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Jack Whalen

Born		1949 Elizabeth, New Jersey, USA Education     	PhD in Sociology Occupation   	Professor; user experience researcher Employers     	Aalto University; Sustainable Fisheries Partnership Known for	Research at the intersection of social interaction,			computer computer technology, and artificial intelligence Website	https://aalto-fi.academia.edu/JackWhalen

Jack Whalen is a veteran design ethnographer, having led projects (many of them international) focusing on user/customer experience, customer services, expert system technology and artificial intelligence, peer-to-peer sharing applications and user generated content, and knowledge management more generally. He is a professor in the School of Arts, Design and Architecture at Aalto University in Helsinki, Finland. He also is on the staff of Sustainable Fisheries Partnership, an international NGO in the world of sustainable seafood and marine and freshwater conservation, where he currently directs user experience research for their Systems Division.

Whalen was born in Elizabeth, New Jersey, to an Irish-American family and raised in Elizabeth and nearby Union. He received a B.A. in sociology at Temple University in Philadelphia in 1973. He drove a taxi for Yellow Cab in Philadelphia from 1970 to 1974, and was also employed from 1973-76 as a youth worker, Assistant Director, and then Executive Director by the Lutheran Settlement House in Philadelphia's Fishtown neighbourhood. During his years in Philadelphia, Whalen was also active in community organising efforts in the Fishtown and Kensington neighbourhoods before leaving for New Hampshire in 1976 to serve as Director of Development for Franconia College.

In 1977, Whalen moved to California to attend graduate school in sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He received a PhD in sociology from UCSB in 1984, after taking a position the prior year as Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Oregon. He was appointed Associate Professor in 1989 and served as Department Head from 1990-93.

In 1994, Whalen left Oregon for a position as Senior Research Scientist at the Institute for Research on Learning, in Palo Alto, California, before moving to Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in 1997, where he was a Principal Scientist in the Systems and Practices Laboratory and later, the Computing Science Laboratory.

He left PARC in 2010 and joined the School of Arts, Design and Architecture at Aalto University in Helsinki, Finland, initially as Visiting Professor in the Department of Design and then as Adjunct Professor of Design and Ethnographic Research. Also in 2010, Whalen became a staff member of Sustainable Fisheries Partnership (SFP), an international NGO, serving as Director of Evaluation and Quality Assurance in their Science, Research and Data Division. He now directs user experience research for SFP's new Systems Division, focusing on their FishSource, FisheriesWiki, Sustainable Seafood Metrics websites.

Whalen has been married for over forty years; he and his wife Marilyn have one child and three grandchildren. He lives in San Francisco and Helsinki, and is a citizen of both the United States and Ireland.

RESEARCH

Over a career spanning three decades, Whalen has studied commercial fishers, seafood buyers, engineers and line workers in vehicle assembly plants, print shop customers and machine operators, field service technicians, police and fire communications centres, sales reps and their customers, corporate call centres, software and system engineers and their project teams, and many other types of technology users. He has also carried out groundbreaking life history research on the post-movement lives of 1960s student activists.

As a Senior Research Scientist in the mid-1990s for the Institute for Research on Learning (IRL) in Palo Alto, California, Whalen led a small group of field researchers who joined a reengineering team from Xerox’s U.S. Customer Operations to design a functionally integrated process for customer support. One important contribution of Whalen’s group was the creation of a new learning strategy, called Phased Interactive Learning or ‘PhIL’. PhIL was later adapted for use by Xerox in their technical service force and then became the foundation for the company’s corporate learning strategy.

