A transdisciplinary exploration of interpretability and trust of advanced software with the Australian Proptech community of practice

This research explores the notion of interpretability and trust of advanced software in the context of the Australian Proptech community of practice. It does so through a transdisciplinary qualitative and reflexive research methodology that embeds findings with a creative artefact: an ethnographic novel.

This research was catalysed by a practice paradigm that Humphreys (2009) refers to as “epistemic opacity”. The paradigm can be understood as the pairing of these two predicaments:

1. Brewer’s (2016) predicament of knowledge that rhetorically asks: How do we process information when the volume of information available surpasses our processing power?

Where the solution to the first predicament requires advanced software, it presupposes the second predicament:

2. That which Humphrey’s (2009) refers to as the anthropocentric predicament: How do we, as humans, understand computationally based scientific methods that transcend our own abilities? Or in simpler terms, how can we trust that which, even with radical transparency, we cannot understand?

There is an empirical link between trust and adoption (Bedué and Fritzsche, 2022; also, Chen and Park, 2021) and so mistrust can lead to a lack of adoption and scepticism from users, impacting the success of Proptech solutions but in its most perverse form, epistemic opacity can enable the manipulation and exploitation of a user base itself. This research explores interpretability as a notion that may remediate epistemic opacity and bridge the gap of trust over privileged knowledge between the user and the creators of these solutions.

As a practitioner-researcher in this context, I have explored, through interviews and reflexive journaling, the Australian Proptech community of practice as both a hub of influence for implementing interpretability in future development pathways but also as a source of social learning. I have adapted Scholz and Steiner’s Architecture of Knowledge (2015) as a framework for integrating various ethnographic research methods with my own practical experience to create new knowledge. This research is for practitioners in the Australian Proptech community of practice who are engaged with ideation, development, distribution and implementation of advanced software.

The process of fictionalising the findings of this research, within the methodology, has been a deliberate choice to support practitioners and a hope that the findings and insights from research participants are not limited to this thesis nor the academic reader. Rather, by presenting findings to a general audience within a fictionalised ethnographic novel, Uptown, it is my hope to present a realist version of history, using figurative techniques (White, 2004).

UpTown is seeking to subvert an objective ontology entirely, in favour of abstracted realism and integrated knowledge, creating a new (fictional) reality that is grounded in the outcome and theorisation of ethnographic fieldwork. I do this, not to shirk a responsibility to truth telling but to access a new and different truth through literary techniques - and a truth that will also help readers create a truth for themselves and continue a conversation within the Australian Proptech community of practice.

The creative artefact can be accessed at this link:
https://bit.ly/ReadUptown