wendy house

I first heard of the Park Hill estate during my undergraduate environmental psychology classes in 1986.  The architect’s, Ivor Smith and Jack Lynn’s, vision for a high rise estate to replace sprawling slums in the northern English city of Sheffield with “Streets in the Sky”. Streets in the sky would recreate the strengths of the communities which had flourished in the back to back slums and provide improved living conditions at a bargain price. Taking people out of small, damp, Victorian terraces where  kids played in the streets and giving them streets in the sky with views over the city, inside toilets, covered walkways, balcony’s where children could play and neighbours could chat, with room for attractive open park land around the high rise buildings.  Smith and Lynn’s designs were heavily influenced by Le Corbuiser’s Breton Brut as evident in his Marseilles Unité d’Habitation. Breton Brut became known in Britain as ‘Brutalism’,  simple functional form. They wanted to build in a sense of neighbourliness into these functional spaces.

These changes were intended to improve the standard of living for people now living in a slum area locally know as ‘Little Chicago’ in the gangster era.  The Park Hill estate was completed in 1961 with 995 flats that could house over two thousand people overlooking Sheffield city centre. Front doors opened to a 12 ft wide balcony, a street, that runs right across the estate over bridges between buildings.  Milk floats could trundle from door to door along streets named the same asthose in the original slums they replaced.  People that were neighbours in the slums were rehoused next to each other. 

Worthy, admirable intentions

When built,  the social ideal didn’t happen

The estate soon became known as Sheffield’s San Quentin. The failure of the original design vision has been blamed on many things including

• easy access routes for muggers
• poor sound insulation
• the streets being open to the inclement Sheffield weather
• the building’s ugliness
• the poverty of the occupants

In 1998 Park Hill became the largest grade 2  listed building in europe.

This centruy English Heritage, Urban Splash and Sheffield city council have been renovating Park Hill.

It’s difficult to tell from the publicity what is being changed to make the project work  as a successful place to live this time. A recent BBC TV programme about the renovation focussed on English heritage’s aesthetic and structural requirements for preservation not mentioning any changes to the space aimed at improving the occupants expereince of living there. The programme made the vision appear less social that the original. So what will have changed since it first opened?  It looks like the renovation will be

• It’s prettier with bright rainbow colours
• occupants will not all be council tenants, some will be home owners and some shared ownership. They will be a different socio-economic mix
• the streets will not be open to the Sheffield weather
• living there comes with the kudos of living in a classic listed building

10 more days to produce a joint practical report. Each day I walked passed Steve’s home and called for him. He was always either out, off his head, or sleeping. He didn’t turn-up for classes either.  I suspect he was really living in Pill village.

After a week of not being able to coordinate any sensible time with Steve I decided to cut my losses.  Doing the work in half the allotted time, with half the workers, my maths told me this would be 4 times as hard to do now because I’d tried to work with Steve. Sigh. No more calling for Steve. Hoorah!

The experimental work, persuading 20 people, all strangers, to give me 15 mins of their time to make 30 line-length comparisions was a fun way to meet people in pubs. The research for, and writing of, the report was also fun. 

Steve was soon forgotten.

Paul let me into Steve’s home. Student accomodation, 9 boys sharing a kitchen and washrooms. Ewe. Steve was lying face-down on the hallway floor making a gurgling sound that could have been a variation on his normal giggling.

what’s wrong?

he’s stoned

drunk?

No, high

I laughed. Steve had already started without me. Our coursework was an experimental study of the effects of the Muller-Lyer illusion characteristics on visual perception.  Steve had clearly bypassed the constraints of the specific illusion, the visual sense and the experimental method. Steve had gone straight for an immersive qualitative experiential study through the doors of all perception.  You had to admire his rebellious,  innovative and hands on approach to his degree studies. 

I’d heard about drugs, not taken any, not really interested in taking any. The opportunity to talk to someone while stoned was a first for me and very tempting. Our interviewing skills practical wasn’t due for a while, but a bit of up front practice could come in handy.  Happily I bounced over Steve’s twitching body, sat on the floor by his head and tried to attract his attention.  He garbled and giggled and gurgled, but nothing recognisable as a word, no phrases. I got bored of watching this body with all the control skills of baby.

when is he likely to be compus mentus?

