Absence — an era needing dialogue with human experience, not with UI/UX user experience
Joining a recent UX psychology book study gave me the chance to encounter a variety of new keywords, and also led me to think about many things I hadn't previously considered.
Even before that, I'd joined the IT industry relatively late, and through UX that I experienced and learned after joining as a trigger, I came to take interest in HCI, design and human psychology, service design, psychology, and eventually philosophy. After passing through that journey, I'm now parked at the station called "sociology."
I've been doing web planning, web planning, UX/UI planning, service planning, PM, PO work, and now I'm doing development PM work. And you might say, "Sociology? Really?" But honestly I think it's just that sociology was too close for me to see.
Most outputs in this field, which is based on ICT or HCI, are tools for the interface (communication) between machine and human, and using those tools, various human-to-human businesses have been conducted.
Moreover, recently a variety of generative AI has begun to appear as SaaS products, beyond mere papers or prototypes.
Because of this, non-programming development — like the mathematicians in the movie Hidden Figures who first faced computers and actively responded to them — is no longer a domain solely for humans.
I had a vague feeling about how to express this.. fortunately I found a piece at a similar temperature, so I'll leave a post.
Sociology is useful if it can combine the experience of the age with life's stories (narratives). On the other hand, sociology that provides only information is useless; and if sociology is sold to power, it can even become dangerous.
Sociology is successful when it is adopted as a tool through which people connect their lives with the times they live in, and delicately assess the influence of their times on their own lives. p20
You have always defined sociology as "a dialogue with human experience." Two questions come to mind about this definition. First, what does "human experience" mean to you here?
It means both Erfahrung and Erlebnis. At the interface between the individual and the world, two different phenomena are produced. German distinguishes these two phenomena, but in English there's no distinguishable word, so people usually blend these two phenomena together into the single concept "experience."
Erfahrung (experience) means what "happens to me" as we interact with the world. And Erlebnis (lived experience) means what "I live through" in the process of encountering the world. That is, lived experience is the product of the perception of what happened and the effort to absorb and make it understandable, working together.
Experience is an effort to attain (inter-individual or higher) objectivity, but lived experience is clearly and explicitly subjective. If we simplify the concepts of experience and lived experience a bit, we could also translate experience as the objective aspect of experience and lived experience as the subjective aspect. Or with a bit more interpretation, we could translate them as experience without the actor's involvement versus experience with the actor's involvement. If experience can be presented like a report on the external world by the actor, lived experience emerges from the actor's "inner side" and affects private thoughts, feelings, and emotions — so it will only appear in the form of a communication by an actor.
In the first category, in reports about experience we can hear of so-called "facts" — inter-subjectively verifiable events. But the contents conveyed as lived experience are not inter-subjectively verifiable. The beliefs the actor conveys are, so to speak, not simple facts but ultimate yet unique "facts at issue." For this reason, the epistemic status of experience and lived experience is very different. And these different epistemic statuses of experience and lived experience cause no small amount of confusion in carrying out sociological research — above all, confusion in interpreting the facts discovered through research. The validity and reliability of the evidence the observer presents differ depending on the object of observation. So they lead the two participants — observer and object of observation — into an endlessly extending "dialogue between sociology and human experience."
Unfortunately, the sociological discourse led globally by English awkwardly merges two phenomena that should be clearly distinguished. Namely, the German concepts we already looked at: experience ("what happens to me," the "objectifiable" aspect of an event) and lived experience (the mental and emotional reverberation of an event or state, the "subjective" aspect). The common absence of this distinction between experience and lived experience in sociological discourse tends to reduce what occurs in human reality — the "lived" reality — to a survey of mere experience. Thereby the understanding of reality is degraded, and its concrete presentation is distorted. p45
Let me explain with a recent case that, despite looking like a truth, is endlessly confirmed and also endlessly contested. At the last Venice Biennale, the Polish artist and animator Artur Zmijewski repeated Philip Zimbardo's famous experiment — the one that randomly divided people into prisoners and guards and observed their behavior. Zimbardo's original experiment produced chilling results. Not many days after starting the experiment, those assigned the "guard" role clearly transformed into torturers and killers, and those classified as "prisoners" transformed into victims. But in Zmijewski's experiment, a completely different "encouraging" result emerged, and the people who participated in this experiment were immediately praised. According to the spirit of mutual understanding, tolerance, and solidarity, the experiment participants cooperated with each other and made a satisfying, lasting agreement.
In a similar vein, "human relations theory" suddenly comes to mind. It is a theory almost forgotten now but that caused a sensation at the time — based on the "Hawthorne studies" conducted in the 1920s and 1930s by Elton Mayo at the Western Electric Company's Hawthorne plant near Chicago. Mayo removed, one by one, the coercive methods that were known to bring about the discipline and obedience of workers. Even so, contrary to the conventional wisdom of the time, work efficiency actually began to rise sharply and continuously. From the perspective of generally accepted knowledge, the results of this experiment were truly an incomprehensible mystery. That is, if one follows the authoritative knowledge based on motion measurements in the age of Taylor and Henry Ford's conveyor belts, and the conventions of a system grounded in punishment.
The surprise and embarrassment shown in these two cases are a side-effect commonly known as "Descartes' error." Descartes' error implicitly assumes that the researcher holds the position of subject, and the research object holds the position of object. But in Zmijewski's and Mayo's experiments, the moment the "research objects" notice that they are fellow participants in the experimental game, the mask of that premise is stripped off and dismissed. In order to live up to the hint that an important public meaning is given to the game, they suddenly begin to pay attention to their own behavior. With a sense of duty to play the game responsibly, they try to do their best in whatever role they've been assigned.
Do we need more "cases"? I think these two cases alone are enough to show the crux of the matter. To state the "crux of the matter" very simply: truths produced with the aid of scientific standards are actually grounded in the Cartesian subject/object dichotomy. That is, the truths of science are valid only insofar as this dichotomy can be maintained. Therefore, in "the human sciences," they will be valid only insofar as subjectivity can be removed from their research objects — human beings. But subjectivity cannot be removed, not even through the most extreme attempts such as Auschwitz or the former Soviet gulag. Between natural-scientific and social-scientific truths lies the unruly, stubborn, irremovable element of human subjectivity. And there is also the element of self-identity — not an ontological or epistemological opposition, but whether one holds the status of researcher or the status of object of research.
Art, unlike (social) science (including various "social" variants), attempts to seize the truth of the object in its "real-life" form — not under the "sterilized, decontaminated" conditions artificially simplified and reduced by an "ideal experiment." Above all, the fact that art is forced to treat the object of art as a subject is important. That is, it presupposes, at the same time as the object-status, a unique identity. Unlike neutrons, white blood cells, or strata, the "object" of art is a being that is human and can make its own decisions. The social scientist must take into account that a human being is a being that can "choose." Of course, some social sciences dream of rising to the privileged status of natural science's authority, but this very difference alone clearly shows the limits of social science. If social scientists turn their backs on writers and artists and fix their eyes on natural-scientific cases, dreaming of rising to a "mature" status like that of "natural" science, they will become lazy and foolish people who have abandoned their calling as social scientists of their own accord. p52
Somehow, when I read sociology, sociologists, and the troubles they try to solve.. the words somehow read as "designer" to me.. is it just me? Only me???! hehehe
