[Music]
show of hands who pays taxes here Oh
quite a few so even some of the students
I thought there might not be so many
hands given that there’s so many
students so especially those of you who
pay taxes I want to say thank you
because you fund our public universities
and you pay my salary and you allow me
and people in my Institute to do
research that we’re passionate about
which is about designing technology that
fits with people and that fits into
their everyday lives not you having to
fit technology and your your taxes also
go to fund some of the big funding
schemes that we apply for for research
funding in consortiums to do our
research and my concern here today is
not to tell you about the great research
we’re doing in our group which I would
love to do another time but to tell you
something that is increasingly of
concern to me and that is that the
systems and processes that we have in
place now mean that people are spending
more and more time talking about doing
research or constructing reports about
research that they should have done and
not actually doing the research that we
need to address some of the really
serious problems we’re facing in today’s
society and I can illustrate this a
little bit from an email I got just last
week from a research proposal that was
submitted to a large European funding
scheme and this was with 11 partners
from universities industry public bodies
from six countries and it was this
really great research project that we
cared about about designing technologies
to support health and well-being for old
people living at home but the rest of
the letter goes on to say we regret that
we can’t fund you that your score didn’t
reach the funding level but
in fact what happened here there are
only six out of 187 proposals that were
funded and this was in fact a highly
rated proposal so it’s not like the
research proposed wasn’t any good so
apart from not being able to do the
research that we cared about and wanted
to do and had put in enormous amounts of
time and effort months of effort to
write up a postdoc fellow in my
Institute won’t have a job to go to when
his current short-term project ends a
colleague from another university has
very hard monetary targets that he has
to meet that is set by his University
each year as part of his annual
performance review so this won’t
contribute to his meeting his funding
targets but I also have a guilty
confession to make
because another part of me also said
thank you that we did not get it and
that’s because I know that if we had
have got it
I was buying into an enormous amount of
administration and management and
overhead that would be really onerous so
what’s going on with this I think that
the proposal itself illustrates some of
this because it was a hundred and fifty
three page proposal and only about
thirty three of those pages were
actually about the research and the rest
was about administration and management
etc and we could have if we had wanted
to have brought in consultants at a
thousand euros a day to write those
pieces because they know how to how to
fit the funding body’s needs and in that
proposal we had to say exactly what we
would be doing at any point in time in
the next three years that this project
was running in the state of radically
changing technology we would have had to
say in three and a half four years time
when we were doing this work what we
would be doing how long it would take
and exactly what would what we’d be
producing and this becomes a
straitjacket and we have to report again
this Gantt chart Gantt plan at regular
intervals to the funding body and they
don’t pay us all their money till the
very end and sometimes they withhold it
because for some reason we didn’t quite
meet exactly what we’ve said we also
have to have very detailed timesheets
that we keep as if we can clearly
differentiate what this thought was
about and how what work package it
mapped to and that we still know that
this timesheet has to reflect the time
that we said it would take not the time
that it really took and there are some
false assumptions here there’s an
assumption that that research work can
be defined as a rational process that
you’re going from A to B and that you
know what that path is and you know the
shape and the size of the moon that
you’re going to reach at the other end
but the reality of research is so much
different we know where we’re starting
from and we can really define the
problem space really well and we can
have a good plan for how we think we’re
going to get there to solve it but we
don’t know what’s happening over that
hill what we’re going to encounter and
what other paths we might end up taking
that might take us to far more exciting
and interesting places than we’d ever
thought we could go to some of the ways
that we do that particularly for us as
human computer interaction researchers
is talking to the people that we’re
designing for and with so we might come
to them with an idea but after talking
with them and working with them they
might say no but the straitjacket of our
Gantt chart and our agreement with the
funding body says that we can’t take on
their no we have to still deliver what
we had send so we can’t really respond
to their needs they continue helping us
because they want to help as
participants but we’re not delivering
something of value to them we’re
delivering a tick tick box to a report
there’s also no room in this model of