I dont know

can you let him know I called and ask him to call for me when he’s got his marbles together

yeah

Not cute, like Brad Pitt or Jonny Depp are cute.

Not handsome, like Daniel Craig or Sean Connery are handsome.

Steve had something, like Robert Carlisle or Gary Oldman have something.

Instead of working on our psychology practical coursework we spent an October Saturday afternoon wandering round warehouses, photographing them. Steve giggled a lot, like my grandmother or Alan Carr giggle.  Often. I wandered after him, playing the audience, taking photographs, and enjoying the peace of the places.  Practical work? We can start on Monday, no hurry….

lecturer: you will work on this psychology practical in  pairs

Ony 2 weeks at University, one as a fresher and one on the course. It was easy to predict how the 29 girls and 3 boys would pair: 

• Tom, from Dudley, the folk music fan would pair with Rob the straight looking, quiet, guy. Rob was sectioned less than 2 weeks later. 
• Steve with his white and lime green mohiecan haircut, white leather biking jacket, gold nose-ring, black and bleached stained never-ending drainpipes would pair with Karen the silent dumpy shuffling goth who reminded me of a doormouse in need of a haircut.
• The gaggle of girls who dressed for their intended career paths as personnel managers in neatly ironed pastel coloured blouses and pencil skirts would all pair together.
• Heather from Sheffield, in her Def Lepoard t-shirt, locks that bounced on her hips, cowboy boots and a laugh that could stop a bus at 100 yards – would pair with her flatmate - me. I definitely got the best deal.  Me, straight a-line bob, pointy nose, cheshire-cat-grin and home-made 1920′s styled hand-made clothes in black and white.

I was wrong with two predictions.  Without a glance her way Steve strode straight passed Karen, placing himself between Heather and me.  There was something sneaky and slinky about the move. His first conversation with me was to ask if I would consider working with him on this practical.  I was flattered. People who clearly put so much time and effort into peacocking rarely noticed my acceptable variation on mainstream self-presentation. What prompted this?

Karen’s hand lifted a swathe of black backbrushed bush from her face and her piecing brown eyes clearly shifted from Steve to me. She turned abrubtly and shuffled double-speed in her overly tight long skirt, to Heather. Heather welcomed her with all the warmth of an earth mother. My already strong relationship with Heather wouldn’t be dented by this unexpected abberation.

I agreed to work with Steve, we arranged to meet that weekend ….

The British Psychology Society Research Digest includes many thought provoking and entertaining articles from all over the world.  Sometimes it is difficult to work out if the articles are serious, tongue-in-cheek, or some-other-body-part connecting with some-other-body-part that should ultimately be censored (smirk).

For example, in  a recent edition a French researcher wrote a thesis diagnosing Darth Vader with a mental disorder - Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD).  Evidently this could explain why the film is popular with teenagers – a group where BPD is more prevalent than the rest of society.  Surrupticiously implying that people with BPD will tend to like the film. 

I’d like to make it thoroughly clear that despite any evidence to the contrary, I’ve always found the Star Wars films rather unengaging.  Really, no, it’s true…. Mwa hahahahaha HA!

wendy  @  ho mail

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WES ©:   Wendy Experience Scale*

What is this?

This is a tool for assessing product and services experiences.   The tool uses a questionnaire  developed with the help of Excel and 84 pots of tea.   The  WES © can be administered to any Wendy  that uses a product or service that you want to assess.   The WES © will tell you whether that product or service meets the stringent, to be published, Wendy  International Standard of Experiences (WISE).    Unlike assessment tools such as the SUS which focuses merely on usability with  Likert scales**,   the WES ©   focusses on product and service relevant experiences including usability with  9 semantic differential scales*** .     The scales tap into the following experiences:

1. Fabulousness
2. Aesthetics – Visuals
3. Fitness for purpose
4. Financial value
5. Aesthetics – Tactility
6. Usability
7. Complexity
8. Engagement
9. Predictability****

 Also known as ‘ FAFFAUCEP’   (pronounced faff-Oh-sep)

The WES © is currently in a Beta release stage and is available for use* by product and service developers on condition that they ask advance permission and provide me with a full report of the product, service,  assessment conducted including the results which will be used to build the  WISE standards.

