Jesper Simonsen

Roskilde University · Department of Communication, Business and Information Technologies (CBIT)

This article investigates and exemplifies the personal side of our supervising skills. This is inspired from psychotherapeutic research specialized in investigating open-minded contact and authentic meetings. The article is based on our experiences supervising project groups at Roskilde University. Supervision is sometimes a challenging task that m...

Many opportunities for benefitting from information technology (IT) are not discovered until IT systems are in operational use. The realization of these benefits depends on local efforts that cannot presume top-management support but must themselves generate the innovation potential necessary to improve system use. To facilitate such local efforts,...

This chapter revisits Peter Jarvis’s classic model of individual learning (Jarvis, Towards a comprehensive theory of human learning. Routledge, 2006) and introduce a contemporary ventriloquist perspective on the communicative constitution of organizations (Cooren, Action and agency in dialogue. John Benjamins Publishing Company, Amsterdam/Philadelp...

This paper investigates the digital transition that occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic. We elicit 3 cases of digital transition that took place at part of the contingency plan, that was executed in the Danish healthcare sector. It was a necessity in order to support the physical distancing between patient and healthcare staff and new treatment t...

Many healthcare interventions fail to produce the intended effect. In this paper we look back at the fasting-time project, which aimed to shorten patients' preoperative fasting times. However, the project failed to achieve this effect, even though it had been identified and prioritized by the clinicians at the studied hospital. A set of mutually re...

Many healthcare interventions fail to produce the intended effect. In this paper we look back at the fasting-time project, which aimed to shorten patients' preoperative fasting times. However, the project failed to achieve this effect, even though it had been identified and prioritized by the clinicians at the studied hospital. A set of mutually re...

The participatory design of CSCW systems increasingly embraces activities of reconfiguring the use of existing interconnected systems in addition to developing and implementing new. In this article, we refer to such activities of changing and improving collaboration through the means of existing information infrastructures as infrastructuring. We i...

The transfer of patients from intensive care unit (ICU) to general ward involves risk to patient health. To mitigate this risk the present study investigates the current use of follow-up plans in the handover from ICU to general ward and proposes a novel design of follow-up plans. On the basis of a record audit we find that follow-up plans exist fo...

Professional work is often regulated by procedures that shape the information seeking involved in performing a task. Yet, research on professionals’ information seeking tends to bypass procedures and depict information seeking as an informal activity. In this study we analyze two healthcare tasks governed by procedures: triage and timeouts. While i...

We scrutinise the concrete practices of participants' engagement in participatory design through an empirical case in which nurses from different hospital wards began as reluctant users, but gradually engaged in processes approaching genuine participation. We expand a newly proposed, psychologically inspired perspective into a conceptual frame to i...

Previously technical design was the realm of software engineers; now it is increasingly completed by users who configure systems after go-live. To exploit the possibilities afforded by systems the users also adapt their practices in response to their systems. The process of configuring systems and practices for each other is rich in local particula...

For more than a decade, quality development in the Danish health care sector has been managed with an accreditation system known as the Danish quality model (DQM), shaping the strategy for how to align work organization with technology use. In this article, we introduce a participatory design approach, known as effects-driven information technology...

Participatory design (PD) can play an important role in obtaining benefits from healthcare information technologies, but we contend that to fulfil this role PD must incorporate feedback from real use of the technologies. In this paper we describe an effects-driven PD approach that revolves around a sustained focus on pursued effects and uses the ex...

Participatory design (PD) can play an important role in obtaining benefits from healthcare information technologies, but we contend that to fulfil this role PD must incorporate feedback from real use of the technologies. In this paper we describe an effects-driven PD approach that revolves around a sustained focus on pursued effects and uses the ex...

This paper contributes to the ongoing debate on participation in Participatory Design (PD) by drawing on the notion of genuine participation [8]. It clarifies nurses' empirical journey as one of becoming and learning [1, 6], where they move from being reluctant participants, attending only because management has instructed them to do so, to taking...

We investigate the concept of participation from the perspective of the quality of the contact in communicative interactions between participants. We argue for the need for an academic-personal competence that qualifies the human contact central in all Participatory Design (PD) activities as a way to contribute to "an era of participation." We desc...

