We describe each type of work model in turn and give participants practice building each type in pairs from a simplified transcript. Without a well-defined way to generalize from specific users, we appear to be designing from anecdotal evidence. These models can be shown to account or fail to account for the work practice of any individual user. In this section, we describe and demonstrate the consolidation process for each type of work model. We show how each consolidated model reveals issues to which a design must respond.
Participants work in pairs to read and derive issues from consolidated models of each type.
Inventing a System Response Ultimately, system design is the invention of the system's response to a user problem. Without adequate customer data this invention is ungrounded-it is not driven from deep knowledge of how people organize their work, and cannot be developed in its details to support customers' work well. Without a coherent understanding of work, design tends to degenerate into lists of features that do not consider the system as a whole, or that depend on the designers keeping the whole system in their heads. Work models capture precisely the detail necessary to ensure invention is grounded in customer work, provides a coherent solution to a whole work problem, and is developed to support actual work practice. In this section, we describe the grounded brainstorm process by which we do this.