The aim of this thesis is to explore how trust-enablement is achieved in a digital environment using interactive design. Part 1 lays the theoretical foundations for this argument. Trust-enablement is when users can conduct trust relationships on their own terms, exchanging evidence relevant to their interaction and understanding. This is an advance on previous research that argues for the façade or the enforcement and coercion of trust. It is a position that is agnostic about the value of the relationship: both trust and distrust are equally valid options. I argue that trust-enablement is a two-way negotiation – those who seek trust may also be
subject to trust considerations. In this first part, I establish the key terms of reference and justify why trust-enablement is a suitable approach to trust in a digital environment. I outline ethnomethodology and critical interaction design, two inter-connected fields on which this research builds. In part 2, I explore how the design of trust works in a series of practical projects. Applying my insights from part 2, I argue in part 3 that the development of a digital environment that is a shared context, where trustors can exchange evidence on their own terms, is the key to trust-enablement.
Part 1 opened with a description of the contested nature of trust. Researchers from a wide range of areas have defined trust and emphasised different elements of trust in a myriad of ways. I agree with Cofta (2007, p. 11) that trust is a relationship within which the trustor, in a position of vulnerability, is confident that another party (the trustee) will respond in the trustor’s interest. However, definitions of trust do not contribute much to how trust works as a practical accomplishment as trust seems to be so context-specific. In this thesis, I argue that focusing on the processes and structures around trust, and thereby side-stepping any static definition of trust, allows a designer to consider the elements of a digital environment that can enable trust.
The form, establishment and maintenance of trust relationships in digital environments are in part shaped by the underlying technology used to create digital systems. What are the qualities of the medium that we have to work with as digital designers? Current digital environments are characterised by users undertaking a high amount of information disclosure. A flood of data is being created that users of the internet can archive, search, and possibly take out of the context it was intended for. The full ramifications of these types of environments are yet to be understood. Donath (2007) argues that in the pursuit of efficiency, some digital environments have also short-cut many aspects of human behaviour, and some of these short cuts are inappropriate, meaning that users tend not to want to participate. It is possible that trust is one of those aspects of human behaviour that needs complex treatment in the digital environment.
This thesis uses ethnomethodology and critical interactive design as perspectives to explore the design of trust-enablement within provisional digital
environments. Generally speaking, ethnomethodology is a recent branch of sociology, which argues that meaning is constructed by those involved in a situation. From this perspective, trust is a practical accomplishment between trustors and trustees. Ethnomethodology has influenced interactive design. Interactive design, in broad terms, is the consideration and design of the user’s experience of a digital environment. Originally, the aims of this discipline were grounded in the values of automation and efficiency. However, as time has passed and technology has moved into more areas of human lives there has been an increasing amount of critique of mainstream interactive design theory. Different strands within interactive design exist. One of these, ‘critical design’, is particularly relevant to trust-enablement because it encourages consideration of how users might be able to reflect critically upon their own identities and roles within digital environments, as well as consideration of alternate ways users can relate to each other (beyond the pursuit of commercial interactions). The research perspectives allow a problematising of trust, context, the role of the participant and designer in a digital system, and the intersections between these concepts. Problematising also opens up exploration of the connection between theory, practice and what design should be doing in the rapidly changing area of digital environments.
Now that the grounding of this research is established, this thesis turns to explore the intricacies of trust via a series of five practical projects that are data- gathering exercises forming the basis of part 2. Trust is studied across a series of several domains. These projects explore the tensions between trust in theory, which have been discussed in this part, and trust in the context of a practical implementation. The thesis gains insights into how participants construct trust, what trustors value in a trust interaction, and how they resolve ambiguity. I convert these insights in part 3 to propose a design approach that may enable trust. As mentioned above, I argue that one solution to trust-enablement is the development of a shared context between users.