Mapping Wicked Problems and Related Stakeholders
Transition Design Seminar — Spring 2018
Group Members: Yidan Gong, Christi Danner, TC Eley, Robert Managad
Assignment Brief
“Teams will reference their research on a Pittsburgh-based wicked problem and begin visually ‘mapping’ it within 5 categories: 1) social issues; 2) environmental issues; 3) economic issues; 4) political issues; 5) infrastructural/technology issues. Each team will be provided with a paper-based, ‘project canvas’ with the five categories listed and will begin by populating these areas with post-it notes that clearly identify an issue.
Then, teams will undertake a process to: 1) identify all of the stakeholders affected by the wicked problem; 2) map the conflicts and affinities among them that would be barriers to resolution. Step 1 of the assignment involves brainstorming on white boards with post-it notes and in step 2, the use of a paper-based, ‘project canvas’.”
Group Topic
We decided to tackle the wicked problem of the Rising Negative Effects of Social Networking. As a digital system, social network services (SNS) provide avenues towards establishing, sustaining, and building social relationships. They rely on user-generated content, sharing-of-content, and modes of user communication in order to collect user patterns, meta-data, and metrics. There are three primary types of SNS, as categorized by Wikipedia:
1. socializing social network services used primarily for socializing with existing friends (e.g., Facebook)
2. networking social network services used primarily for non-social interpersonal communication (e.g., LinkedIn, a career- and employment-oriented site)
3. social navigation social network services used primarily for helping users to find specific information or resources (e.g., Goodreads for books)
Because of its web-based nature, this wicked problem is unrestricted by geographic barriers — content is generated and shared by users on various platforms instantaneously, and consumers are exposed to content that is [a] of personal relevance, [b] news aggregation, or [c] of high web rating. This generation and exposure to content forms the backbone of this wicked problem, and its ties to big corporation and daily lifestyles sustain its presence in the existing system.
Problem Characteristics
There are 2.46 billion SNS users worldwide, and Americans on average check their phones 80 times a day. Our team entered the research process with pre-existing notions about the issue and we were surprised to find that its scale surpasses what we already knew to be daunting.
There are a number of distinguishing characteristics about this particular wicked problem. First, there is no central problem. Social networking sites have led to many pervasive problems in all aspects of society.
The challenge in studying the rising negative effects of SNS is the task of studying the ramifications of a massive design project that revolutionized society.
Numerous designers, engineers, and business people contributed to the rise in SNS. To mitigate the negative effects is to mitigate consequences that they either could not have anticipated, or that they did not care to anticipate. To say that these designers were not conscientious is tricky territory, because the many positive uses and effects of social networking bring into question whether it is useful or fair to focus only on the negative.
Second, the problem (or problems) that result from SNS are not place-based. It is possible to study anecdotal cases of these negative effects in, for example, a school; however, the problems are not localized. Rather, SNS comprise the modern topography that is the internet. The internet exists everywhere and nowhere at the same time, and the comfort of its constant presence has led to its largest psychological effect on the world’s population: addiction.
Social psychologist Adam Alter describes addiction as: “something you enjoy doing in the short term, that undermines your well-being in the long term — but that you do compulsively anyway.” Many of the negative effects of SNS stem from its highly addictive nature. Unlike drug or alcohol addiction, internet and smartphone addiction do not carry a cultural stigma. Therefore, many people who are most destructively affected by the negative psychological effects of social networking sites may not realize that they have a problem. The root negative effect (addiction) is invisible to many because the dominant cultural mindset says that constant social networking is both acceptable and normal.
Social networking companies take advantage of the addictive nature of their technology in order to expand their influence and power into all sectors.
We found that the driving force behind these negative effects appears to be capitalism and greed on the part of these companies.
Finally, we considered that these characteristics could comprise a unique typology for a transition design problem. The rising negative effects of social media are a network of interrelated problems; there are many positive effects to consider; the problem is not place-based; and most people have a high degree of familiarity with the topic.
Connections Between Processes and Trends
Through mapping our wicked problem and connecting the different root causes and consequences, we identified three recurring nodes: SNS companies, addiction, and data. The above diagram illustrates the connections that emerged from the complexity of the research we gathered. We identified these three nodes as possible points of intervention that might radiate out and cause changes through the whole system, like acupuncture.
