| Landscapes of Practice: Bricolage as a Method for Situated Design | | BIBAK | 1-28 | |
| Monika Buscher; Satinder Gill; Preben Mogensen; Dan Shapiro | |||
| This paper proposes a 'bricolage' approach to designing systems for
cooperative work. This involves users, participatory designers and
ethnographers in a continuing cycle of design and revised work practice, often
in settings where resources are limited and short-term results are required. If
exploits the flood to market of hardware, software and services. The approach
is illustrated with results from a project with a practice of landscape
architects. Their work is analysed in terms of communities of practice and
actor networks. These perspectives help to identify the 'socilities' of people
and technologies and of the relationships between them. They help to
distinguish different forms of cooperation with differing support needs,
opportunities and vulnerabilities. They inform the design of technical support,
the assessment of outcomes, and the design of further solutions, in a cycle of
'situated experimentation'. Keywords: actor-networks, bricolage, communities of practice, CSCW, ethnography,
participatory design | |||
| The Communication Bottleneck in Knitwear Design: Analysis and Computing Solutions | | BIBAK | 29-74 | |
| Claudia Eckert | |||
| Communication between different members of a design team often poses
difficulties. This paper reports on the results of a detailed empirical study
of communication in over twenty British, German and Italian knitwear companies.
The knitwear design process is shared by the designers, who plan the visual and
tactile appearance of the garments, and the technicians, who have to realise
the garment on a knitting machine. They comprise a typical but small design
team whose members have different backgrounds and expertise. Knitwear design
allows a detailed analysis of the causes and effects of communication
breakdown. Designers specify their designs inaccurately, incompletely and
inconsistently; technicians interpret these specifications according to their
previous experience of similar designs, and produce garments very different
from the designers' original intentions. Knitwear is inherently difficult to
describe, as no simple and complete notation exists; and the relationship
between visual appearance and structure and technical properties of knitted
fabric is subtle and complex. Designers and technicians have different
cognitive approaches and are very different people. At the same time the
interaction between designers and technicians is badly managed in many
companies. This paper argues that improving the accuracy and reliability of
designers' specifications would significantly enhance the design process. It
concludes with a description of the architecture of an intelligent automatic
design system that generates technically correct designs from the designers'
customary notations. Keywords: automatic design, communication, design, ethnography, knitwear, notation,
team working | |||
| An Integrated Approach to Designing and Evaluating Collaborative Applications and Infrastructures | | BIBA | 75-111 | |
| Prasun Dewan | |||
| Collaborative systems include both general infrastructures and specific applications for supporting collaboration. Because of the relative newness and complexity of these systems, it has been unclear what approach should be used to design and evaluate them. Based on the lessons learned from our work and that of others on collaborative systems, we have derived an integrated approach to researching collaborative applications and infrastructures. The approach can be described as a sequence of steps: We decompose the functionality of collaboration systems into smaller functions that can be researched more-or-less independently. For each of these functions, we adopt general (system-independent) principles regarding the design and implementation of the function, identify collaboration scenarios at multiple levels of abstraction, identify requirements based on the scenarios, adopt an interaction model to meet the requirements, realize the interaction model as a concrete user interface, develop a logical architecture of the system, identify a physical architecture for placing the logical components in a distributed system, develop infrastructure abstractions, use the abstractions to implement applications, and perform lab studies, field experiments, and simulations to evaluate the infrastructure and applications. As in other models with multiple phases, feedback from subsequent phases is used to modify the results from the previous phases. In this paper, we describe, illustrate and motivate this research plan. | |||
| Co-Constructing Non-Mutual Realities: Delay-Generated Trouble in Distributed Interaction | | BIB | 113-138 | |
| Karen Ruhleder; Brigitte Jordan | |||
| "Social Navigation of Information Space" by Alan J. Munro, Kristina Hook and David Benyon (eds.) | | BIB | 139-141 | |
| Mike Fraser | |||
| "Information Ecologies: Using Technology with Heart" by Bonnie Nardi and Vicki O'Day | | BIB | 143-145 | |
| Geoffrey C. Bowker | |||
| "Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences" by Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star | | BIB | 147-153 | |
| D. W. Randall | |||
| Work Practices Surrounding PACS: The Politics of Space in Hospitals | | BIBAK | 163-188 | |
| Hilda Tellioglu; Ina Wagner | |||
| This paper uses a case study of collaborative work practices within the
radiology department of a hospital, for examining the usefulness of spatial
approaches to collaboration. It takes a socio-political perspective on
understanding the shaping effects of spatial arrangements on work practices,
and seeks to identify some of the key CSCW issues that can be addressed in
spatial terms. We analyse the spatial settings or layers (physical, digital and
auditory) within which work takes place, and the qualities of connections
between them, examining in how far they support (professional) boundaries or
help maintain a sense of context. Guiding themes are the relationships between
space and the visibility of work, and how to accommodate social world needs
