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Back to the Future of EUD: The Logic of Bricolage for the Paving of EUD Roadmaps
Abstract
Several recent approaches to EUD increasingly recognize an active role of users in the construction of the tools that support their daily practices. However, there is still a lack of a general framework that could play a role in the comparison of existing proposals and in the development of new EUD solutions. The paper proposes a conceptual framework and a related architecture, called Logic of Bricolage, that aims to be a step further in this direction. The concluding remarks point to the potential value of this conceptualization effort in the EUD field.
... The high ceiling means that the user can create a more complicated solution. Some approaches, like the Logic of Bricolage (LOB) [4], exists to help for the conception of EUD. ...
In our Age of exponential technological advance, recent developments are determining an evolution of end users from passive information consumers into information producers. Users are increasingly willing and, indeed, determined to shape the software they use to tailor it to their own needs. Based on a brief review of research activities we performed in the last decade, this paper analyzes some challenges that software designers face to comply with the new roles of end users in the software life cycle, and discusses how to provide end users with software environments that empower them to become co-designers of their own tools and products. The examples reported in the paper show why and how end users are involved in design activities in various application domains.
This paper argues that traditional and mainstream mythologies, which have
been continually told within the Information Technology domain among designers
and advocators of conceptual modelling since the 1960s in different fields of
computing sciences, could now be renovated or substituted in the mould of more
recent discourses about performativity, complexity and end-user creativity that
have been constructed across different fields in the meanwhile. In the paper,
it is submitted that these discourses could motivate IT professionals in
undertaking alternative approaches toward the co-construction of
socio-technical systems, i.e., social settings where humans cooperate to reach
common goals by means of mediating computational tools. The authors advocate
further discussion about and consolidation of some concepts in design research,
design practice and more generally Information Technology (IT) development,
like those of: task-artifact entanglement, universatility (sic) of End-User
Development (EUD) environments, bricolant/bricoleur end-user, logic of
bricolage, maieuta-designers (sic), and laissez-faire method to socio-technical
construction. Points backing these and similar concepts are made to promote
further discussion on the need to rethink the main assumptions underlying IT
design and development some fifty years later the coming of age of software and
modern IT in the organizational domain.
One fundamental challenge for the design of the interactive systems of the future is to invent and design environments and cultures in which humans can express themselves and engage in personally meaningful activities. Unfortunately, a large number of new media are designed from a perspective of viewing and treating humans primarily as consumers. The possibility for humans to be and act as designers (in cases in which they desire to do so) should be accessible not only to a small group of high-tech scribes, but rather to all interested individuals and groups. Meta-design characterizes activities, processes, and objectives to create new media and environments that allow users to act as designers and be creative.In this paper we discuss problems addressed by our research on meta-design, provide a conceptual framework for meta-design, and illustrate our developments in the context of a particular system, the Envisionment and Discovery Collaboratory.
Drawing on field studies of three, real world, organizational environments, namely an architectural practice, a medical centre and the Control Rooms on London Underground, this paper explores the ways in which personnel use paper and screen based documentation to support synchronous and asynchronous collaborative activity. It discusses how collaboration involves a complex configuration of co-participation by personnel in a range of activities, ranging from seemingly individual tasks to mutually focussed, real time cooperation. By addressing the ways in which personnel manage collaboration and interactionally organize a range of activities, we discuss the ways in which paper and screen based media provide rather distinctive support for cooperation. These observations form the basis for some suggestions concerning requirements for CSCW systems.
This paper proposes a `bricolage' approach to designing systems for cooperative work. This involves users, participatory designers and ethnographers in a continuing cycle of design and revised work practice, often in settings where resources are limited and short-term results are required. It exploits the flood to market of hardware, software and services. The approach is illustrated with results from a project with a practice of landscape architects. Their work is analysed in terms of communities of practice and actor networks. These perspectives help to identify the `socialities' of people and of technologies and of the relationships between them. They help to distinguish different forms of cooperation with differing support needs, opportunities and vulnerabilities. They inform the design of technical support, the assessment of outcomes, and the design of further solutions, in a cycle of `situated experimentation'. Keywords Actor-Networks, Bricolage, Communities of Practice, CSCW, ...
This paper is about the development of systems whose end users are professional people working in a specific domain (e.g., medicine, geology, mechanical engineering); they are expert in that domain, but not necessarily expert in nor even conversant with computer science. In several work organizations, end users need to tailor their software systems to better adapt them to their requirements and even to create or modify software artifacts. These are end-user development activities and are the focus of this paper. A model of the interaction between users and systems, which also takes into account their reciprocal coevolution during system usage, is discussed. This model is used to define a methodology aimed at designing software environments that allow end users to become designers of their own tools. The methodology is illustrated by discussing two experimental cases.