Administering the WES ©

Let a common all garden Wendy use your product or service  to complete a common task that it was designed to enable.   Provide a unbroken supply of tea during use.   Observe the Wendy complete the task collecting usability style observational data.   When the Wendy has completed the task,   or given up  provide her with a copy of  the WES © and ask her to mark an X on the line between each pair of experience  descriptors that indicates her experience on  this continuum.   There is a practice item that you should encourage the Wendy to complete then discuss her answer to make sure that she understands how to use the scale.     As the Wendy completes the scale ask her to describe examples that have lead to her reporting this experience.   This information will be extremely useful for either developing marketting materials or deciding what to change to improve the experience.

Below is an example of a WES ©  completed by my marking X’s on each scale item describing my experience of my wireless radio.   You can make your own practice scale that covers some dimension of the Wendys or the product being assessed.   In the example below the practice item asks about whether the Wendy considers the product a worthy conversation piece.

Practice by identifying  where you are  on this scale:

Where is the Wireless Radio on these scales?:

Analysing WES © Results:

Allocate the location maked on the line with a weighting number between 1 and 10.    

For even number questions the weightings increase towards the left,   for odd number questions the weightings increase towards the right.     Sum all the weightings.       The total possible score is 90.   Higher scores indicate better Experiences.  

Coding the example provided above looks like this

 Total score = 62/90 = 69%

The  average of multiple  WES © scores can be  used  to provide  overall Experience score for the product.  

The   normalisation data to enable comparision across different products and services  and  indicate the value of the score relative to a benchmark will be published as part of WISE.   Note that without the normalisation data it is possible that all procucts receive scores in the 80′s (a  roof effect)  or below 20 (a floor effect).     Our expert, on-site, Wendy (me)  recommends that prior to the publication of WISE we should assume that any score under 60 is at best a mediocre product or service and any score under 45 is an experience that should be avoided.

For in depth analysis each item should be verified with the  observational measures taking during the use phase and the comments made by the Wendy’s when completing the questionnaire.  

In this example we can clearly see that the tactile aesthetics (score = 5) provided the biggest opportunity for improving Wendy’s experience.   Wendy talked about the radio being a bit too big to put in her pocket,   she liked the bouncy rubber bits but all the little buttons were a bit too small and pointy to enjoy pressing them,   she prefers rubber-buttons (who doesn’t?!) and the industrial-safety feel for portable.    

Next Steps

The WES ©  development team haven’t decided whether to gather normalisation data on the vo version, refine the  item labels before collecting normalisation data  or just chuck the semantic differential format and  develop  WES © (v1) based on a creatively cunning perverison of  Kelly’s Repertory Grid technique.  

* Use is permitted by prior agreement with the inventor (me,   Wendy!)

** the linguistically pedantic should note that Likert scales tend to use split infinitives such as ‘strongly agree’ which can irritate those completing the scale undermining its efficacy in cases where people choose not to select any options that include split infinitives for purely curmudgeonly reasons.   This makes the scale unreliable for responses from educated people from Yorskhire.

*** The semantic differential is based on the assumption that everyone interprests the scales in the same way.   Unfortunately,   this assumption is not true rendering the WES © useless to anyone other than Wendy.

**** For some products or services predicatability is not a positive experience quality (e.g. games).   Administrators are advised to either scope the item to refer to the service or product  controls.  

When returning an assessed  cousework essay on UK history in the 19th century to a 17yr old me…

Tory School teacher (TST):   you are very Machiavellian

Wendy:   is that a good or a bad thing?

TST: let me know when you find out

Within a couple of hours I’d  read a copy of ‘The Prince’ .   It was fascinating, written beautifully, based on multiple case study research to provide a  pragmatic set of behavioural recommendations for a leader (Prince) occupying a recently acquired territory to maintain effective control.   In the 1960’s psychology used the term ‘Machiavellianism’ to label a personality ‘Disorder’ with the core theme of  deceiving others for personal gain.      I wish I’d kept the essay that prompted the TST’s comment.        