through spatial arrangements. Keywords: CSCW, ethnographic case study, health care, space | |||
| Computer Supported Social Networking For Augmenting Cooperation | | BIBAK | 189-209 | |
| H. Ogata; Y. Yano; N. Furugori; Q. Jin | |||
| The exploration of social networks is essential for finding capable
cooperators who can help problem-solving and for augmenting cooperation between
workers in an organization. This paper describes PeCo-Mediator-II to seek
capable cooperators through a chain of personal connections (PeCo) in a
networked organization. Moreover, this system helps to gather, explore, and
visualize social networks in an organization. The experimental results show
that the system facilitates users' encounters with cooperators and develops new
helpful connections with the cooperators. Keywords: collaborative help networks, mediation, on-line social networks, personal
connections, software agents | |||
| Bridging Work Practice and System Design: Integrating Systemic Analysis, Appreciative Intervention and Practitioner Participation | | BIBAK | 211-246 | |
| Helena Karasti | |||
| This article discusses the integration of work practice and system design.
By scrutinising the unfolding discourse of workshop participants the
co-construction of work practice issues as relevant design considerations is
described. Through a mutual exploration of ethnography and participatory design
the contributing constituents to the co-construction process are identified and
put forward as elements in the integration of 'systemic analysis' and
'appreciative intervention'. The systemic analysis proposes collaboratively
grounding the emergent understandings on an inductive and iterative analysis of
actual technologically mediated work practice. The appreciative intervention,
in turn, calls for envisioning images of future system and context through a
recognition of presence and change intertwined in the existing ways of working.
The identified elements are joined into three dimensions of interplay, namely
the analytic distance, the horizon of work practice transformations and the
situated generalisations, which reformulate new conceptualisations of what the
integration of work practice and participatory system design is all about. It
is suggested that these dimensions together with practitioner participation
call into question some of the taken-for-granted assumptions and commonly
forwarded intractable disciplinary dichotomies and contribute more generally to
bridging work practice and participatory design. Keywords: analysis, ethnography, image interpretation, integration,
interdisciplinarity, intervention, participatory design, practitioner
participation, radiology, system design, work practice | |||
| Reviewing Practices in Collaborative Writing | | BIBAK | 247-259 | |
| Hee-Cheol (Ezra) Kim; Kerstin Severinson Eklundh | |||
| This paper presents an interview study in which 11 academics as interviewees
participated for the purpose of revealing common collaborative writing
practices, with particular focus on reviewing documents. First, we present the
findings obtained concerning the issues of co-operating strategies underlying
the reviewing process, how people revise their documents and comment on them,
what they use the previous revision history for, and to what extent current
technology is used in the reviewing process. Second, we also discuss aspects of
the design of collaborative writing tools. Keywords: change notification, change representation, collaborative writing, comment,
communication, coordination, practice, revision history, reviewing, version
management | |||
| Hunting for the Treasure at the End of the Rainbow: Standardizing corporate IT Infrastructure | | BIBAK | 261-292 | |
| Ole Hanseth; Kristin Braa | |||
| This paper tells the story of the definition and implementation of a
corporate information infrastructure standard within Norsk Hydro. Standards are
widely considered as the most basic features of information infrastructures --
public as well as corporate. This view is expressed by a high level IT manager
in Hydro: ''The infrastructure shall be 100% standardized.'' Such standards are
considered universal in the sense that there is just one standard for each area
or function, and that separate standards should fit together -- no redundancy
and no inconsistency. Each standard is shared by every actor within its use
domain, and it is equal to everybody. Our story illustrates that reality is
different. The idea of the universal standard is an illusion just like the
treasure at the end of the rainbow. Each time one has defined a standard which
is believed to be complete and coherent, during implementation one discovers
that there are elements lacking or incompletely specified while others have to
be changed to make the standard work, which makes various implementations
different and incompatible -- just like arbitrary non-standard solutions. This
fact is due to essential aspects of standardization and infrastructure
building. The universal aspects disappear during implementation, just as the
rainbow moves away from us as we try to catch it. Keywords: actor network theory, global information systems, information
infrastructure, standardization | |||
| Unpacking a Timesheet: Formalisation and Representation | | BIBAK | 293-315 | |
| Barry A. T. Brown | |||
| While the use of formal systems has been an important topic within CSCW,
their use as representations has been relatively neglected. This paper, using
ethnographic data from a British oil company, investigates how representations
are used. In the company studied an electronic timesheet system was implemented
to be used by staff to account for their work. Looking at this system in use
provides insights on what changes when processes are computerised. In
particular, the computerised system used inflexible computerised rules to
enforce a division of labour between the accountants who ran the system, and
those who filled in their timesheets. However, this rigidity was not a purely
negative feature; it helped the accountants who ran the system to do
''representational work'', and establish the accuracy of the timesheet system.