Whalen’s studies on artificial intelligence with Erik Vinkhuyzen at IRL were dedicated to evaluating expert systems for diagnosing machine problems for service technicians in the field as well as call centre agents – not the technical achievements of these systems per se but the entire system of person-in-interaction-with-technology. While computer system developers often speak of the coupling of human intelligence with machine power in a single, interactive system that dramatically enhances human performance, Whalen and Vinkhuyzen’s investigation of diagnostic systems in actual use demonstrated how achieving this objective was not primarily a matter of deciding how to allocate functions between the machine components and the human elements, but rather how to build effective tools that take the fundamental differences between human action and machine operation into account. From this evaluation, they developed innovative service strategies whereby the work community itself could become a ‘living expert system’ that would then effectively leverage the distinct capabilities of AI technology.

This field research on call centres in industry was later featured in Simon Head’s The New Ruthless Economy: Work and Power in the Digital Age, a critical analysis of the impact of reengineering and information technology on the modern workplace, as well as John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid’s The Social Life of Information.

These call centre studies built upon Whalen’s prior research on public sector teleservice while a faculty member in sociology at the University of Oregon. Together with sociologists Marilyn Whalen and Don Zimmerman, Whalen carried out field studies for several years on public safety (police, fire, and emergency medical) communications centres. This included his working full-time for eighteen months as a Communications Specialist in the Department of Public Safety for the city of Eugene, Oregon. Computer-aided dispatch in 9-1-1 operations became one of the foci of this research, as did the interactional problems that call-takers face in conversations with callers, especially when the callers are emotionally overwrought.

After moving to the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), Whalen’s field research with Daniel Bobrow on how to support knowledge sharing practices in work communities was instrumental in the development of the Eureka ‘technical tips’ system for the Xerox service force. 15,000 service technicians around the globe currently use Eureka, solving over 750,000 problems each year, for an estimated savings in service costs to Xerox since its deployment of over $100M. Eureka has also earned Xerox several awards, including being named ‘Knowledge Company of the Year' by KMWorld magazine in 1999.

Following the development of Eureka and a related system for Xerox sales, Whalen led PARC projects with Telecom Italia and General Motors to develop similar knowledge sharing and learning systems for customer support centres and assembly plant manufacturing engineers, respectively. Both these systems remain in operation today.

Also at PARC, Whalen led two projects on barriers to innovation in software development. One focused on the adoption of agile methods by Xerox software engineers; the other was a three-year study carried out for Fujitsu’s system engineering organisation in Japan, focusing on how their engineers manage system integration projects and work with customers to determine requirements. Whalen’s work with Fujitsu also led to the creation of their Social Science Centre (SSC). The SSC is staffed solely from within their system engineering division and uses ethnographic fieldwork to foster internal organisational innovation (especially skill development amongst engineers) and assist external clients through human-centred system design.

Whalen’s later research at PARC dealt with the design of embedded and remote diagnostics intended to dramatically improve customer self-service for Xerox products. His analysis of Xerox customers addressed barriers the company would face in implementing any self-service programme.

Most recently, at Aalto University in Helsinki, Whalen has been a tutor and advisor on a number of PhD projects in the industrial design programme, including research on Chinese users of shanzhai (counterfeit products), communal design practices of street vendors in rural Uganda,  resident participation in Finnish housing renovation, career paths and personal development of young Finnish designers, design opportunities involving the everyday energy consumption practices behaviour of families in urban India, and the locally situated use of innovative design methods.

PUBLICATIONS

Books

Margaret Szymanski and Jack Whalen (editors). Making Work Visible: Ethnographically Grounded Case Studies of Work Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2011.

Jack Whalen and Richard Flacks. Beyond the Barricades: The Sixties Generation Grows Up. Temple University Press. 1989.

