It design for Amateur Communities Cristian Bogdan Stockholm 2003 Doctoral Dissertation Royal Institute of Technology Department of Numerical Analysis and Computer Science
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- 1.5Structure of the thesis
- 1.6Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW)
- 1.6.1Understandings of CSCW
- 1.6.2Theoretical debates in CSCW
- 1.6.2.1Human actors. Critique of the cognitive approach
- 1.6.2.2Being-in-the-world and the language-action perspective
- 1.6.2.3Situated action and the criticism of formalisms
- 1.6.2.4Ethnomethodologists’ critique of theoretical zeal. Technology in working order. Ethnography in CSCW
1.4Research questionsThe questions addressed by this thesis are as follows:
1.5Structure of the thesisThe first, empirical part of the thesis comprises ethnographically oriented field studies of amateur work and technology. Chapter 2 presents a study focused on work of radio amateurs, members of a world-wide voluntary community. The main interest is to understand the immediately-apparent community endurance. Several features of amateur radio work, such as challenge, contingency and pioneering are emphasized and an understanding of community endurance is drawn based on these features. Chapter 3 presents a study focused on work and information technology used by geographically distributed members in three international student organisations. Findings of Chapter 2 are considered in regard to their resemblance with features of the student organisation work and technology. Chapter 4 represents the design-intervention part of the thesis. It focuses on amateur work-oriented design of artefacts for supporting voluntary student work as examined in Chapter 3. Several problems and specifics related to the introduction and self-sustainability of participatory design practices and amateur software development work are reflected upon. The resembling findings from Chapter 2 and 3, as well as lessons from their application in Chapter 4 are then discussed and refined in the discussion Chapter 5 to constitute a generic perspective of “amateur community”. Unlike existing CSCW perspectives such as “network community”, the “amateur community” perspective developed here is not grounded in a specific kind of technology, but in a specific kind of work: amateur work. The result is compared with perspectives such as community of practice. Finally, general conclusions are drawn from the perspective developed, answering to the research questions posed.
CSCW has its origins in the field of Human-Computer Interaction, which in turn began from ergonomics, or “human factors”. While the multidisciplinary character of HCI implies contributions from psychology and computer science, CSCW takes into account the social context of work involving more than one user, hence sociology and computer science are the principal disciplines that contribute to CSCW. However, defining CSCW more precisely than an intuitive understanding like ‘research on software used by multiple users’ has sparked debates and difficulties. 1.6.1Understandings of CSCW“Groupware” is the generally used term for denoting software that supports groups, but many authors reject the idea that CSCW is limited just to that, and question the practical possibility of defining a ‘group’ (e.g. Bannon and Schmidt, 1991). Howard (1988, cited by Bannon and Schmidt) uses the term “strict constructionists” to denote the designers of groupware. They are mostly focused on solving technological problems of providing multi-user facilities, and are not much concerned with the concept in which the application will be used (and, according to Bannon and Schmidt, they are mostly designing for their own group). According to Howard, the remainder of the CSCW field is formed by “loose constructionists” coming from various disciplines. This view is reflected in the double-track organisation of the biannual CSCW conference, one track is concerned with technical issues, the other with social-technical issues. In that ‘language game’, this thesis is a “loose-constructionist” endeavour. Starting from problems in understanding “cooperative work”, authors such as Hughes et al. (1991) prefer to see CSCW as a paradigm rather than a discipline. They see all work as socially organised, hence even seemingly individual work falls within the CSCW domain. As Schmidt and Bannon, they too conclude that CSCW is not only limited to groupware and that its contributing disciplines are affected in “large areas” by CSCW. They contend that CSCW research should affect the way all computer support systems are designed. As such, instead of seeing CSCW as a specialised sub-discipline of HCI, they view CSCW as a paradigm change for both computer science and sociology. The change is not as pronounced as a Kuhnian (1962) “paradigmatic shift” but, due to profound influences to all the disciplines involved, the term ‘paradigm’ is “not out of place”. Schmidt and Bannon (1992) propose to define CSCW as design of support for articulation work, which is defined by Strauss (1985) as “the numerous tasks, clusters of tasks and segments on the trajectory of tasks needed to be meshed”. They point out that when tasks are “uncertain”, task allocation and articulation cannot be planned in advance. A classic example of such a ‘task-uncertain’ environment is the domain of office work. This thesis will investigate ‘computer support for amateur work’, in geographically distributed cooperative settings that will be examined and characterised as “amateur communities”. 1.6.2Theoretical debates in CSCWCurrently neither HCI nor CSCW have a widely recognized theoretical framework. Besides the “articulation work” perspective mentioned above (also known as “coordination theory”), a number of theories were proposed for use by researchers who work in the two related disciplines. To better ground the methods used, the theoretical debates that have led (among other things) to their adoption in CSCW will be shortly reviewed. 1.6.2.1Human actors. Critique of the cognitive approachCognitive science has been widely used in HCI in the early years but it has been criticized by papers such as “From human factors to human actors” (Bannon 1991) calling for humans to be seen as active actors rather than collections of cognitive processors in a wider ‘human-machine system’ model, typical for the ergonomics tradition. 