Whiteboards facilitate coordinative practices by making information publicly accessible and thereby strengthening communication and joint commitment about it. This study investigates how coordination is accomplished in an emergency department through interactions with the whiteboard and with the coordinating nurse, who is the main keeper of the whi...

Design is increasingly becoming a part of the university curriculum and research agenda. A theory about the process and practice of design might be important to establish design as a main subject at universities. We believe it is in the interest of many design communities - not least the Participatory Design (PD) community - to engage in theorizing...

The goal of this full-day workshop is to create a place where people can share experiences, plans, and questions about teaching Participatory Design (PD). We aim to create a context for all of us to talk about how we design and set up courses, what challenges we face and how we solve them. The workshop is for people who are interested in the way pe...

‘Situated Design Methods’ is a book that many of our design-oriented students has asked for – they asked for a good, research based book about how to make design-oriented projects in their humanistic-technological field. 24 researchers from Roskilde University’s strategic research initiative Designing Human Technologies took the challenge of this d...

Whiteboards are a central tool at emergency departments. We investigate how the substitution of electronic for dry-erase whiteboards affects emergency department clinicians' mental workload and distribution of their time. With the electronic whiteboard, physicians and nurses spend more of their time in the work areas where other clinicians are pres...

Life in contemporary society is saturated by design. We live in designed environments, we are surrounded by design objects, and in many situations our attention, capacity, and movement are affected by design. Today design penetrates areas far beyond the traditional craftsmanship-based design professions. It takes place in domains as different as he...

Electronic whiteboards are introduced at emergency departments (EDs) to improve work practices. This study investigates whether the time physicians and nurses at an ED spend in patient rooms versus at the control desk increases after the introduction of an electronic whiteboard. After using this whiteboard for four months nurses, but not physicians...

Embracing real use in an iterative approach calls for systematic formative evaluation. Effects-driven IT Development has been suggested as a way of supporting a Participatory Design (PD) process involving implementations that expose mature prototypes to real work practices. This is followed by evaluations of how specified and desired effects are ob...

Systems development has been claimed to benefit from user participation, yet user participation in implementation activities may be more common and is a growing focus of participatory-design work. We investigate the effect of the extensive user participation in the implementation of a clinical system by empirically analyzing how management, partici...

PDC 2012 is an excellent opportunity to enter engaging conversations and debates about the status and future of the field of Participatory Design. This issue of the proceedings provides an excellent starting point for debate as it points to a number of trends, challenges and dilemmas for the field. With firm roots in the original Participatory Desi...

http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/DESI_a_00158

http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/DESI_a_00157

Much of the research in Participatory Design has been concerned with developing new methods, techniques and tools. Methods are ‘recipes’ for how to do Participatory Design and include – in addition to tools and techniques – organizing principles and general guidelines for the process, all based on a particular worldview or perspective. This chapter...

A recurrent problem in information-systems development (ISD) is that many design shortcomings are not detected during development, but first after the system has been delivered and implemented in its intended environment. Pilot implementations appear to promise a way to extend prototyping from the laboratory to the field, thereby allowing users to...

This chapter deals with IT design in an organizational setting – be it a medium sized service company, a large industrial company, a small entrepreneurial knowledge company, or a public company or institution. In such work settings we often find a complex organizational structure, including several management levels, diverse professional groups, wo...

Information technology (IT) is a means to an end, yet many IT projects assign primacy to technical development and attend comparatively less to the organizational change effort that is required to attain a good fit between organization and IT system. This entails a risk of not capturing the benefits of the deployed system. Effects-driven IT develop...

We describe the effects-specification process from a project that was conducted during the fall 2010 and spring of 2011 in this chapter. The project configured and implemented an electronic patient record system at a maternity ward at a hospital located in a European region. The process comprised workshops with effects specification with management...

For customers information technology (IT) is a means to an end. This tight association between IT systems and their use is, however, often absent during their development and implementation, resulting in systems that may fail to produce desired ends. Effectsdriven IT development aims to avoid the chasm between development and implementation through...

We present effects-driven IT development as an instrument for pursuing and reinforcing Participatory Design (PD) when it is applied in commercial information technology (IT) projects. Effects-driven IT development supports the management of a sustained PD process throughout design and organizational implementation. The focus is on the effects to be...