what this rational model of what
research is for errors learning mistakes
and that’s a key part of how we make
innovation of how we make advance
of how we generate new knowledge in some
of the accounting models for many of
these funding agencies these errors or
failures are deviations or problems that
we can account for in our report with
yet more documentation but they’re not
seen as a normal part of the research
process they’re not seen as learning
opportunities to explore what’s a better
way that every failure a mistake
is one more step towards somewhere
better and I think Albert Einstein would
have trouble these days operating in our
current funding environment in our
current university environment because
he talks about time to think what a
luxury and time to think for months and
years like open-ended I don’t know how
long it will take me to think about this
he talks about trying things 99 times
and succeeding on the hundredth time but
he can’t predict in his Gantt chart
upfront that it will take him a hundred
goes he just has to keep trying out and
I can just imagine him putting in a
proposal to one of these funding schemes
and getting a rejection letter because
he couldn’t fully specify his path to
relativity theory and there are loads of
examples of research that is unexpected
innovations that come in unexpected ways
so Percy Spencer who had a chocolate bar
melt in his pocket as he stood beside a
magnetron that generated that the
microwave as an invention an arts design
student who took a radically different
approach to thinking about how to had a
design prosthesis by doing life models
and end drawings and really exploring
the articulation of joints and changed
the paradigm for how we do prosthesis
and robotic arms but did it in this very
practice let approach that he didn’t
define upfront or couldn’t have defined
upfront because he did it by trial and
error and in fact the medical physicists
he was working with were really
skeptical that he would get anywhere or
that this was a way to go but it
changed what we do with bossy C’s now so
research is a far more exciting
open-ended creative process then is ever
captured in these formal models and
graphs and and time sheets that embody
this rationalistic account of research
that can be totally defined upfront and
what it encourages in the end it’s not
so much creativity in the research but
creativity in the reporting and in the
timesheet keeping so that we can keep
the computer happy and keep the funding
body happy and make sure we get the
money paid for the work that we really
do want to do this has really
problematic implications I think that we
should all be concerned about one is
that a societal level and the other one
is the individual cost for the
researchers involved so at a societal
level so I’m just using this as an
illustration in 2015 this is a report
from a report from one of the major
European funding agencies there they
were 42,000 proposals submitted that
year and a total of about 4200 or so
that were actually funded so it’s a
success rate of about 10 point 7 percent
I have some figures from a 2011 study
about the order of effort required to
make a proposal so I am putting together
figures from different years so they’re
just indicative but what they indicate
is that we had nearly 19,000 700 person
years in 2015 just put to writing
proposals writing about research not
doing research nearly to one and a half
billion euros if we look at a UNESCO
report that actually equates to all of
the researchers in Ireland in 2050
not being able to do any actual research
only able to write about doing research
and then there are also costs of the
people who do get funded at the
negotiations for the contract that take
time and effort and also when they get
the projects funded over the next three
years their significant effort required
to manage and report and every D and W
on that Gantt chart we saw before
generates reams of documents would we be
happy if this level of effort was put
into if we had one and a half billion
euros put into funding teams of doctors
and nurses competing to be able to save
patients lives in this operating theatre
not operating not saving lives just
competing talking about what they do and
then when they do get that funding for
the few who do they actually wouldn’t be
in the operating theatre very much
they’d be out filling in the paperwork
and the reporting in the admin around it
it’s a big cost that is using up our
taxpayer funds to talk about research
not do it and I understand that because
it’s taxpayer funds there’s an
accountability that’s really important
but I think we’ve got the balance wrong
between managing the risk and the
control versus trusting the researchers
to get on and do research and to
appropriately allocate their time to
delivering benefits for society and they
said that there’s also personal costs in
this era academics are increasingly
becoming subject to numerous metrics
there was a 2012 report in the UK that
said UK academics were subject to 100
different metrics that measure
publications or grant income or teaching
evaluations numerous of them and there
this quantified academic selves now
reduced to numbers that are
decontextualized and don’t make any
sense but these numbers matter because
they matter for promotion for getting
your next job for getting your next
funding grant and it puts enormous
pressure on people and I hear this I I
do some interviews for a podcast series
