Creating Conditions for Participation: Conflicts and Resources in Systems Design

User participation in design is a well recognized way of gaining more knowledge about work, and of improving the quality of the computer application to be designed. Yet many experiences with user participation were gained under circumstances quite different from those of corporations in the 1990's - in the Scandinavian collective resource projects. This paper will argue that a lot can still be learned from these projects, in particular when it comes to the creation of conditions for participation.The paper will present a recent project, the AT project, in order to discuss the concerns and conditions of participatory design projects today. This discussion seeks inspiration also in philosophical concerns regarding human development. The main message is that we shouldn't throw out the baby with the bath water, though certainly many aspects need to be rethought. The paper goes on to suggest that new alliances between groups in organizations, with due concern for their diversity of resources, and with constructive use of the conflicts inherent in the organization despite their fundamentally conflicting interests, may be a way forward in empowering organizations, making room for groups and individuals within them to act. The paper discusses experiences with ways of setting up design activities in such an environment

Re-framing Research in Human-Computer Interaction from the Point-of-View of Activity Theory?

Within human-computer interaction cognitive science is today the leading approach. Yet its position is threaded philosophically as well as from within the field. Most attempts to re-frame human-computer interaction from within the field are minor revisions to the traditional theoretical basis, still without much to say about real-life computer applications. In this paper I shall present and discuss an alternative approach based on activity theory.The following summarizes the theoretical anchor points:Activity is mediated. That artifacts mediate use means that we are normally not aware of them as such in use, they are transparent to us. Artifacts are seen as historical devices.Although collective, each activity is conducted through actions of individuals.Activities are not taking place in isolation but interwoven with other activities. Artifacts may be the instruments of a web of activities. The concepts of breakdowns and focus shifts are used in the further analysis of specific computer applications in use, and a mapping technique for such analysis is developed. Based on an example I take the first steps towards a more contex\-tualized analysis of human-computer interaction. The human activity framework has provided a vehicle for bringing together an overall analysis of work and use of computer technology with a detailed analysis of human-computer interaction. It provides a way of understanding the relations between the overall socio-political conditions of work and the specific use of the specific computer application in a specific situation. What actually goes on may be analysed from many different levels of activity, where the actual actors are different, and maybe even different from those who conduct the specific actions

Mediating Technical Platforms to Support the Development of Shared Work Practices

This paper discusses two examples of how shared technical support platforms are adapted and developed in organizations. One is support for object oriented design and programming, the other, production of documents in an office. These two cases represent longitudinal studies of the use, the adaptation and the development of these platforms. This development involved active mediation of platform coordinators who were users of the shared environment, at the same time as they possessed, and developed further, skills and procedures to undertake its continued development. The paper applies a developmental perspective in that its concern is how the technical platform and the work practices surrounding it, are developing over time, and how the technical and organizational conditions have been in support of or a hindrance to this development

Computer Applications as Mediators of Design and Use

The present report constitutes together with 21 submitted papers the author's doctor's dissertation. This dissertation summarizes an understanding of computers as the materials that we shape in design, on the one hand, and the artifacts that we use, in work and other everyday activities on the other. The presented work is primarily methodological and design-oriented, i.e. it is concerned with changing computer applications and with understanding them as changing and as part of change

ECSCW 2011 Conference Supplement: European Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work Aarhus, 24.-28. September 2011

Dual eye-tracking (DUET) is a promising methodology to study and support collaborative work. The method consists of simultaneously recording the gaze of two collaborators working on a common task. The main themes addressed in the workshop are eye-tracking methodology (how to translate gaze measures into descriptions of joint action, how to measure and model gaze alignment between collaborators, how to address task specificity inherent to eye-tracking data) and more generally future applications of dual eye-tracking in CSCW. The DUET workshop will bring together scholars who currently develop the approach as well as a larger audience interested in applications of eye-tracking in collaborative situations. The workshop format will combine paper presentations and discussions. The papers are available online as PDF documents at http://www.dualeyetracking.org/DUET2011/

Scenarios as springboards in design of CSCW

Our point of departure is that the relationship between social science, cooperative working and technology is not as much a matter of differences in understanding, as it is a matter of how to accomplish change. This chapter outlines an approach to design of CSCW where change is addressed in terms of ''expansion of the work practice''. To facilitate the change process as a process of expansion, scenarios are used as springboards. Creation and use of scenarios are supported by a conceptual ''toolbox''. The foundation for this toolbox is an understanding of the design process as ``abductive thinking'' consisting of idea generation and systematic reflection, and an understanding of design tools inspired from activity theory. As design processes may involve different communities of practice, we discuss the role of scenarios as boundary objects

Design of Information Systems: Things versus People

Information Technology is usually designed using traditional system development techniques and emphaizing conventional management objectives that focus on the information rather than the people in a workplace. This chaper uses research from a gender perspective that highlights the ways that office systems can be designed with peopel in mind. It then applies the gender perspective to explain why Cooperative or Participatory Design can be used to enable system developers and office workers to work together to design applications that better support working practices

Multimedia: interdisciplinary challenges to design

The term multimedia is often used for research into getting new media, like sound and video, into the computer. In recent years activities have escalated. Many new research and educational activities have been initiated, also in Scandinavia. The label multimedia has been broadened to include research in, e.g. video-conferencing, hypermedia, CSCW, virtual reality, robotics, and digital theater. Accordingly, the field is opening for many new and exciting interdisciplinary challenges. We propose that the IS community could get an important role in engaging in re-conceptualisation of computer artifacts from the perspective of use. We should focus on concerns for advances in interaction technology, new domains beyond work, new ways of working in interdisciplinary teams, and new ways of working with users who are not established in a well-defined work setting

Cooperative Prototyping: Users and Designers in Mutual Activity

In most development projects, descriptions and prototypes are developed by system designers on their own, utilizing users as suppliers of information on the use domain. In contrast, we are proposing a cooperative prototyping approach where users are involved actively and creatively in design and evaluation of early prototypes. This paper illustrates the approach by describing the design of computer support for casework in a technical department of a Danish municipality. Prototyping is viewed as an on-going learning process, and we analyze situations where openings for learning occur in the prototyping activity. The situations seem to fall into four categories: 1) Situations where the future work situation with a new computer application is simulated to some extent to investigate the future work activity. 2) Situations where the prototype is manipulated and used as a basis for idea exploration. 3) Situations focusing on the designers' learning about the users' work in practice. 4) Situations where the prototyping tool or the design session as such becomes the focus. Lessons learned from the analysis of these situations are discussed. In particular we discuss a tension between the need for careful preparation of prototyping sessions and the need to establish conditions for user and designer creativity. Our conclusion is that users and designers should prepare to learn from breakdowns and focus shifts in cooperative prototyping sessions rather than they should try to avoid them