Companies
The capitalist context motivates SNS companies to be profit-oriented. The companies monetize users’ attention and clicks, so they create products that become addictive to keep the users on their site. Competition in the SNS market increases the incentive to make their products irresistible, thereby perpetuating the cycle. The companies continue to make money at the expense of the users of their services.
Addiction
Users become addicted to the products thanks to persuasive designs rooted in behavioral economics, psychology, and cognitive science. Even when people aren’t using SNS they can be affected by it through experiencing fear of missing out (FOMO). Prolonged use of SNS is linked with mental health issues and depression, and depressed people have been found to use SNS more than average. This vicious cycle is positive for SNS companies because they profit from increased usage.
Data
The users leave a trail of data that the SNS companies can monetize by optimizing ads, tailoring the site for what the individual user will find most appealing, and creating profiles that can be sold to other companies and used in-house. The users’ consciousness of this tracking can lead to social cooling, a term used to describe the long-term negative effects of being tracked and scored by algorithms.
We censor ourselves out of fear for what others may think and what the government or other organizations may be able to access.
The collected data becomes a form of surveillance and reduces the freedom of the users.
Wicked Problem Map
Social Issues
Our identified social issues revolved around problems of mental health, disassociation from social groups within a physical proximity, and social cooling. We developed connections between the designed interfaces of social network services on both responsive devices and desktop devices to user addiction and contribution to depression and low self-esteem.
“… people who logged more Facebook time not only had more depressive symptoms, but that social comparison — in any direction — was the mediator, and for both sexes. In other words, it didn’t matter whether a person was making upward, downward, or neutral social comparison — they were all linked to a greater likelihood for depressive symptoms.” — Alice Walton, Forbes Magazine
Peoples’ tendency to compare themselves to others and the ease of access of social networks can often be exacerbated through cyber-bullying and doxing (the malicious publication of private information about an individual). At the same time, the massive consumption of media by addicted users has been reported to lead to apathy towards global events — news feeds are flooded with stories of high alert on a daily basis, causing SNS users to consider other alerting event as “not that bad”.
Social networking services have also been shown to reduce people’s comfort and engagement in real-world social situations—
“Our phone offers 5-second choices like “checking email” that feel better than waiting in line. And it offers 30-minute choices like a podcast that will teach you that thing you’ve been dying to learn, which feels better than a 30-minute walk in silence.” — Tristan Harris, Humane Tech
In other words, people have the choice to avoid interaction by entering the digital space inside of their smart phones.
Infrastructure and Technology Issues
This domain of issues in the context of social networking services are based in designed user interfaces and data-collection algorithms— all of which contribute to the processes of trends, user security, and pathological consumerism.
As mentioned in the overview above, addictive behavior is connected to the persuasive user interfaces that utilize tactics such as menu option limitations, push notifications, and “like” buttons:
- As suggested by Tristan Harris, apps and SNS services are designed to make unsubscribing, unfriending, or disengagement difficult by making some processes multi-step and inconvenient.
- Automatic notifications show users everything they’ve missed since last looking at their phone, which forces users to scan events that SNS services decide to show them. In effect, these notifications distract people from what they are currently doing and takes them out of the present.
- Reaction buttons (“like”, “angry”, “surprised”) enable users to support causes without actually doing anything, and therefore contributes to apathy as mentioned in the Social Issues section. These buttons can also convey social approval, as the less likes a post gets, the higher the chance of perceiving a post as something that people don’t care about.
Likewise, companies utilize third party-developed algorithms and Artificial Intelligence to collect data about SNS users, which tell companies what methods they can employ in order to improve their persuasive UI. Metric data is also used to trend topics and increase their “viral” status — doing this ushers news to users on a priority-basis through the utility of hashtags and “trending topics,” ultimately disregarding or minimizing other current events.
It’s also worth mentioning the ease of access to hardware that can connect to the internet and, in turn, any social networking service. With the prominence of smart devices and perpetually-connected desktop devices, companies are able to maintain persuasive tactics during all moments of their consumers’ lives.
Conversely, there are some people who do not have access to the internet at all due to a lack of infrastructure. Many under-served communities have limited access to private internet due to a lack of infrastructure. This particular issue ties directly into political and economic issues.