You  can self-assess yourself for 1960’s style psychology Machiavellianism here.

Today I scored as a ‘Low Mach’.   The results say that I ‘reject’ Machiavelli’s opinions.   Indeed, I am not and have never aspired to be a prince, princess or banker.    Alternatively, I could have lied here and on the questionnaire….

I vote that we rename Machiavellianism with the more topical outbreak of:

Chief Executive Bankerism

was I going to tell you something?

can you remind me what it was?

<Essay warning>

Not distributed within the mind,  distributed across people and other things.   The work of Yvonne Rogers  in the 1990′s introduced me to the idea of distributed cognition.   Here are some examples from my everyday life:

• placing my empty bottles by the front door to remind me  to take them to the bottle-bank when I leave the house (memory distributed between bottles and Wendy’s absent mind)
• going upstairs to get my passport,   when I get upstairs I’ve forgotten why I went there,   going back downstairs and seeing the holiday (excitement level: Amber) details on Darling I remember why I went upstairs. (memory distributed between holiday details on Darling and Wendy’s absent mind)
• At the pub quiz,   trying to name a song title from hearing a snippit of the  tune,   I can only hum the continuation of the  tune,   another team member can sings the lyrics to my hummed tune,   a third team member can now name the band then the fourth team member can remember the song title (memory socially distributed between team members).  
• I can’t remember my password as letters and numbers,   I can’t remember the layout of a keyboard,      when infront of Darlings keyboard I  can reliably produce  my password  (memory distributed between keyboard layout and Wendy’s absent mind).   The recent move from US to UK keyboards has been a bit password-disruptive.
• I can’t remember how to get from St Nicolas’s market to Clifton,   but when I am in Bristol I can walk the route directly with no trouble whatsoever,   very pleasant it is too   (Memory distributed between the city-scape and Wendy’s absent mind).   Note that the Schrocks recently experienced the way that St. Nicholas market can suprise you by turning out to be exactly where you  are wandering.

People, sensibly, strategically delegate the effort involved in constructing some memories to post-it notes,   lists, calendars,  address books,   mobile phones,  bag-contents, places,  blogs, photoalbums, family and friends.  

A die-hard cognitivist might say this is just context-cued recall.   Both paradigms provide the means to describe human behaviour,   but the approaches to psychological  theory building and  research are radically different.   The cognitivist would attempt to identify the specific cues that work most effectively and assess them in a lab,   one specific unusual context,  rather than analyse everyday activities in commonly meaningful contexts.   These different research techniques would yield different practical,   application, recommendations.

The cognitivists make the research language and approach to understanding human behaviour their domain as specialists,   ‘everyday’ approaches enable results to be readily recognisable, understandable and communicable to people outside of a specialist discourse.   They also afford more meaningful pragmatic applications.  

<Essay warning over>

My next essay will probably be on Reading’s buses…

also known as:   Remembering what to remember

I first encountered the currently popular (in Psychology of memory circles) ‘prospective memory’ as a term to describe  remembering what to remember through Baddeley & Wilkin’s 1984 article ‘Taking memory out of the laboratory’ .   The Laboratory,  Lab, was typically where British psychologists studied  human memory  using rigourous exprimental methodologies.   The lab was normally a windowless, beige, unadroned room lest participants, then ‘subjects’,  be distracted or inadvertantly influenced by non-experimental phenomena that might undermine the effect of the experimental manipulation.    

I liked Baddeleys work because he’d systematically estabished the positive  impact of re-instating memorising context on  recall levels through various studies including  the influence of alcohol (Vodka) or physically being under water (diving)  when memorising,   and recalling.   Both these experimental studies sounded fun,   were themselves memorable,  and were even repeatable* in less rigorous forms with colleagues at University during normal studenty nocturnal activities.  