Looking into the politics of this system in use illustrates the danger of
generalising the relationship between formalisation and power. Keywords: ethnography, formalisation, organisational politics, representation,
timesheets, workflows, work practices | |||
| Shift Changes, Updates, and the On-Call Architecture in Space Shuttle Mission Control | | BIBAK | 317-346 | |
| Emily S. Patterson; David D. Woods | |||
| In domains such as nuclear power, industrial process control, and space
shuttle mission control, there is increased interest in reducing personnel
during nominal operations. An essential element in maintaining safe operations
in high risk environments with this 'on-call' organizational architecture is to
understand how to bring called-in practitioners up to speed quickly during
escalating situations. Targeted field observations were conducted to
investigate what it means to update a supervisory controller on the status of a
continuous, anomaly-driven process in a complex, distributed environment.
Sixteen shift changes, or handovers, at the NASA Johnson Space Center were
observed during the STS-76 Space Shuttle mission. The findings from this
observational study highlight the importance of prior knowledge in the updates
and demonstrate how missing updates can leave flight controllers vulnerable to
being unprepared. Implications for mitigating risk in the transition to
'on-call' architectures are discussed. Keywords: anomaly, common ground, decision, ethnography, event, knowledge, mutual
awareness, observation, plan, shift change, update | |||
| Designing Work Oriented Infrastructures | | BIBAK | 347-372 | |
| Ole Hanseth; Nina Lundberg | |||
| Healthcare is making huge investments in information systems like Picture
Archiving and Communication Systems (PACS) and Radiological Information Systems
(RIS). Implementing such systems in the hospitals has been problematic, the
number of systems in regular use is low, and where the systems are in use the
benefits gained are far below what has been expected. This paper analyzes and
identifies a number of challenges one will be confronted with when implementing
PACS and RIS. To deal with these problems it is suggested to consider them as
''work oriented infrastructures''. This term is supposed to draw our attention
to the fact that these systems have the same general characteristics as
traditional infrastructures at the same time as they are developed to support
specific work tasks. These are, and should be, designed and implemented
primarily by their users based on their actual use of the technology. Standards
are equally important for both work oriented and other kinds of
infrastructures. But in the first case, the standardization process is more of
a ''cleaning up'' type which follows a period where the infrastructures have
been changed in different ways in different regions or communities. Keywords: artefacts, gateways, healthcare, information infrastructure, work practice | |||
| Distributed High-End Audio-Visual Content Creation: An Experience Report | | BIBAK | 373-386 | |
| Apostolos Meliones; Antonis Karidis | |||
| In the recent years the world has witnessed an unprecedented expansion in
the global audio-visual industry and actions have been initiated to strengthen
its actors, especially in filmmaking and video production. Companies seeking
ways to improve their performance and productivity and become more competitive
are investing in modern digital technologies. High-performance computing
systems are found today even in small production facilities. Yet, little effort
has been used to implement activities other than production/post-production and
even less to integrate the whole cycle of content development and creation
within a networked collaborative environment. This paper reports the experience
of the DAViD project aiming to establish ways to interact and collaborate
during pre-production phases. Several benefits have been demonstrated, such as
reduction of the overall production time and cost, increased productivity and
increased ability to execute complex, multi-company productions in shorter
times and lower budgets. Keywords: audio-visual industry, audio-visual production, audio-visual content
creation, DAViD, HPCN, video production | |||
| "Organisational Change and Retail Finance: An Ethnographic Perspective" by Richard Harper, Dave Randall and Mark Rouncefield | | BIB | 387-391 | |
| Geraldine Fitzpatrick | |||
| "From Web to Workplace: Designing Open Hypermedia Systems" by Kaj Grønbæk and Randall H. Trigg | | BIB | 393-396 | |
| Wolfgang Prinz | |||