Scientific papers

Margaret H. Szymanski and Jack Whalen. Work Practice Analysis At Xerox. In Making Work Visible: Ethnographically Grounded Case Studies of Work Practice, edited by Margaret H. Szymanski and Jack Whalen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2011. Jack Whalen and Daniel Bobrow. Communal Knowledge Sharing: The Eureka Story. In Making Work Visible: Ethnographically Grounded Case Studies of Work Practice, edited by Margaret H. Szymanski and Jack Whalen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2011. (A revised and updated version of Bobrow and Whalen 2002, Community Knowledge Sharing in Practice: The Eureka Story.) Jack Whalen and Marilyn Whalen. Integrated Customer Service: Re-inventing A Workscape. In Making Work Visible: Ethnographically Grounded Case Studies of Work Practice, edited by Margaret H. Szymanski and Jack Whalen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2011. Bob Moore, Jack Whalen, and E. Cabell Hankinson Gathman. The Work of the Work Order. In Organisation, Interaction and Practice: Studies in Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis, edited by Nick Llewellyn and Jon Hindmarsh. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2009. Erik Vinkhuyzen and Jack Whalen. Expert System Technology in Work Practice. In Orders of Ordinary Action, edited by Stephen Hester and David Francis. Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate Publishing. 2007. Jack Whalen and Don H. Zimmerman. Working a Call: Multiparty Management and Interactional Infrastructure in Calls for Help. In Calling For Help: Language and Social Interaction in Telephone Helplines, edited by Carolyn D. Baker, Michael Emmison, and Alan Firth. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 2005. Yutaka Yamauchi, Jack Whalen, and Daniel G. Bobrow. Information Use of Service Technicians in Difficult Cases. In Conference Proceedings CHI 2003: New Horizons. 2003. Marilyn Whalen, Jack Whalen, Robert Moore, Geoff Raymond, Margaret Szymanski, and Erik Vinkhuyzen. Studying Workscapes. In Discourse and Technology: Multimodal Discourse Analysis, edited by Philip LeVine and Ron Scollon. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. 2003. Jack Whalen, Marilyn Whalen, and Kathryn Henderson. Improvisational Choreography in Teleservice Work. British Journal of Sociology 53: 239-258. 2002. Bobrow, Daniel G. and Jack Whalen. Community Knowledge Sharing in Practice: The Eureka Story. Reflections 4 (2): 47-59. 2002. Jack Whalen and Erik Vinkhuyzen. Expert Systems in (Inter)action: Diagnosing Document Machine Problems Over the Telephone. In Workplace Studies: Recovering Work Practice and Informing Systems Design, edited by Paul Luff, Jon Hindmarsh and Christian Heath. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2000. Jack Whalen and Geoff Raymond. Conversation Analysis. In The Encyclopedia of Sociology, 2nd Edition, edited by Edgar F. Borgatta and Marie L. Borgatta. New York: Macmillan. 2000. Jack Whalen and Don H. Zimmerman. Observations on the Display and Management of Emotion in Naturally Occurring Activities: The Case of ‘Hysteria’ in Calls to 9-1-1. Social Psychology Quarterly 61:141-159. 1998. Jack Whalen. Expert Systems Versus Systems for Experts. In Social and Interactional Dimensions of Human-Computer Interfaces, edited by Peter Thomas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1995. Jack Whalen. A Technology of Order Production: Computer-Aided Dispatch in 9-1-1 Communications. In Situated Order: Studies in the Social Organization of Talk and Embodied Activities, edited by George Psathas and Paul ten Have. Washington, D.C.: University Press of America. 1995. Goldman, Marion S. and Jack Whalen. From the New Left to the New Enlightenment: Methodological Implications of Public Attention on Private Lives. Qualitative Sociology 13:85-107. 1990. Clayman, Steven E. and Jack Whalen. When The Medium Becomes The Message: The Case of the Rather-Bush Encounter. Research on Language and Social Interaction 22:241-272. 1989. Whalen, Jack, Don H. Zimmerman, and Marilyn R. Whalen. When Words Fail: A Single Case Analysis. Social Problems 35:335-362. 1988. Jack Whalen and Richard Flacks. Echoes of Rebellion: The New Left Grows Up. Journal of Political and Military Sociology 12: 61-78. 1984. Jack Whalen and Richard Flacks. The Isla Vista ‘Bank Burners’ Ten Years Later: Notes on the Fate of Student Activists. Sociological Focus 13: 215-236. 1980.