if computer is two, what is one?
This strategy is about helping ground conversations about computers in framings that are familiar, well-known, and offer institutional knowledge to draw on. It is generally a mistake to get into conversations about computers in the absence of the context in which they are being used. This strategy is sometimes understood as starting conversations about computers with the question "what problem are we trying to solve?" But sometimes the issues we live with are better understood as ongoing issues rather than problems. For this reason, it's a flag to start any conversation about computers - it's better to start them with the context in which computer use is being proposed - education, food delivery, housing, labour, customer service, etc.
When you talk about computers, or ask people to talk about computers, you are immediately pushing a conversation into expert and unfamiliar territory for most people, which is not a good posture for being inclusive, inviting, or accessible. Also, people that know about computers are incentivized to bring knowledge that is useful and familiar to them - including privacy, security, and rights - but may really miss a much wider range of perspectives and expertise. Some examples of this:
Housing as 1, Computer as 2
In a smart city project launch that happened in Toronto, the first public interest group on the scene was there to find out about the smart city plans for affordable housing. Housing, in a city experiencing a housing crisis, is familiar and well-known territory for people to ask questions about if and how computers and the internet would prove useful to addressing a housing shortage. While there were some plans about technologies that integrated different construction methods and modularity, there was only so much margin in the proposed project to really address this critical issue of housing. As the project progressed, land valuation became a major issue of contention, one that helped reduce the allure of technology and return the project discussions to the fundamentals of land value and housing access.
Border crossing as 1, Computer as 2
During the height of the pandemic, the federal government launched an app that was supposed to be used anytime someone crossed the border into and out of the country. This case (along with the next one) illustrated the ways in which during times of crisis, new technologies can be launched amidst fears and pressures. Border crossing and public health management were the ones in this example. And because there was such a heavy emphasis on the desire to automate the border to whatever degree possible, the experiences, from an equity perspective, of those that were used to doing it several times a day, or those used to doing it without using an app, were pushed aside as inconvenient. It was later understood that there had been a desire to automate border crossing prior to the pandemic, and that this emergency was used as a way to speed passage of that norm. If the experience of the people crossing a border (one) was prioritized over the computer (two), there would have been several other approaches on offer. It is notable that in this instance, the unions involved in supporting people crossing the border were some of the most persistent voices in challenging the approach, also showing the value of labour's perspective in shaping the use and experience of computers.
Public health as 1, Computer as 2
It was not long into the COVID-19 pandemic before a Canadian tech firm volunteered computer code to support a COVID-tracking app. This app relied on rules set by two major global tech companies because the app was a mobile phone app. These two global tech companies are not public health experts, yet in the middle of a global health emergency, they were granted the power to define a set of rules that required each country to join the app program at the national level. Canada, along with several other countries, has a federalist system, with healthcare being run at the provincial level. This caused a mismatch between how the computer idea worked and how the actual health care system worked. By falling into the computer as one frame conversation, the app was celebrated for being open source, easily accessible for oversight, and optional. None of these computer features answered the pressing public health question: did the app work? (no).
Municipal finance as 1, Computer as 2
In a large city, the government was keen to show its digital transformation capacity by making it easier to pay property taxes and parking tickets by using an app. The political appeal was that the city was using new tech to make things easy and user-friendly. This is the computer story. The deeper story is a municipal finance story, where the city had set up a deal to allow a tech firm to become a financial intermediary for all payments made through the app, which was a large and consistent revenue stream, for the foreseeable future. The story was talked about in computer terms of convenience and ease of use, but the proper framing would have been about municipal finance and deal valuation.
What these stories have in common is that the enthusiasm to be using new technologies moves the conversation about them into over-simplified consumer conversations about ease when the necessary conversations need to be started from topics and locations that are the fundamentals. By starting conversations about computer use at this level, everyone has a much better chance at setting the table for the still difficult conversations about if and how using computers as part of an approach to issue management, problem solving, or workflow actually supports a better outcome.