Sesiones y Temáticas

Part 2 uses the creation of practical projects to reflect on trust across different contexts and how trust-enablement works as a practical implementation. Each project builds on the preceding project. As I learnt about trust and context, I shaped the next project and re-framed my enquiry. This conclusion explores what the projects discussed in part 2 had in common, that is, what issues linked to the design of trust seemed to re-appear across domains. The differences in how trust worked and the insights gained from the projects are also relevant. Some of the insights seem incidental, others more overarching in the understanding of how trust-enablement works. Insights are explored and applied further in part 3.

One contribution of my thesis is to present from an interactive design perspective how trust can only be understood in context, and that the understanding of trust evidence is only meaningful once filtered by those involved in the situation. As my research has developed, it has become apparent that trust evidence is so contingent on how participants understand context that it is more useful from an interactive design perspective to focus on how participants create context. As each participant might draw different interpretations, I argue that digital environments need to look for different ways to support trust that do not focus on the surface value of trust signals. This concept is pursued in part 3. By understanding how trust works across different contexts, we can design digital environments that enable trust by supporting participants’ trust processes and preferences. This was the aim of the projects outlined in Part 2.

The data produced by the second and third projects was different to the final two projects. The second and third projects delimited the range of responses a participant could provide. In these projects, participants could only choose from a restricted selection of responses. The final two projects, on the other hand, allowed participants to produce specific references to a situation or arguments to back up observations about trust. Limited information cues were chosen as design elements and exploration points for two of the projects (the financial trading game and the ‘virtual teams’ project) to learn about trust in certain conditions. The type of trust situations of particular interest here are when reputation and knowledge mediated by the experience of others cannot be accessed or relied upon. This approach reflects the conditions of current digital environments, within which

users can encounter an infinite number of strangers and participate in limitless unknown interactions.

One aspect that all the project insights had in common was the idiosyncratic nature of the judgment of trust. All participants had different ways of making sense of a situation and then applied their personal opinion of what trust should be. Chapter 5 found that participants may look beyond the decision frame as demarcated by the designer to form a perception. Chapter 7 demonstrated that participants approached the activity of finding trust with similar processes; they just had different interpretations, perspectives and preferences that determined their trust perception. All participants differentiated between facts and the presentation of facts. They read ‘in between the lines’ of what the presentation was saying about the authenticity of the material and also the motivation of the material’s writer. In Chapter 8, the director of the highly emotional documentary pointed out that in order to form trust, we need to let participants form their own ways of reaching understandings. In order to enable trust, digital environments need to be created by the users themselves so that users can share and manage the type of trust evidence and relationships that are relevant to them. As technology and design is now at a point where spaces can be established that can be infinitely configurable by users, this agenda may be achieved in the near future.

One observation that stands out for me across all the practical projects I undertook is how interested participants are in the concept of trust. It was a subject they wished to talk about and reflect on. Möllering (2006a) describes trust as a ‘mystical’ process that, if it were explicable, would not be trust. Perhaps users are drawn to this magical quality of the interaction, are intrigued by the possibilities trust offers and find it a topic worthy of philosophical reflection. The claim that users are interested in trust cuts against the grain of the literature that either assumes that users do not want to have anything to do with trust (for instance, the work of Bødker 2007; Quercia 2009), or that users need to be involved because they hold essential information required for the trust interaction. At the beginning of this thesis, in section 1.1, I examined how trust research is split between those who wish to attempt to automate trust for the user and those who believe that trust interactions should combine the power of computing

technology and human thinking. The research literature encouraged me to share the assumption that users were either not interested in trust or only interested because they had to be, and I found that this view is not necessarily correct. There is little research dealing with the issue or whether users might find the concept of trust intrinsically interesting. The research closest to the claim that users are interested in trust is research that investigates the link between control and trust for users.

Researchers (for instance, Kaminski et al. 2005; Chang & Schroeter 2010) argue that users wish to be in control of their trust interactions including the level of privacy used in their digital lives. Users wish to self-manage how they present themselves to others, worry when information is taken out of context, and value when others are discreet with their information (Preneel 2010). Squicciarini (2008) argues that a solution that allows users to control their data is a negotiation system whereby users trade private information incrementally. Users are more likely to share information if they perceive they have control over it (Chatfield et al. 2005). However, the claim that users want to deal with trust because they wish to control their interactions still implies that users are only interested in trust as a means to an end rather than trust as a core interest in itself.

In order to verify the claim that users have an interest in some areas of trust, I contacted a number of researchers in the field of trust research to canvas their opinion on whether they think users are interested in trust decisions and to check if there was any pre-existing research that I had missed. Wakeman (2010) believes that users do not favour trust interactions because to focus on a trust interaction takes users away from their ‘primary cognitive task’ at the moment. But what if trust was the cognitive task at hand? On the other hand, Ries (2010) believes that users do not like making decisions, but sometimes do want to have a level of control in the interactions that affect them. Users understand trust in terms of risk, according to Lacohée (2010), who, as an example, points to a new and developing market in information brokerage. A new organization, Mydex, helps individuals manage their personal information on their own terms. The organisation is attempting to re-dress the current power dynamics that develop between individuals and institutions. Often individuals lose control of their personal data

when it is handed over to an organisation. The information is used by the organisation in all sorts of ways that disadvantage the individual, for instance, the data is sold to third party companies that use the data to improve marketing techniques.

In reference to how and why technology is accepted, Lacohée et al. (2006) argue that users understand the inherent risks involved when using technology, and see interaction with technology as a trade-off with risk. For instance, there is an item for purchase on an internet site that is very tempting. However, it is possible that purchasing the item might lead to theft of credit card details. It depends on how tempting the item is for a user to purchase it.

I am not arguing that users are interested in all trust interactions. There are a multitude of trust decisions involved in daily life and it would be too complex to process each one separately. But I agree that there are some trust decisions that users want to be involved with and these types of decisions are those that involve interaction with others. There may be a spectrum of trust decisions, and towards one end are the types of trust interactions users are drawn to and are interested in. At the other end of the spectrum are decisions that are either considered boring or stressful, and users would prefer not to engage with them. More detail about what type of decisions lie at different ends of the spectrum is a subject for further research.

It was surprising not to find more difference in how trust works across these four domains. Different dimensions of trust may be prioritised depending on the situation. For instance, a visit to a doctor may emphasise competence, whilst an interaction with a potential date may prioritise continuity (depending on personality preference). This might point to a problem with the design of this and other data-gathering projects. Without ‘real-world’ motivation, participants in a project are not responding as if a context was ‘real’ and may adapt generic ways of thinking about trust. However, this insight in itself is useful for the design of trust-enablement. Trust is not easily predicted or pre-empted. As all trust interactions are to some extent unique, all trust-enablement can seek to achieve is to create environments within which users can share context, and share and manage the trust evidence important to those in a situation. If these environments

are flexible enough to be configured ‘on the fly’, then users can change and shift as the situation evolves.

The projects revealed that although trust is highly personal and idiosyncratic, it does evolve in relatively structured ways. In Chapter 5, participants understood that when one is playing a game, certain expectations are met that help form the decision-making space. In Chapter 7, all participants drew attention to similar parts of a document when seeking trust, but applied different priorities when weighing up the information. If we can build these processes and structures into digital environments, it may assist users to create the contexts needed to trust-enable. Part 3 applies the implications from these methodological insights to arrive at a proposition, a set of design elements that are a solution for trust-enablement within the interactive design of a digital environment. The nuances of trust found in this part are interpreted into design elements in the form of affordances and configurations.