‘Taking memory out of the laboratory’ was published in a book called ‘Everyday memory, actions and absentmindedness’  .    This was ground breaking news to me in 1984.    There I  was in the middle of a degree course, approved as official content and jargon by the British Psychological Society,  where I had focussed my study  on memory research.    I had just about got the hang of the technically specific language of psychological memory research such as retro-interference, auditory-loop, digit-span, recognition vs recall  and much more.    Then,   THEN!   Those gosh-darn leading memory researchers sprang some non-technical terms that made sense and weren’t  part of the current disciplin jargon.   How cheeky is that?

Absentmindedness?  

Cognitive psychologists study the absense of mind.   It was too much,  I had a couple of vodkas and fell in  a local canal with my miss spelt revision notes to celebrate.  

PS:   If I remember I’ll tell you why I’m telling you about prospective memory in a later post…

* Actually conducting the experiements makes them  more memorable and easier to understand an evaluate than just reading or thinking about them over a cup of tea.

According to get Reading:

“She then fled downstairs and tried to call 999, but he grabbed the phone off her and punched her twice in the face.   She began screaming so he put his arms around her neck so she couldn’t breath”   she was “in fear of her life” and “honestly believed she might die”,

This behaviour is reported as ‘out of his normal character’ and he says

“He is dreadfully upset about what has happened,”

Whether ‘in’ or ‘out’ of character he chose to stop her seeking social support (calling the police),   punch her in the face  two times  and throttle her when she tries to get support locally by screaming.   He could have chosen  to ignore her or do a silly dance.    It was his choice and he did choose extreme violence.    Evidently he ‘lost it’ (self-control?).   Lost it  appears to be part of  a socially acceptable storyline to excuse violence.   Psychologists label loss of control as a psychological  disorder  and use it to explain the curiously termed  domestic violence.    

“perpetrators of domestic violence  rarely receive adequate psychological treatment, because they are viewed as criminals, rather than individuals with psychological problems.“

In the above case the offender got a suspended sentence and fined the cost of a good night out,   60 quid.   No requirement for a psychological assessment or treatment with the fine hardly touching the actual expense of the social services his behaviour  drew upon (e.g. Police, NHS).  

How safe do I feel in a society where the legal system thinks I can be justifiably (for 60 quid) be repeatedly punched in the face and throttled when I try to call for assistance if the agressor claims its not habitual and they regret it?      

Since moving to Reading I’ve found lots of familiar strangers,   I see them on the bus everyday during my commute,   in the local cooperative store when I’m picking up milk for my tea,   behind the counters in Jacksons,   in the local internet cafe.

During my 1986 final year degree course Environmental Psychology classes I  learned that people are more likely to exhibit altruistic behaviours to familiar strangers (than complete strangers)  when meeting those familiar strangers outside of the normal context.   Each will recognise the other easily but have difficulty placing the source of this familiarity.  

This means that when I meet someone who normally rides on the  same  bus as me everyday,   in Jacksons,   I will think I know them and be nicer than I would be to someone totally unrecognisable.    

Excellent.  

More familiar strangers means more oportunities to be squishy.   Given  my natural  curmudgeonist tendencies this can only be a good thang.  

I have trouble keeping my categories stable.   Evolving categories.    By using mini-series such as ‘cute accent’ and ‘dreamy cheese’  I’ve tried to curb my tendancies to create categories and re-assign posts.   The WordPress categories  are  painfully insufficiently fuzzy for my taste.

The new version of WordPress (2.3) has support for tagging and tag-clouds.    Tags could easily evolve to replace my categories because they support the natural emergent and fuzzy quality of both my categories and interests.   Hoorah!  

Replacing my categories with tags could  clean-up the Wendy House archive navigation for you and me.  Tags do not yet offer some of the useful properties of the category system such as hierarchical relationships and hence  similarity groupings.     I’m starting to use tags on my new posts but old posts are not tagged.  

Will adding tags to old-posts spam your RSS readers?   I’ve asked the WordPress support forum to clarify before I start wrecklessly adding tags to past-posts to while away  the long winter evenings.  