Unprecedented project changes refereed to as 'unintended consequences' are viewed both as a set back and an opportunity for the project. Some contractors see such changes as an opportunity to make extra profit, while some other do not accept these change and try to complete the project with in the stipulated period. Unintended consequences may bring certain changes in the project that demand immediate and compelling adjustments. Metron has identified five factors that limit people's ability to accurately predict these unintended consequences, which are lack of knowledge, error, immediacy of interest, basic values, and fear of consequences. Unintended consequences become remarkably greater as project delivery continues to increase.
On-line observation and tracking of design processes reveal that design practices often display surprising features that defy our understanding, descriptions, and planning capabilities. Systems tend to be fragmented, untidy and unpredictable, often turning the designers’ setting and practice into a “swamp”. Drawing on stories of system development projects the author highlights the role of transient constructs as dynamic carriers of knowledge and effective vehicles for sensemaking. Transient constructs help resolve the dynamic tension between stability and change in design processes. On the one hand, given their unfinished and makeshift character, they allow for variability, online experimentation, and cognitive transactions; on the other hand, they may occasionally coalesce into more stable and persistent structures, which are continuously reconfigured by a never ending activity of bricolage.
The interest of the Electronic Medical Record EMR is from now on obvious. However, Health Professionals still not have at their disposal tools allowing them to support their cooperative practices. In the French DocPatient project, we try to improve practitioners' cooperation when they use the medical documents by implementing a document-based EMR. Our assumption is that a best integration of the way they use these medical documents in the EMR design will improve its utility, its use and its acceptance. In this paper, we show that annotations practices must be transposed in the EMR to reinforce collaboration, coordination and awareness.
This paper focuses on tight communities and specifically on the distributed, mediated discourses that their members articulate around documents and inscribed material artifacts. The paper presents a prototype-based design experience toward the definition of a collaborative annotation tool that is endowed with discourse oriented functionalities whose main characteristics have emerged from case studies we undertook in the healthcare and agricultural domains. In latter domain an initial prototype was proposed and progressively tuned to help users propose modifications to an institutional document through the expression of comments gathered around and about a common artifact, and then build a representative summary of the opinions emerging within the community as a result of this distributed discussion. In light of the reported case study, we discuss a new perspective on this class of annotating applications and the related functionalities that could realize a new simplified model of discourse and foster its adoption in distributed settings and communities of practice.
Collaborative problem solving often involves actors with heterogeneous competences or that see a common problem from different perspectives: this can make mutual understanding difficult. The paper presents case studies in different domains where collaboration leverages shared representations, and discusses the main reasons why these representations succeeded in fostering mutual understanding. We observed how the technologies proposed to manage those representations were successful only to the extent they were made able to adapt to the dynamic and open conventions that actors adopted during their activities. The point of the paper is that locality, openness and underspecification are key factors in this process, for their capability to promote tacit knowledge and to let competent actors reach a sufficient level of mutual understanding towards some common goal. The paper proposes a conceptual framework to characterize the notion of knowledge artifact interpreted as a semiotic system where actors can make sense of shared and underspecified representations, and derives from this notion implications for the design of a supportive technology.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S107158191200033X)
In this paper, we present the WOAD architecture, a design-oriented architecture that allows to build modular and flexible Electronic Patient Record (EPR) based on the metaphor of Active Document. An Active Document is an electronic document that users can easily built by aggregating smaller data modules, called didgets, to mimic their paper-based templates and provide them with proactive behaviors in support of daily practice. After presenting the basic elements of WOAD (i.e., datoms, didgets, templates and mechanisms), we summarize the observational studies that inspired the development of ProDoc, our first WOAD-compliant EPR, and that gave us preliminary user feedbacks for validation. We then illustrate the core implementation details of the WOAD architecture, as it has been deployed in ProDoc.
Digital web-accessible annotations are a compelling medium for personal comments and shared discussions around documents. Only recently supported by widely used products, "in-context" digital annotation is a relatively unexamined phenomenon. This paper presents a case study of annotations created by members of a large development team using Microsoft Office 2000---approximately 450 people created 9,000 shared annotations on about 1250 documents over 10 months. We present quantitative data on use, supported by interviews with users, identifying strengths and weaknesses of the existing capabilities and possibilities for improvement. Keywords Annotation, asynchronous collaboration, distributed work, computer mediated communication, World Wide Web 1 INTRODUCTION Highlighting and writing comments in the margins as we read is a natural activity. These annotations are often personal notes for subsequent reference. When shared among co-workers they also support communication and collaborat...
The nature of change or the law of unintended consequences
- J Mansfield
- J. Mansfield