with academics and I hear the enormous
stress that people are under there are
study reports that show that people are
working 50 60 hours on average in in
academia and there’s a real problem with
chronic stress and burnout and we know
from psychology literature that when
people are stressed they’re less
creative their thinking is more closed
and these are the very people we want
not if we want being open and being
creative the University my colleague in
our proposal it wasn’t funded his
University recognizes as as do many
others that their academics our staff
are getting increasingly stressed but
what they’re doing is not dealing with
the measures that are causing and the
performance indicators that are causing
the stress they’re offering them stress
management courses and mindfulness
training which are great they’re great
skills to have but not just to put
people back into the battlefield into
those same pressure situations so what
do we need to do science is really
really important there was a march for
science on the 22nd of April and at 600
cities more than 600 cities around the
world people marching for the importance
of what science can contribute to
society in terms of the health of our
communities education well-being the
economy everything we need good healthy
scientists and researchers delivering
the outcomes to society that that we’re
paying them to do as taxpayers the
United Nations developed a set of
sustainable development goals in 2015
and I think these are great because they
were recognizing that gross domestic
product is the only indicator as the
health of the health of a nation was a
very narrow indicator and this was about
trying to develop a much more inclusive
set of indicators and to redefine what
success means and I wonder what we might
be able to do similarly within a
research environment within an academic
context what might a set of sustainable
research and researcher goals look like
that recognizes that research is
creative and messy and open-ended that
different types of research need
different timeframes that the health and
well-being of the researchers doing the
research is just as important as they
are as the outcomes of the work and that
recognizes that compassionate
collaborative work environments not
competition and stress are the way to
deliver good science the way we can
manage risk in positive ways that draw
on trust in our researchers so I want to
encourage us to start thinking about
what this set of goals might look like
redefining what success is and what our
indicators are so that we can really put
our taxpayers funds to the best use in
actually doing science not just talking
about science thank you
[Applause]
you
show of hands who pays taxes here Oh
quite a few so even some of the students
I thought there might not be so many
hands given that there’s so many
students so especially those of you who
pay taxes I want to say thank you
because you fund our public universities
and you pay my salary and you allow me
and people in my Institute to do
research that we’re passionate about
which is about designing technology that
fits with people and that fits into
their everyday lives not you having to
fit technology and your your taxes also
go to fund some of the big funding
schemes that we apply for for research
funding in consortiums to do our
research and my concern here today is
not to tell you about the great research
we’re doing in our group which I would
love to do another time but to tell you
something that is increasingly of
concern to me and that is that the
systems and processes that we have in
place now mean that people are spending
more and more time talking about doing
research or constructing reports about
research that they should have done and
not actually doing the research that we
need to address some of the really
serious problems we’re facing in today’s
society and I can illustrate this a
little bit from an email I got just last
week from a research proposal that was
submitted to a large European funding
scheme and this was with 11 partners
from universities industry public bodies
from six countries and it was this
really great research project that we
cared about about designing technologies
to support health and well-being for old
people living at home but the rest of
the letter goes on to say we regret that
we can’t fund you that your score didn’t
reach the funding level but
in fact what happened here there are
only six out of 187 proposals that were
funded and this was in fact a highly
rated proposal so it’s not like the
research proposed wasn’t any good so
apart from not being able to do the
research that we cared about and wanted
to do and had put in enormous amounts of
time and effort months of effort to
write up a postdoc fellow in my
Institute won’t have a job to go to when
his current short-term project ends a
colleague from another university has
very hard monetary targets that he has
to meet that is set by his University
each year as part of his annual
performance review so this won’t
contribute to his meeting his funding
targets but I also have a guilty
confession to make
because another part of me also said
thank you that we did not get it and
that’s because I know that if we had
have got it
I was buying into an enormous amount of
administration and management and
overhead that would be really onerous so
what’s going on with this I think that
the proposal itself illustrates some of