Political Issues
The political power of SNS is a topical issue, given Facebook’s role in the 2016 United States presidential election and President Trump’s rampant use of Twitter. SNS has made politicians more accessible to the public, fostering closer communication; however, SNS also intensifies political divides and creates opportunities for fraudulent activity that threaten the integrity of democracy.
On a local level, policy makers have the power to bring SNS to underserved communities who do not have proper accessibility. However, oftentimes accessibility to SNS and to the internet in general is unequal based on infrastructure, race, and income.
SNS has very little regulation and no ethical standard, allowing hate speech and harassment to flourish. A study by the Anti-Defamation League found that anti-Semitic targeting of journalists during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign on Twitter impacted over 800 journalists. The hateful Tweets gained more than 10 billion impressions, meaning that this sort of phenomenon has a hand in normalizing hate speech on a massive scale — not to mention silencing the voices of journalists who would rather not expose themselves to harassment online.
The structure of SNS reinforces political polarization. Users have the ability to follow or unfollow other users, influencers, or publishers, therefore selecting the types of opinions they are exposed to. People tend to engage with others who already agree with them. These choices create positive feedback loops that, in conjunction with the algorithms inherent in most SNS, continue to expose these users only to their already-preferred side of any given issue. The “bubbles” that each user finds his or her self in create the illusion that no alternative opinions are viable outside this echo chamber. Furthermore, political disagreements that occur on SNS tend to exacerbate differences rather than seek harmony.
SNS as a medium over-simplifies political issues, boiling complexity down to soundbites.
The rise in fraudulent activity on SNS and its effect on the political process has been an issue that has entered the public discourse recently. There are many forms of manipulation. During the 2016 U.S. presidential election, over 140 pro-Trump fake news sites were run by teenagers in Macedonia, who did not care about American politics but who struck gold when their articles were shared by Americans on Facebook.
Another form of fraudulent activity takes place on Twitter. Programmers create “bots,” which are fake accounts that are automated to generate content. A research team at Oxford University found that during the 2016 U.S. election, between the first and second debate, over 1 million tweets in support of the candidates came from automated accounts. These fake tweets comprised approximately one-fifth of the Tweets in support of Clinton and one-third in support of Trump. Twitter bots also manipulate the outcome of political polls, which politicians, the press, and the public traditionally use as an important metric to gauge a candidate’s popularity.
Strikingly, Facebook and other SNS companies are not in any rush to halt the cycle of “fake news” or to disable fake accounts and bots. Facebook and Twitter are currently facing potential sanctions from the UK parliament for their refusal to hand over information pertaining to Russian misinformation campaigns that took place on these platforms, and impacted the EU referendum.
Perhaps one of the largest dangers of SNS in the political sphere is that users will grow weary of the constant barrage of political discourse in their newsfeeds, become disillusioned with the idea that the information they see is unreliable, and become disengaged with politics altogether.
Economic Issues
In a November 2017 op-ed about major tech companies, Senator Al Franken wrote:
“I am extremely concerned about these platforms’ use of Americans’ personal information to further solidify their market power and consequently extract unfair conditions from the content creators and innovators that rely on their platforms to reach consumers.”
SNS companies hold a vast amount of economic power. As of August 2017, Facebook and Google combined hold almost 60% of all digital advertising. In recent years, tech companies have overtaken oil companies as the leaders in American market valuation. Not only do SNS companies hold economic power in these very obvious ways, but they also control livelihoods.
Publishers, media companies, small and local businesses, and charities all depend on SNS to gain exposure to their audience. Their content is shared on these platforms, which are an essential component of their business models. This leaves these companies and organizations highly vulnerable to SNS companies’ whims, which are not particularly sensitive to this dynamic. For instance, a change in early 2018 to Facebook’s newsfeed algorithm increased exposure to posts from friends and family and decreased exposure to other pages, therefore reducing the reach of businesses dramatically. According to Brian Warner, CEO and founder of the website Celebrity Net Worth, in December 2017 the site’s average article reached 15,000 of its 500,000 fans on Facebook. After the algorithm change, one month later, a successful post reaches just 1,500 of those fans. Changes such as this force publishers out of business and damage not only their wallets, but also the information economy.