In Denmark emergency departments are newly established and still in a process of devising their procedures and tech-nology support. Electronic whiteboards are a means of sup-porting clinicians in creating and maintaining the overview necessary to provide quality treatment of patients. The con-crete meaning of the notion of overview is, however, fus...

We report from a case study of the implementation of an electronic whiteboard system at two emergency departments at Danish hospitals. The purpose of the whiteboards is to support the clinicians in maintaining an overview of the patients at the departments. The electronic whiteboard system was designed in collaboration with clinicians from the depa...

We report from a case study of the implementation of an electronic whiteboard system at two emergency departments at Danish hospitals. The purpose of such whiteboards is to support the clinicians in maintaining an overview of the patients at the department. The electronic whiteboard system was designed in collaboration with clinicians from the depa...

Participatory design includes engaging in large-scale information-systems development where participatory design approaches have been applied throughout design and organizational implementation. The keynote suggest to extend the iterative prototyping approach by (1) emphasizing participatory design experiments and pilot implementations as transcend...

In SJIS volume 20 (2008), Mathiassen and Nielsen analyzed engaged scholarship in Scandinavian IS research. They conclude that the collaborative research practice and tra - dition for conducting action research projects might be jeopardized by a recent and general tendency to publish in compliance with traditional IS research publication channels: I...

Purpose: To investigate the effects of a fully functional electronic patient record (EPR) system on clinicians' work during team conferences, ward rounds, and nursing handovers. Method: In collaboration with clinicians an EPR system was configured for a stroke unit and in trial use for 5 days, 24h a day. During the trial period the EPR system wa...

With its 10th biannual anniversary conference, Participatory Design (PD) is leaving its teens and must now be considered ready to join the adult world. In this article we encourage the PD community to think big: PD should engage in large-scale information-systems development and opt for a PD approach applied throughout design and organizational imp...

For customers information technology (IT) is a means to an end. This tight association between IT systems and their use is, however, often absent during their development and implementation, resulting in systems that may fail to produce desired ends. Effects-driven IT development aims to avoid the chasm between development and implementation throug...

Top management should be incorporated in IT projects to enhance business process and sustain its growth. It requires a vendor to be able to convince management that a proposed IT solution meets an organization's particular needs. Vendors must convince management they understand the customer's business and their solution fits management's overall re...

Purpose: To investigate the circumstances as to why it is so difficult in the primary care sector to implement IT based infrastructures supporting shared care. Case study: The qualitative analysis includes two separate case studies of IT-supported shared care implemented in two different regions of Denmark throughout 2005. The study comprises 21 in...

Purpose: To investigate the circumstances as to why it is so difficult in the primary care sector to implement IT based infrastructures supporting shared care. Case study: The qualitative analysis includes two separate case studies of IT-supported shared care implemented in two different regions of Denmark throughout 2005. The study comprises 21 in...

Which parts of an electronic patient record (EPR) can initially form a stable standard solution to be used by all clinicians? And which parts of an EPR can we predict needs initial as well as on-going re-configuration to meet the needs from diverse medical specialties. To analyze which screen types in a clinical process that can be standard configu...

To investigate the circumstances as to why it is so difficult in the primary care sector to implement IT based infrastructures supporting shared care. The qualitative analysis includes two separate case studies of IT-supported shared care implemented in two different regions of Denmark throughout 2005. The study comprises 21 interviews and 35 hours...

This chapter presents results elicited from empirical studies of the implementation and use of an open-ended, configurable, and context specific information technology supporting networked communication in a large distributed organization. Our findings are based on a longitudinal case study of the implementation and use of the technology that sprea...

This chapter presents results elicited from empirical studies of the implementation and use of an open-ended, configurable, and context specific information technology supporting networked communication in a large distributed organization. Our findings are based on a longitudinal case study of the implementation and use of the technology that sprea...

One of the five regions in Denmark has initiated a remark-able and alternative strategy for the development of Elec-tronic Patient Record (EPR) systems. This strategy is driven by Participatory Design (PD) experiments and based on evidence of positive effects on the clinical practice when using EPR systems. We present this PD strategy and our relat...