this because it was a hundred and fifty
three page proposal and only about
thirty three of those pages were
actually about the research and the rest
was about administration and management
etc and we could have if we had wanted
to have brought in consultants at a
thousand euros a day to write those
pieces because they know how to how to
fit the funding body’s needs and in that
proposal we had to say exactly what we
would be doing at any point in time in
the next three years that this project
was running in the state of radically
changing technology we would have had to
say in three and a half four years time
when we were doing this work what we
would be doing how long it would take
and exactly what would what we’d be
producing and this becomes a
straitjacket and we have to report again
this Gantt chart Gantt plan at regular
intervals to the funding body and they
don’t pay us all their money till the
very end and sometimes they withhold it
because for some reason we didn’t quite
meet exactly what we’ve said we also
have to have very detailed timesheets
that we keep as if we can clearly
differentiate what this thought was
about and how what work package it
mapped to and that we still know that
this timesheet has to reflect the time
that we said it would take not the time
that it really took and there are some
false assumptions here there’s an
assumption that that research work can
be defined as a rational process that
you’re going from A to B and that you
know what that path is and you know the
shape and the size of the moon that
you’re going to reach at the other end
but the reality of research is so much
different we know where we’re starting
from and we can really define the
problem space really well and we can
have a good plan for how we think we’re
going to get there to solve it but we
don’t know what’s happening over that
hill what we’re going to encounter and
what other paths we might end up taking
that might take us to far more exciting
and interesting places than we’d ever
thought we could go to some of the ways
that we do that particularly for us as
human computer interaction researchers
is talking to the people that we’re
designing for and with so we might come
to them with an idea but after talking
with them and working with them they
might say no but the straitjacket of our
Gantt chart and our agreement with the
funding body says that we can’t take on
their no we have to still deliver what
we had send so we can’t really respond
to their needs they continue helping us
because they want to help as
participants but we’re not delivering
something of value to them we’re
delivering a tick tick box to a report
there’s also no room in this model of
what this rational model of what
research is for errors learning mistakes
and that’s a key part of how we make
innovation of how we make advance
of how we generate new knowledge in some
of the accounting models for many of
these funding agencies these errors or
failures are deviations or problems that
we can account for in our report with
yet more documentation but they’re not
seen as a normal part of the research
process they’re not seen as learning
opportunities to explore what’s a better
way that every failure a mistake
is one more step towards somewhere
better and I think Albert Einstein would
have trouble these days operating in our
current funding environment in our
current university environment because
he talks about time to think what a
luxury and time to think for months and
years like open-ended I don’t know how
long it will take me to think about this
he talks about trying things 99 times
and succeeding on the hundredth time but
he can’t predict in his Gantt chart
upfront that it will take him a hundred
goes he just has to keep trying out and
I can just imagine him putting in a
proposal to one of these funding schemes
and getting a rejection letter because
he couldn’t fully specify his path to
relativity theory and there are loads of
examples of research that is unexpected
innovations that come in unexpected ways
so Percy Spencer who had a chocolate bar
melt in his pocket as he stood beside a
magnetron that generated that the
microwave as an invention an arts design
student who took a radically different
approach to thinking about how to had a
design prosthesis by doing life models
and end drawings and really exploring
the articulation of joints and changed
the paradigm for how we do prosthesis
and robotic arms but did it in this very
practice let approach that he didn’t
define upfront or couldn’t have defined
upfront because he did it by trial and
error and in fact the medical physicists
he was working with were really
skeptical that he would get anywhere or
that this was a way to go but it
changed what we do with bossy C’s now so
research is a far more exciting
open-ended creative process then is ever
captured in these formal models and
graphs and and time sheets that embody
this rationalistic account of research
that can be totally defined upfront and
what it encourages in the end it’s not
so much creativity in the research but
creativity in the reporting and in the
timesheet keeping so that we can keep
the computer happy and keep the funding
body happy and make sure we get the
money paid for the work that we really
do want to do this has really
problematic implications I think that we
should all be concerned about one is
that a societal level and the other one
is the individual cost for the