Perhaps the most chilling economic impact of SNS occurs when you ask yourself the following question: what is the product of SNS companies? The product is your attention. The product of SNS companies is the data mined from each user. SNS companies gain most of their revenue from advertising, which is powered by their massive collection of personal data. In the second quarter of 2017, Facebook earned $9.3 billion, 98% of which it earned from advertising. The economic model of SNS companies is a self-perpetuating cycle, intentionally designed to fuel more and more economic growth, social influence, and power.
Environmental Issues
Though social networking services exist and influence more obviously in the virtual world, they are still based in the physical world and influence the sustainability of the environment. There are two aspects of social networking services that could impact the environment: one is the physical emissions and resources consumed, and the other is the mindset of anti-environmentalism which is amplified over social networking services.
First, it is hard to realize how much we contribute to the green gas when we slide open our phone and upload the data to cloud bases.
Indeed, the annual footprint for each user that is active monthly is 269 grams, or around the equivalent footprint of a cup of coffee.
And this is not the end. The data is stored in physical storage units which consume enormous land and resources, however are often disregarded by social networking services users. As we revealed before in the Infrastructure and Technology section, smart devices and desktop devices are the tools with which we utilize social media, all of which are manufactured with conflict minerals, energy, etc. from nature. As a result, the more we use the social networking services, the more we exploit the limited resources embedded in the environment.
Aside from the physical consumption of the resources, the amplification of the collective anti-environmental mindset is also disruptive to the future. On social media platforms, which have few regulations, anti-environmental communities are connected and are able to reach out to a broader audience. Thus, the potential apathy for sustainable habits might emerge in social networking services users, most of which are of a younger generation and potentially vulnerable to destructive ideas.
Stakeholder Groups
Our first step towards attempting to draw relationships among stakeholders was to make the process more manageable by roughly grouping the many stakeholders into clusters based on which stakeholder groups would likely align with one another. For example, “users (young adults and teens),” “users (adult),” “users (elderly),” “parents,” and “schools” were grouped into the category “Family sphere” because these groups would likely have many aligning interests; however, we were careful not to conflate these groups entirely. Certain relationship lines were drawn specifically to one group, and not to an entire cluster.
We found that among green lines (aligning interests), red lines (conflicting interests), and black lines (mixed interests), the majority of lines on our stakeholder map were black. We could think of a few reasons for this. First of all,
the many positive effects of SNS were impossible to ignore in this exercise, and in many cases we changed a red or a green line to black in consideration of stakeholder dynamics that we did not necessarily consider in the wicked problem map.
An example of this would be the relationship between ecosystems and SNS users. Initially, we drew a red line because in the context of the wicked problem map, the relationship is inherently negative because the use of SNS contributes to the destruction of the ecosystem. Also, the use of SNS would be bad for the users themselves. However, realistically speaking, the users benefit from the resources taken from the environment, so we changed the line to black to signify that this relationship benefits stakeholders in the SNS user group.
There were also many relationships that were mixed because the stakeholders might hold a conflicting and complex relationship with one another. For example, we speculated that car companies might have a conflicting alignment with SNS companies because drivers who are distracted by SNS on their cell phones often get into car accidents. However, we also speculated that the relationship would also align positively because car companies use SNS as a platform for advertising.
Partway through this exercise, we chose to change the language of our main stakeholder group from “SNS Companies” to “SNS Executives.” This change helped us to focus on the people who are at the center of the decision-making process, and who would also directly benefit or suffer from the success or failure of these companies.
One of our biggest takeaways from the stakeholder map was the realization that SNS companies hold a vast amount of influence and maintain direct relationships in almost every sector of society.
Mapping Stakeholder Relations
We identified social network companies, teen and young adult users of SNS, and the environment as three major conflicting stakeholders. We speculated about their fears and concerns together with their hopes and desires, in order to explore the dynamics among the groups.
Social network companies are the main driving force in the system. Their hopes of gaining new users and of users being engaged contribute to user-friendly designs and explorations. Thus, the teens and young adult user group will be able to meet new people and get recognition from other peers. Moreover, if the social networking companies advocate for the common good and become known for being beneficial to society, this can raise the concern about environmental issues and reduce the negative effects of humans on the environment, which is a significant hope for the environment.
