CHI researchers can ask to evaluate proposed technologies. As these questions get to the core of what computer-human interaction can be about - ie., when and how should we interact with computers - this paper challenges the CHI community to think more broadly about their work and its role in society. This is a discussion that we need to be having, and the authors should be thanked for raising it.

I encourage the authors to dive further into these questions, addressing issues of values. Specifically, when asking how technology mask the underlying nature of problems, the authors are putting their values in opposition to those of researchers propossing new technologies. How can these conflicts be constructively addressed?

One nitpick - on page 5, a mention is made of "three questions". Those three questions are not all clearly delineated until page 7. Perhaps this should be made clear earlier.

I hope to hear more of this line of inquiry.