researchers involved so at a societal
level so I’m just using this as an
illustration in 2015 this is a report
from a report from one of the major
European funding agencies there they
were 42,000 proposals submitted that
year and a total of about 4200 or so
that were actually funded so it’s a
success rate of about 10 point 7 percent
I have some figures from a 2011 study
about the order of effort required to
make a proposal so I am putting together
figures from different years so they’re
just indicative but what they indicate
is that we had nearly 19,000 700 person
years in 2015 just put to writing
proposals writing about research not
doing research nearly to one and a half
billion euros if we look at a UNESCO
report that actually equates to all of
the researchers in Ireland in 2050
not being able to do any actual research
only able to write about doing research
and then there are also costs of the
people who do get funded at the
negotiations for the contract that take
time and effort and also when they get
the projects funded over the next three
years their significant effort required
to manage and report and every D and W
on that Gantt chart we saw before
generates reams of documents would we be
happy if this level of effort was put
into if we had one and a half billion
euros put into funding teams of doctors
and nurses competing to be able to save
patients lives in this operating theatre
not operating not saving lives just
competing talking about what they do and
then when they do get that funding for
the few who do they actually wouldn’t be
in the operating theatre very much
they’d be out filling in the paperwork
and the reporting in the admin around it
it’s a big cost that is using up our
taxpayer funds to talk about research
not do it and I understand that because
it’s taxpayer funds there’s an
accountability that’s really important
but I think we’ve got the balance wrong
between managing the risk and the
control versus trusting the researchers
to get on and do research and to
appropriately allocate their time to
delivering benefits for society and they
said that there’s also personal costs in
this era academics are increasingly
becoming subject to numerous metrics
there was a 2012 report in the UK that
said UK academics were subject to 100
different metrics that measure
publications or grant income or teaching
evaluations numerous of them and there
this quantified academic selves now
reduced to numbers that are
decontextualized and don’t make any
sense but these numbers matter because
they matter for promotion for getting
your next job for getting your next
funding grant and it puts enormous
pressure on people and I hear this I I
do some interviews for a podcast series
with academics and I hear the enormous
stress that people are under there are
study reports that show that people are
working 50 60 hours on average in in
academia and there’s a real problem with
chronic stress and burnout and we know
from psychology literature that when
people are stressed they’re less
creative their thinking is more closed
and these are the very people we want
not if we want being open and being
creative the University my colleague in
our proposal it wasn’t funded his
University recognizes as as do many
others that their academics our staff
are getting increasingly stressed but
what they’re doing is not dealing with
the measures that are causing and the
performance indicators that are causing
the stress they’re offering them stress
management courses and mindfulness
training which are great they’re great
skills to have but not just to put
people back into the battlefield into
those same pressure situations so what
do we need to do science is really
really important there was a march for
science on the 22nd of April and at 600
cities more than 600 cities around the
world people marching for the importance
of what science can contribute to
society in terms of the health of our
communities education well-being the
economy everything we need good healthy
scientists and researchers delivering
the outcomes to society that that we’re
paying them to do as taxpayers the
United Nations developed a set of
sustainable development goals in 2015
and I think these are great because they
were recognizing that gross domestic
product is the only indicator as the
health of the health of a nation was a
very narrow indicator and this was about
trying to develop a much more inclusive
set of indicators and to redefine what
success means and I wonder what we might
be able to do similarly within a
research environment within an academic
context what might a set of sustainable
research and researcher goals look like
that recognizes that research is
creative and messy and open-ended that
different types of research need
different timeframes that the health and
well-being of the researchers doing the
research is just as important as they
are as the outcomes of the work and that
recognizes that compassionate
collaborative work environments not
competition and stress are the way to
deliver good science the way we can
manage risk in positive ways that draw
on trust in our researchers so I want to
encourage us to start thinking about
what this set of goals might look like
redefining what success is and what our
indicators are so that we can really put
our taxpayers funds to the best use in
actually doing science not just talking
about science thank you
[Applause]
you
Please follow and like us: