The Day-to-Day Co-Production of Ageing in Place.

We report findings from a study that set out to explore the experience of older people living with assisted living technologies and care services. We find that successful 'ageing in place' is socially and collaboratively accomplished - 'co-produced' - day-to-day by the efforts of older people, and their formal and informal networks of carers (e.g. family, friends, neighbours). First, we reveal how 'bricolage' allows care recipients and family members to customise assisted living technologies to individual needs. We argue that making customisation easier through better design must be part of making assisted living technologies 'work'. Second, we draw attention to the importance of formal and informal carers establishing and maintaining mutual awareness of the older person's circumstances day-to-day so they can act in a concerted and coordinated way when problems arise. Unfortunately, neither the design of most current assisted living technologies, nor the ways care services are typically configured, acknowledges these realities of ageing in place. We conclude that rather than more 'advanced' technologies, the success of ageing in place programmes will depend on effortful alignments in the technical, organisational and social configuration of support

Corealisation: A Radical Respecification of the Working Division of Labour in Systems Development

Institute for Communicating and Collaborative SystemsThis thesis develops and assesses an alternative approach to developing IT systems in complex organisational settings, aiming to equip IT professionals with an orientation to design that allows them to create uniquely work affording artefacts that closely fit the working practices of those working with them. This involves a radical respecification of the working division of labour in systems development. Regular reports of failing IT projects have lead to a sense of an ongoing crisis that persists despite the development of various candidate remedies over the past decades. This thesis starts with a critical appraisal of various issues encountered in systems development, conceptualisations of design work and a discussion of the problem of “informing design”. A review of various approaches taken to address this issue reveals that the relationship between ‘design’ and ‘use‘ and between ‘designers’ and ‘users’ is at the heart of the matter. Drawing on ethnomethodology as a means of studying work as a socially organised, situated activity, I then introduce the notion of corealisation as a radical respecification of design. Corealisation aims to erase the boundaries between ‘design’ and ‘use’ by fostering a longitudinal partnership between IT and non-IT professionals orienting to the work on and with IT systems as a whole rather than as separate processes. It takes seriously the ethnomethods of all parties, calling practitioners to consider exactly what it is that they and their fellow members know and use in doing the work of IT design: how the work to be supported gets done in the here-and-now, with these resources at hand rather than according to some representation of how work gets done that is external to the setting and has little or no connection to the purpose at hand. An ethnographic study of work in a manufacturing plant and of IT design in this setting provides the background for the subsequent discussion of the programme of corealisation, especially the notion of design qua member. The thesis goes beyond traditional research methodologies by documenting and reflecting upon the researcher’s experiences as a corealiser of systems, working with other members of the setting. This highlights the importance of having a familiarity with the ‘biography’ of a place as a resource for design work. Finally, the thesis discusses various aspects of corealisation, drawing out implications for the social organisation of design work, especially issues of participation, the use of representations in design work, aspects of dependability and, last but not least, the question of how widely the approach of corealisation may be applied

Stepping into the clouds : enabling companies to adapt their capabilities to cloud computing to succeed under uncertain conditions

Recent technologies have changed the way companies acquire and use computing resources. Companies have to adapt their capabilities, which combine business processes, skills, etc., to exploit the opportunities presented by these technologies whilst avoiding adverse effects. The latter part is, however, becoming increasingly difficult due to the uncertain long-term impact recent technologies have. This thesis argues that companies are required to adapt their capabilities in a way that increases the company’s resilience so that they are robust yet flexible enough to succeed under uncertain conditions. By focusing on cloud computing as one recent technology, this thesis first identifies the underlying processes of adapting capabilities to cloud computing by investigating how software vendors migrated their products into the cloud. The results allow the definition of viewpoints that influence the adaptation of capabilities to cloud computing. Furthermore, the Functional Resonance Analysis Method (FRAM) is applied to one software vendor after the migration of their product into the cloud. FRAM enables the analysis of ‘performance variabilities’ that need to be dampened to increase the resilience of systems. The results show that FRAM appropriately informs steps to increase and measure resilience when migrating products into the cloud. The final part develops cFRAM which extends FRAM through the viewpoints to enable the analysis of capabilities within FRAM. The goal of cFRAM is to enable companies to (1) identify existing capabilities, (2) investigate the impact of cloud computing on them, and (3) inform steps to adapt them to cloud computing whilst dampening performance variabilities. The results of the cFRAM evaluation study are unequivocal and show cFRAM is a novel method that achieves its goal of enabling companies to adapt their capabilities to cloud computing in a way that increases the company’s resilience. cFRAM can be easily adapted to other technologies like smartphones by changing the viewpoints

Dependability as Ordinary Action

This paper presents an ethnomethodologically informed study of the ways that more-or-less dependable systems are part of the everyday lifeworld of society members. Through case study material we explicate how dependability is a practical achievement and how it is constituted as a common sense notion. We show how attending to the logical grammar of dependability can clarify some issues and potential conceptual confusions around the term that occur between lay and ‘professional’ uses. The paper ends with a call to consider dependability in its everyday ordinary language context as well as more ‘professional’ uses of this term