However, potential threats also exist when more people use the social network services — more pollution is produced during manufacturing, more carbon emission is caused by addictive use, and more conflict metals are extracted for electronic devices.
There is an alignment between the fears of social networking companies and teens and young adult users: once the teens and young adults feel they are not cool, the websites might lose users and be abandoned. Also, cyber-bullying cases will disrupt the reputation of social network services and this may cause a loss in market revenue.
We selected teens and young adult users as one of the conflicted stakeholder groups since they are easily manipulated by social service networks. If our concern discussed in the Environment section, that climate change deniers may spread misleading information on SNS, comes true, teens and the young adults might be the most influenced groups. They are indeed the most influential upcoming impact in the next decade. So, hopefully, this will not come true.
Working Process
The work contributed to these assignments was completed and developed over the course of two and a half weeks. Our working process involved three primary phases that we cycled through on a constant basis:
- Researching the problem.
- Mapping the terrain.
- Making connections.
In the beginning stages of understanding the scope of social networking services, we relied on some preconceptions, opinions, and notions that we had about the topic such as: what websites can be considered a SNS, how these websites operate, and how user addiction plays into sustaining these websites. This informed our initial research as we searched for web articles, statistics, and survey results, and editorials that discussed the topic within the social and economic realms. In a sense, we were wandering through the terrain of the problem, not sure what we were going to find or where our research would take us.
Our first analog mapping attempts were framed by this research, with categories formed in order to provide organization and a cause-effect structure. We identified that we lacked nodes in the Environmental and Infrastructure + Technology domains, and that we felt that our ability to create connections was hindered by the limited scope that we had been researching. This shifted our focus to peruse a breadth of topics in all domains — creating the initial wicked problem map enabled us to discover our holes, and directed us towards further research steps.
This intentional workflow led to feelings of getting deeper into what this problem entailed — as TC noted “being on the cusp of understanding.” With this mindset, we were able to expand our research to involve specific search terms that brought up unrealized aspects that connected to the larger whole. We also received feedback from other groups who identified topics that we hadn’t yet dipped our toes into — specifically, in SNS’s carbon usage, resource usage, and social activism. At this point in our working process, we recognized two key points:
- Boundaries needed to be set to keep the wicked problem from expanding too far, especially with the limited time we had for the assignment.
- Stepping back and receiving feedback from other parties not directly involved in the mapping process is incredibly valuable — outside insight reveals what the working group had not yet realized or recognized or thought was relevant.
By the final meeting, which involved finalizing the wicked problem map digitally and identifying strands of alignment and disagreement between stakeholders, disparate pieces of our maps began to come together — it was at this step that we could take a step back and recognize how the system is interconnected as a whole.
At this point, we also looked back and identified segments of our working process that had opportunity for change if we were to do it again, discussed below.
Reflection — Difficulties, Challenges, and Insights
Below are some of the reflections we had while working on mapping the wicked problem of the negative effects of SNS and mapping the stakeholder relations:
- The centrality of addiction to our problem. Through all of our research, we came to a rather simple conclusion: without an addictive product, none of the other issues would exist. The other problems are mapped in detail, but they all lead back to the products reeling people in and keeping their attention for long periods of time.
- Design and designers are at the center of this problem. They exacerbate this issue knowingly through the creation of corporate-friendly persuasion tactics and UI.
- The power that executives of SNS companies hold. Through mapping the stakeholder relations, we began to visually see the immense power held by executives of SNS companies and the SNS companies themselves. Both had social influence and economic influence and were connected to many of our root causes.
- Lack of location. Since SNS are not place based (besides the data centers we discussed earlier), we had trouble bringing the problem back to Pittsburgh. As the project progresses we will narrow our scope and focus on Pittsburgh specifically.
