Search results

In this book Kaj Gronbaek and Randall H. Trigg present a set of principles for the design of open hypermedia systems and provide concrete implications of these principles for issues ranging from data structures to architectures and system integration and for settings as diverse as the World Wide Web and the workplace.

In this paper, we look at how people working in a governmental labor inspection agency tailor their shared PC environment. Starting with standard off-the-shelf software, the tailors adapt that software to the particular workplace in which they are embedded, at the same time that they modify and extend the practices of that workplace. Over time, their adaptations and the tailoring processes themselves become structured and systematized within the organization. This tendency toward systematization is in part a response to the requirement that the results of tailoring be sharable across groups of users. Our study focuses on several dimensions of the work of tailoring: construction, organizational change, learning, and politics. We draw two kinds of lessons for system development: how better to support the work of tailors, and how system developers can learn from and cooperate with tailors.

This paper reports our experiences in developing a workoriented design practice. We sketch our general approach to relating work practice studies and design, including our use of case-based prototypes to bridge between the worlds of professional design and the settings in which new technologies will be used. We go on to describe our entry into the work site that was the setting for this project, our encounters with members of the site and with their work, and the development of our design agenda. Along the way we discuss the difficulties of maintaining alignment, the limits of research prototypes. and the politics of representing work practices.

This article provides an overview of a research program developed over the past 20 years to explore relations between everyday practices and technology design and use. The studies highlighted reflect three interrelated lines of inquiry: (a) critical analyses of technical discourses and practices, (b) ethnographies of work and technologies-in-use, and (c) design interventions. Starting from the premise that technologies can be assessed only in their relations to the sites of their production and use, the authors reconstruct technologies as social practice. A central problem for the design of artifacts then becomes their relation to the environments of their intended use. Through ethnographies of the social world, the analyses focus on just how social/material specificities are assembled together to comprise our everyday experience.