The objective of the project was to measure the clinical usability of an EHR configured by use of participatory design with clinicians from a neurological stroke unit in order to get input to the County's future strategy for incremental implementation of EHR. The content of the EHR was defined during a series of workshops with the clinicians after...

This workshop paper reports on a recently completed large scale PD experiment where paperbased patient records were replaced with an Electronic Patient Record (EPR) system at Roskilde Hospital in Denmark. The use of large projected screens led to an interesting reconfiguration of the coopera- tive work among the clinicians. During the nursing hando...

Evidence-based IT development aims at developing a new commercial contract model for IT projects where the cus-tomer's payment is dependent on measurable effects of using the vendor's system. The idea is to establish a strategic part-nership in which customer and IT vendor share the responsi-bility of providing IT solutions that meet agreed-upon, m...

Managing groupware technologies in global virtual teams is viewed as a process of integrating technology and collaboration. This involves a continual negotiation of the team's goals, processes, and technology. We investigate organizational factors constraining this integration process, by analyzing the failure of integrating groupware into two glob...

Systems development is replete with projects that represent substantial resource investments but result in systems that fail to meet users' needs. Evidence-based development is an emerging idea intended to provide means for managing customer-vendor relationships and working systematically toward meeting customer needs. We are suggesting that the ef...

This article presents results elicited from studies conducted,in rela- tion to implementing a web-based information system,throughout a large dis- tributed organization. We demonstrate the kind of expectations and conditions for change that management face in relation to open-ended, configurable, and context specific web-based ,information systems...

This article presents results elicited from studies conducted in rela-tion to implementing a web-based information system throughout a large dis-tributed organization. We demonstrate the kind of expectations and conditions for change that management face in relation to open-ended, configurable, and context specific web-based information systems lik...

We address IT design and provides examples of how to design solutions based upon participatory design techniques and ethnographically inspired analysis within a full-scale design project . The case exemplifies an ambitious , yet realistic , design practice , that provides a sound basis for organisational decision making and for technical and organi...

This article documents how log analysis can inform qualitative studies concerning the usage of web-based information systems (WIS). No prior research has used http log files as data to study collaboration between multiple users in organisational settings. We investigate how to perform http log analysis; what http log analysis says about the nature...

Groupware is often used in distributed organizations to support communication and coordination. Managers direct resources and set up goals for the deployment of groupware. It is however difficult to foresee the effect of groupware and many cases report that groupware is either hardly used or does not produce the intended effects. We have analyzed t...

Integrating groupware in work practices poses a range of interrelated problems comprising organisational and technological issues. These are complex issues, since they derive from the combined influence of a range of heterogeneous elements and emergent phenomena in the intersection of groupware and work practice. To understand these issues a framew...

In this paper we investigate collaboration within global virtual project teams. Our objective is to understand the practice of virtual teams to determine conditions needed in order to integrate groupware in such a context. The research question explored is: What are the conditions for integrating groupware technology in collaborative practice withi...

One important goal of employing groupware is to make possible complex collaboration between geographically distributed groups. This requires a dual transformation of both technology and work practice. The challenge is to reduce the complexity of the coordination work by successfully integrating the protocol stipulating the collaboration and the art...

The paper presents lessons learned in relation to changing work practices in design. We describe method dissemination activities in three IT-organisations in relation to introducing a method for design in an organisational context. From the activities a number of lessons are drawn. Keywords: design, organisational context, method, dissemination 1....

The article reviews the concept of ‘strategic alignment’ and presents the critique by Ciborra in SJIS (Vol. 9, No. 1) entitled "De profundis? Deconstructing the concept of strategic alignment". We present a design approach that suggests how designers, conducting design projects in a specific organization, can take care of and ensure that the design...

This paper introduces the term 'anchoring' within systems development: Visions, devel-oped through early systems design within an organization, need to be deeply rooted in the organization. A vision's rationale needs to be understood by those who decide if the vision should be implemented as well as by those involved in the actual implementation. A...

We address design of computer support for work and its coordination at the Danish Broadcasting Corporation. We propose design solutions based upon participatory design techniques and ethnographically inspired analysis within a full scale design project. The project exemplifies an ambitious, yet realistic, design practice, that provides a sound basi...