- Including positive aspects of SNS to our map. Focusing on only the negative effects of SNS felt like we were limiting our understanding of the problem. There are many positive effects of social media, like improving social relationships with friends, but we didn’t consider researching the positive effects because the focus of the assignment was to diagram the root causes of the problem. This biases the information that we will find and paints a less than complete picture. How can the positive aspects of a problem be represented when mapping? One option is to use a different color for the positive bubbles and the positive relationships. By mapping these, the complexity of the problem will be fully captured and new relationships will be found. I would guess that the positive and negative aspects of a problem would be intricately linked, which would give everyone working on the problem a better idea of the relationships between the different groups. This understanding will help us once we start thinking about possible interventions, since we will want to enhance the positive and decrease the negative aspects of our problem.
Here are some ideas we had about mapping wicked problems in general:
- The emergent connections from creating a mind map. The mind map is the byproduct of the ideas and connections we had while conducting our research. It was helpful for us, but almost unreadable to someone unfamiliar with our work. How can we make the mind map accessible to someone who is looking at it for the first time? We are starting to think how we can visually categorize the information to aid understanding.
- Mapping the problem was a way to externalize our thinking and find the gaps in our research. The act of doing the mapping made us realize that we didn’t really know what we were reading when we first started. We then switched to adding bubbles after we read a relevant article. An example of the benefit of this approach was after our first two meetings we realized we had very little information on the environment, so we intentionally looked for information and connections related to the environment. The map also provided a way for us to easily share our research with the other members of the group, collaborate, and make connections between research that we otherwise wouldn’t have been able to do if we just wrote an academic paper together or shared a lot of articles.
- It’s hard to not think ahead and leap to a solution while researching. We needed to remind ourselves that we were just mapping the problem and not looking for areas to solve. As designers we have been trained to try to generate solutions, as opposed to mapping complexity and seeing the links that naturally arise. This mapping exercise pushed us to focus on understanding the complexity of the problem before we started to think of possible solutions.
- To add to the last point, it was hard to keep the complexity of the issue as we continued to add more information. We really wanted to simplify and break it into manageable parts (most likely due to our educational systems valuing mechanistic thinking and therefore we developed these tendencies as students). In the end we were able to keep the complexity and this allowed us to visualize the relationships between all the parts that we found and see the connections between the underlying causes. Through the process of mapping the complex relationships, we were able to find patterns that we hadn’t seen before starting the mapping.
- This way of mapping is a beneficial tool for all forms of research because it externalizes the ideas and makes the author consider the connections between the various parts. This adds to the complexity of the thinking and may reveal gaps (as it did in our process) and connections between disparate elements that may not have been noticed without creating a comprehensive mind map. There is a real possibility of exporting this process into other disciplines.
- Scaffolding the wicked problem mapping exercise. This assignment was created to help students detect patterns in the chaos, which is something most of us hadn’t done before. We had a number of false starts at the beginning and ran into some dead ends throughout the process. This got us thinking, “How can we practice this skill multiple times to be able to develop the ability to start seeing the patterns more easily?” One possibility is scaffolding exercises to get students to develop the techniques, for example first having students individually map a smaller problem. Then in class students can discuss the work they have done and how they used the mind map. The focus of these small-scale assignments would be to cultivate students’ ability to use the tool and detect patterns. The assignments could also allow experimentation with the form of the tool to see how it could be altered for specific contexts, such as making a map to communicate the connections to someone who was not involved in the making. After reaching a level of familiarity with mapping, the larger assignment could be tackled, allowing students to focus on the content.
- Map power relations in the stakeholder maps. Power dynamics was an important part of our stakeholder map since each of the groups had differing levels of power. One way of mapping the power relations is through lines of another color and the thickness denotes the strength of the power dynamic while the arrow indicates the direction.
- Biases of the wicked problem mappers. A potential problem with mapping wicked problems is the biases of the groups who are mapping. It is a subjective diagramming exercise that has the ability to define the direction of the future interventions. Some possible options are including a diverse group in the mapping and multiple groups create their own maps and then try to bring them together into a comprehensive map. Our own biases are inherent, how do we break through them to represent the problem in a fair way? Right now we could go to different stakeholders and ask their opinions, but they would be basing their answers on the work we had already done, which will take them in a certain direction.
- Lack of references in the mind map. The reliability of the mind map may be called into question because of the inability to verify any of the claims since each bubble lacks a reference. This also makes the mind map appear even more subjective and biased, which is a problem that may be raised against wicked problem mapping by people who were not involved in the creation of the artifact.
