Seeing ethnographically: teaching ethnography as part of CSCW

While ethnography is an established part of CSCW research, teaching and learning ethnography presents unique and distinct challenges. This paper discusses a study of fieldwork and analysis amongst a group of students learning ethnography as part of a CSCW & design course. Studying the students’ practices we explore fieldwork as a learning experience, both learning about fieldsites as well as learning the practices of ethnography. During their fieldwork and analysis the students used a wiki to collaborate, sharing their field and analytic notes. From this we draw lessons for how ethnography can be taught as a collaborative analytic process and discuss extensions to the wiki to better support its use for collaborating around fieldnotes. In closing we reflect upon the role of learning ethnography as a practical hands on – rather than theoretical – pursuit

From Offshore Operation to Onshore Simulator: Using Visualized Ethnographic Outcomes to Work with Systems Developers

This paper focuses on the process of translating insights from a Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW)-based study, conducted on a vessel at sea, into a model that can assist systems developers working with simulators, which are used by vessel operators for training purposes on land. That is, the empirical study at sea brought about rich insights into cooperation, which is important for systems developers to know about and consider in their designs. In the paper, we establish a model that primarily consists of a ‘computational artifact’. The model is designed to support researchers working with systems developers. Drawing on marine examples, we focus on the translation process and investigate how the model serves to visualize work activities; how it addresses relations between technical and computational artifacts, as well as between functions in technical systems and functionalities in cooperative systems. In turn, we link design back to fieldwork studies

Storing, caring and sharing: Examining organisational practices around material stuff in the home

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.Homes are a much discussed, but little empirically examined resource for action. Material stuff at home offer resources for social, organisational and individual activities that we routinely encounter and use on an everyday basis. Yet their purposes, storing and sharing practices of use and roles in social and organisational actions are hardly touched upon within Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) academic literature. As a consequence of this, there are critical gaps in understanding home organisation and management methods as a means of informing the design of novel technologies. This thesis is an examination of everyday routines in home, paying particular attention to tidying, storing, retrieving and sharing practices. To examine these practices at home, this thesis presents a combination of two qualitative studies using ethnographically oriented methods. Study one (Home’s Tidying up, Storing and Retrieving) concerns the topic of home storage in practice; investigating how householders create and use domestic storage practices and the methods used to manage their storage at home. Study two (Social Interaction around Shared Resources) concerns social interaction around shared resources, and the methods used to manage sharing practices at home. Semi-structured interviews, fieldwork observation, tour around a home, and a photo diary were undertaken to produce a ‘rich’ description of how householders collaborate in storing and sharing set of practices to manage their everyday routines. Several key finding emerged from the research, that are used to identify important implications for design of home organisational technologies, for example to support effective lightweight interactions, providing user controlled mechanism to make different levels of privacy protection for family members, offering effective awareness of family communications and notifications of the activities of other people around these organisation systems, and making available a range of flexible options for family members to access a shared resource. The thesis make the case that flexible systems should be designed allowing people to categorise things in different ways, and have the values of home asserted in technologies, considering factors such as emotion around the use of space in home organisation to make homes become the unique places that they are understood to be

Focus Issue on Legacy Information Systems and Business Process Change: Banking on the Old technology: Understanding the Organisational Context of \u27Legacy\u27 Issues

A common thread in recent discussions of organisational change is the importance of the role allocated to information technology in the realisation of such change. It is a feature of many of these discussions that IT is handled in a somewhat simplistic fashion, often with a pronounced theoretical leaning resulting in the case of the disappearing technology . Even empirical studies of new technology often fail to pay attention to the actual details of technology in use, instead focusing upon the part technology might play in producing certain managerial or workplace configurations that are themselves theoretical renderings of organisational life. By way of contrast, this paper presents some results from a long-term empirical investigation of computer systems in use in financial services that specifically aims to focus upon the actual details of technology in use. In addition it attempts to address conventional concerns with the relationship between new technology and \u27skill\u27, productivity and other factors in a rather different fashion by focusing on the issue of \u27legacy\u27. We present a number of examples of legacy issues and try to delineate their impact on everyday working life. \u27Legacy\u27, we argue, is not just a problem encountered by organisations with aging mainframes and dated software, it is an issue from the moment a computer system becomes an integral part of any organisation\u27s everyday work

Storing, caring and sharing : examining organisational practices around material stuff in the home

Homes are a much discussed, but little empirically examined resource for action. Material stuff at home offer resources for social, organisational and individual activities that we routinely encounter and use on an everyday basis. Yet their purposes, storing and sharing practices of use and roles in social and organisational actions are hardly touched upon within Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) academic literature. As a consequence of this, there are critical gaps in understanding home organisation and management methods as a means of informing the design of novel technologies. This thesis is an examination of everyday routines in home, paying particular attention to tidying, storing, retrieving and sharing practices. To examine these practices at home, this thesis presents a combination of two qualitative studies using ethnographically oriented methods. Study one (Home’s Tidying up, Storing and Retrieving) concerns the topic of home storage in practice; investigating how householders create and use domestic storage practices and the methods used to manage their storage at home. Study two (Social Interaction around Shared Resources) concerns social interaction around shared resources, and the methods used to manage sharing practices at home. Semi-structured interviews, fieldwork observation, tour around a home, and a photo diary were undertaken to produce a ‘rich’ description of how householders collaborate in storing and sharing set of practices to manage their everyday routines. Several key finding emerged from the research, that are used to identify important implications for design of home organisational technologies, for example to support effective lightweight interactions, providing user controlled mechanism to make different levels of privacy protection for family members, offering effective awareness of family communications and notifications of the activities of other people around these organisation systems, and making available a range of flexible options for family members to access a shared resource. The thesis make the case that flexible systems should be designed allowing people to categorise things in different ways, and have the values of home asserted in technologies, considering factors such as emotion around the use of space in home organisation to make homes become the unique places that they are understood to be.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

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