1.6.2.2Being-in-the-world and the language-action perspectiveOther criticisms of cognitive science went further to argue against the rationalistic (Cartesian) philosophical tradition at its basis. Instead of the mind-body, subjective-objective rationalistic dualism, Winograd and Flores (1986) proposed a Heideggerian perspective based on the fundamental unity of being-in-the-world. According to that perspective, implicit beliefs cannot all be made explicit, and meaning is fundamentally social. One cannot have a stable representation of the situation (one is “thrown” into the situation). Winograd and Flores are concerned with Artificial Intelligence, which they characterize as “an attempt to build a full account of human cognition into a formal system”, which, in the light of Heideggerian thrownness, can never be completed. In a similar manner, one can reason that accurate ‘human-machine system’ models are impossible to abstract a priori. Another important consequence of the being-in-the-world perspective is that language is action: one does not simply state a fact or describe a situation when speaking; one creates the situation. Based on the latter consequence of being-in-the-world, Winograd and Flores propose the language-action perspective as “a new foundation” for IT design. Speech acts have a central role in the language-action perspective, and are at the core of the system they created, “the Coordinator”, designed to support group work, more specifically “conversation for action”. Although the system as such has generally been considered to have failed, the debates that it sparked in the HCI and CSCW research communities made the language-action approach very influential. One of the major debates was generated by the “situated action” perspective. 1.6.2.3Situated action and the criticism of formalismsThe situated action perspective (Suchman 1987) came as another major criticism to cognitive modelling of human-machine systems. Suchman argues that human action, although using initial plans, is profoundly situated, hence it is impossible to devise a complete model for user action when designing an interactive system. If a system assumes a certain plan for the user action, that system will stop responding appropriately when the user stops acting according to the initial plan. This results in human-machine communication breakdown, and the user gets to see “false alarms” or is taken through long “garden paths” which make it hard for the user to understand the point where the breakdown has occurred. As different from assumptions made by the cognitive approach, plans are inherently vague and are more of a resource for further action than a precise description of the action taken. Suchman’s work marks a milestone beyond which entire classes of CSCW systems based on modelling of human activity started being criticised for not taking into account the situated character of the activities they attempt to support. Examples include workflow systems, based on abstract process models, generic ‘plans’ of organisational activity flow (studied by e.g. Bowers, Button and Sharrock, 1995), organisational memory systems, based on storage of organisational knowledge (discussed by Bannon and Kuuti 1996, Hughes et al. 1996). Interestingly, the language-action perspective proposed by Winograd and Flores for modelling communication can be interpreted (and has been expressed by the authors, op. cit., page 75) as a simple workflow based on “universal distinctions such as requesting and promising” (Flores et al. 1988 cited by Suchman, 1994). This sparked a well-known debate between Suchman and Winograd in the international CSCW journal (Suchman 1994, Winograd 1994). Suchman draws on Winner (1986) who argues that the artefacts like bridges can have politics by e.g. not allowing busses (the transportation mean of the poor) to pass under them, therefore making sure the poor (and, among them, the African-Americans) will not reach a certain area. In a similar manner, Suchman’s argues that the system of categories in the language-action perspective “has politics” in that it is an expression of a ‘hidden political agenda’, due to being imposed for reasons of “discipline and control” to the members of the organisation. 1.6.2.4Ethnomethodologists’ critique of theoretical zeal. Technology in working order. Ethnography in CSCWThere was a further point in Suchman’s criticism of Winograd’s position. That position is described by Suchman as a claim that “theory-driven design will produce coherent systems and practices” (page 186). Suchman emphasizes the opinion that CSCW design should not depart from theory (speech act theory in the case at hand) but from the contextual details of the supported work (see e.g. Bowers, Button and Sharrock, 1995 page 52). Attention to work detail as preferred to “theoretical zeal” has also been emphasized by Button (1993) when observing that sociologists who advocate the ‘social construction of technology’ (including actor-network theorists such as Latour, Callon, Woolgar, Law, and including Woolgar’s interpretation of the above-mentioned Winner) are often preoccupied by their theoretical arguments on sociological issues like gender, economics and actor-networks, while the technology whose construction they describe is “vanishing in misconceived problems of sociological description”. Social constructionists, Button argues, do not account for the use of technology but for the context in which technology is used, i.e. they are not really interested in technology, but in sociological theory. Similar with Suchman, Button argues for an account of technology in the production of working order, drawing from ethnomethodology (Garfinkel 1967), the branch of sociology focused on accounting for the production of social order in everyday situations, which are all considered to be unique. Such an approach to technology in working order, and other, similar lines of thought focusing on work situatedness and contextual detail resulted in a large corpus of CSCW ethnographies (ethnomethodological and otherwise). Accounting for the working order of various settings (e.g. the International Monetary Fund, Harper 1997), studying CSCW technologies introduced in work settings (e.g. Orlikowski 1992), or socio-technical evolutions in settings (O’Day et al. 1996) were all major themes of such empirical approaches. More discussion of ethnography will follow in the Methods section below.
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