Interaction through clusters of artefacts

We find that most approaches analysing and designing computer artefacts, including our own, have been too narrowly focusing on understanding and designing ONE computer artefact, whereas such singular artefacts are less and less frequent in the world around us. Accordingly this paper introduces the concept of clusters of artefact to focus, analytically and design-wise, on multitudes of interconnected computer artefacts surrounding us. In particular, the paper uses two empirical studies of cooperative work and its artefacts in elaborating this topic. The paper further discusses common information spaces as clusters of artefacts around which a web of use activities unfolds. Theoretically, the paper takes its starting point in activity theoretical concerns over mediation and context. INTRODUCTION Individual computer applications, with no connections to other applications, appliances or systems are less and less frequent in the world around us. Mobile phones connect with web-sites and with applications on PCs such as calendars. Word documents are moved between computers and opened in other applications. When a new computer application is introduced in an organization, there are already running applications and hardware platforms. Yet, HCI tends to focus on one user, one application, one computer; Information Systems development tends to focus only on the particular application being developed, raising e.g. questions about existing hardware platforms late in the development process. Even CSCW studies tend to focus on one application at the time, though in this case one that is shared between users. Though common information spaces may seem to be an exception to this rule, they are often, implicitly or explicitly, viewed as something that can be accessed in toto from one (of many) location. As pointed out by Schmidt & Bannon (1992), providing a common information space is not a matter of providing overview and uniform access independent of physical location to a shared database. Many studies of physical document and of classification structures (e.g. Bossen submitted, Schmidt & Wagner, preprint) show how e.g. document structures and physical location are meta-artefacts structuring the use of other artefacts. They may at the same time serve a multitude of purposes, e.g. the work plan of a hospital ward (Bossen, submitted) serves to mediate between the three daily work shifts, to assign patients to individual nurses, and to structure treatments that happen over longer time periods, e.g. chemotherapy. And the work plan is used together with numerous other artefacts, e.g. the nurses’ personal notes and the patient record. In approaching a more detailed understanding of how we may conceptualise such multitudes of artefacts, purposes and actors, we make use of the notion of mediation from activity theory: Computers as well as other artefacts mediate our daily activities, whether these are in relation to things or other human beings (See Kaptelinin, 1996, Bødker 1991, 1999, Bannon & Bødker, 1991, Kuutti & Bannon, 1993, Bertelsen, 1996). Human activity is mediated by socially produced artefacts, e.g. tools, language and representations. This means that in their immediate relation with their surroundings, human beings extend themselves with artefacts that are both augmentations of and external to the person, and some which are entirely internalised and carried only through people, e.g. language, and procedures (Karpachof, 1984). Since we take purposeful acts as the basic unit in our analysis of artefacts, we have to study what happens when users focus on their job (or other purposeful act) while applying the computer artefact. With the hierarchical structure of activity this means that the ideal situation tends to be when the object of the users (conscious) action is the same as the object of work, whereas the user direct unconscious operations to the mediating artefact. The computer artefact becomes a transparent tool. A work object, in activity theoretical terms, always has two sides, the material and the outcome, and that it is exactly the shaping of the outcome from the material, that instrumental mediation is about. CASE STUDIES We introduce two cases studies in order to further study the interplay between multiple artefacts in actual use situations. The two cases differ from, e.g. the hospital ward and most of the cases used in the literature on classification in the sense that the involved artefacts do not present a clear level structure derived from the distinction between work and articulation work (Bødker & Mogensen 1992). The two cases have both been studied through longer empirical projects, where observation, as well as various workshops and participatory design techniques were applied (Bertelsen & Bødker 2001, Bertelsen & Nielsen 1999, Nielsen & Søndergaard, 2000, Petersen & Madsen 1999, Buur & Bødker 2000, Bødker et al 2001). The issue of mediation in these cases and others have been dealt with further by (Bødker & Bøgh Andersen, in preparation). Our examples are extracted from this rich material, some as generic reconstructions and others being exact empirical records. The design case Our first case deals with a usability design group, which has chosen to experimentally rearranging their use of space and design artefacts, to provide more efficient means of sharing design documents and artefacts and of peripherally monitor the work of others in the group. The company is a leading manufacturer of audio-visual equipment, primarily installed in private homes. The work has been characterized by a high degree of division of work and qualifications: industrial designers design, engineers build prototypes, and psychologists test (Bærentsen & Slavensky, 1999). The main point of coordination between these groups is meetings where all groups would contribute to the discussion of prototypes. The group has created a workshop, the design collaboratorium: a joint room where people can cooperate or work alongside each other. The room is the physical framing of workshops with users, usability evaluation sessions, meetings, and work activities of smaller groups of usability professionals, designers, and engineers–in parallel or interleaved with each other (Buur & Bødker 2000). Thus the room is used extensively by all group members, and serves a series of purposes. The room is equipped with a number of whiteboards of varying sizes. Further, it holds prototypes of earlier and present projects. The layout of the room has a traditional meeting table with whiteboards on the surrounding walls and prototypes positioned on shelves on the walls. In this design collaboratorium the presence of prototypes from present and previous projects serve to support awareness in the group of ongoing projects. Exemplar previous products provide a sense of history of the company line. The design knowledge in the group is summarized in a set of principles for good interface design, which are kept an A3 sheet of paper, pinned on one of the boards in the room, annotated with notes on a small whiteboard. Figure 1: The design collaboratorium (drawing by Peter Krogh) The wastewater plant Our second case deals with the study of a wastewater treatment plant. We have conducted workplace studies and we apply an interventionist approach through the construction of prototypes for new computer support for the running and optimisation of the wastewater plant. Our prototyping experiment has been focusing on how to get and maintain a local overview of parts of the plant while moving about, and on compiling and interpreting information that is massively distributed on meters and dials (Bertelsen & Bødker 2001, Nielsen & Søndergaard 2000). The basic mediation in the wastewater plant is simply that the plant mediates the process of turning wastewater into clean water. As analysed in (Bertelsen & Bødker 2001) it is the plant manager, together with a small group of workers, who are the acting subjects as regards the overview and optimisation of the wastewater process. Nonetheless, many of the steps in the re-mediation process are carried out by other actors, and it is only through the entire chain that controlling the plant is possible. Figure 2: The wastewater plant ONE ARTIFACT IN MULTIPLE CONTEXTS As part of the daily round of one of the workers at the wastewater plant, a specific gas motor is looked at and listened to, and as such it is part of the context of the daily round of the worker, what Bertelsen & Nielsen (1999) calls the contextual unit. However, the same motor, when it is taken down for repair, constitutes a contextual unit of its own. Further, the motor is part of the section of the plant transforming gas in the sludge into electricity. This gas production is a contextual unit from one perspective, but at the same time an important indicator of the load of the whole plant. This particular gas motor demonstrates how it is necessary to study more than one use situation and contextual unit in order to understand the complexity of use. In the design case, we make distinction between the situation and contextual unit of users watching TV, and that of usability people or designers studying use, or of making a prototype TV as such. Yet the TV prototype is part of all three contextual units, and is a significant artefact of all three situations. Lesson 1: use is more than one use situation, and use situations and contexts are non-hierarchical, overlapping, transient and heterogeneous. Many actions on the same object, many artefacts and actors One morning before dawn at the wastewater plant, the manager asks a worker to go and look at particular basins. This basin has been automatically shut down, probably because a wire pulling the sludge scraper is broken. The manager needs to know where the wire is broken to determine which preparations are needed before the blacksmith can do the repair. The worker checks the wire, cleans the basin, and tells the manager where