Waffle Warning

dichotomy in the universe of closed questions

a ‘closed question’ is a question that has a specific answer,   answers like:

• yes please!
• Oskaloosa in Kansas
• 43
• 2 pints of real Ale
• Bling

Lets suppose that in the universe of possible questions there are an infinitie number of closed questions.  

What is the dichotomy in the universe of closed questions?   The dichotomy is between questions that can be answered ‘no’ such as   ‘Wendy,   do you live in an igloo?’,   and questions that can be  answered ‘yes’ such as  “Wendy do you live in a wooden house?”   Tonight’s beer-induced Wendy-epiphany is that this dichotomy of closed questions may not be equally populated.   I suspect that there are more possible questions to which the answer is ‘no’ than there are questions to which the answer is ‘yes’.   This suspicion is based on the following preliminary analysis:

Take this question structure as an example:   “Wendy, do you live in a   [insert word here]?”

If the inserted word is a physical home-type without counting all possible insertions  I am estimating that the answer is more often No than Yes.  

Example physical home-type:   house, bungalo, igloo, TeePee, tent, hotel, skyscraper, apartment, condominium, flat, tree,  bath, lake, road  

If the inserted word  is some other plausible descriptor of living conditions I suspect there is  still an obvious weighting towards no over yes.    

Example plausible descriptor:   mess, illusion, happy place, circus, bubble, dream, fantasy

If the inserted word is not plausible  the answer is most likely to be no

Example not-plausible words:  pin, parrot, toe-nail, bling, 43

There are more no than yes answers in the range of possible answers.   People tend to produce ‘yes’ answers,   it’s been studied by psychologists so that they can create and understand the results of questionnaires.   Since people tend (bias?) to agree, to provide ‘yes’ answers,  the tendancy  has been  given the  fancy name of    ‘acquiescence bias’.        

People, not psychonlogists,  use skill and prior knowledge  to help raise the baseline for the production of ‘yes’ answers above  that which would be predicted by either a

• model that assumes the answers produced are a proportionally representative subset of all possible answers  (More ‘No’ responses), or  
• counter-balanced   (half no, half yes) answers approach normally used in questionnaire design to ‘control’ the bias.    

Some people, and psychologists,  are so cunning they minimize asking questions that can be answered no and can effectively use this acquiescence bias to move towards, and gain, a concensus.   People are wonderfully clever like that;   giving each other the opportunity to say yes.

I really like questions where the answer is ‘yes’,   I’ll leave you with this example:

“Wendy would you like another beer?”

Waffle warning over  

thirty-sixth post in a Wednesday series detailing the frightening truth’s behind Wendy’s singleness.

Reason # 36: fear of failure

Friend:   Did you know [Name]* wanted to go-out-with** you?

Wendy: No.   Why didn’t he let me know?

Friend:   he thought he wasn’t good enough for you

Wendy:   a self fulfilling prophecy if ever I heard one

According to Psychology Today corporate Amercia, which employs most of the boys I meet,  focuses on rewarding actual success rather than the type of activities that lead to innovation and success, including effectively dealing with inevitable failures.   This puts the social forces in place that enhance fear of failure.  

*Names have been changed to protect the wussy.

** ‘go out with’ is a British euphamism for girlfriend-boyfriend specific type activities.

is not only Premenstrual tension,   its also Periodic Male Tension.    According to The Guardian online:

A study by psychologists from the University of Derby, England, suggests that men may experience cyclical symptoms similar to, or even worse than, those suffered by pre-menstrual women, including moodiness, discomfort and loss of concentration.   Everything, it appears, apart from the bloat.

 The study is based on ‘self report’,   they asked people to report experience of symptoms traditionally associated with pre-menstruation.   They asked the women on 3 separate occassions and men just once.   There is no mention of the likely differences between men an women when self-reporting symptoms  (example scientific study of gender bias in self-reporting symptoms).

Gosh,   and there’s me thinking girls had a unique experience around menstrual cycles based on hormones and physiological differences.   Silly me,   its just the bloating.   Boys clearly know what it’s like because the experience has been adequately described in answerable questions and measured by someone in Derby.  

The next grumpy boy I encounter will be asked “is it your time of the month then?‘