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The production layout of ENGINECO's new plant.
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User-centred approaches to information systems development presume a particular division of labour between 'users' and 'designers' and an organisation of the development process in discrete projects. We present material from a case study that shows how development takes place during the day-to-day operation of a system and how the social relations...
Context in source publication
Context 1
... the same building reside production, production management, production planning, relevant parts of IT, and maintenance. The layout of the plant can be seen in Figure 1. Parts and materials are delivered to the plant by the external logistics provider who also picks up finished products and empties. ...
Citations
... It is this tacit knowledge that allows, for example, the call operators to take the initiative; to work around problems and align the service with the needs of the client; to identify, assemble and coordinate a set of resources, both technical and social, through a series of situated, practical actions; and to work around rather than with the technical system ( ). This may involve using the technical system in ways that were neither intended by designers nor laid down in standard operating procedures ( Alberdi et al. 2005;Anderson et al. 2008;Voss et al. 2000). ...
Assisted living technologies may help people live independently while also—potentially—reducing health and care costs. But they are notoriously difficult to implement at scale and many devices are abandoned following initial adoption. We report findings from a study of global positioning system (GPS) tracking devices intended to support the independent living of people with cognitive impairment. Our aims were threefold: to understand (through ethnography) such individuals’ lived experience of GPS tracking; to facilitate (through action research) the customization and adaptation of technologies and care services to provide effective, ongoing support; and to explore the possibilities for a co-production methodology that would enable people with cognitive impairment and their families to work with professionals and technical designers to shape these devices and services to meet their particular needs in a sustainable way. We found that the articulation work needed for maintaining the GPS technology in “working order” was extensive and ongoing. This articulation work does not merely supplement formal procedures, a lot of it is needed to get round them, but it is also often invisible and thus its importance goes largely unrecognized. If GPS technologies are to be implemented at scale and sustainably, methods must be found to capitalize on the skills and tacit knowledge held within the care network (professional and lay) to resolve problems, improve device design, devise new service solutions, and foster organizational learning.
... Hence, dependability is often achieved through people's capacity to work around rather than with the system. As we have seen in many previous studies of technologies-in-use (e.g., Hartswood et al. 2003a;Alberdi, et al. 2005;Clarke et al. 2006;Anderson et al. 2008;Voss et al. 2000), such workarounds often involve using systems in ways that were not intended by their designers. In the extracts from our call centre fieldwork below, in some cases these workarounds were spontaneously crafted as ad-hoc, 'one time' only responses to problems that were subsequently set aside and, perhaps, forgotten. ...
... As one staff member remarked, BYou can't improve something until it goes wrong.^This resonates with findings from Participatory Design, of the importance of 'design-in-use', which emphasises that design does not end after a IT system or service has been implemented (Henderson and Kyng 1992;Procter and Williams 1996;Hartswood et al. 2000;Voss et al. 2000;Hartswood et al. 2002Hartswood et al. , 2003bHartswood et al. , 2008. ...
We report findings from a study of call centre staff working to deliver a telecare service designed to enable older people to ‘age in place’. We show the steps they routinely take to produce a care system on behalf of their clients and their families that is both workable within the constraints of available resources and fit-for-purpose. In doing so, we have seen how call centre staff share with one another their experiences and solutions to problems, carry out liaison work with networks of lay carers, and generally act as the ‘glue’ providing the all-important link between otherwise fragmented services. We conclude with some thoughts on the significant technical and organizational challenges if the ‘ageing in place’ vision is to be realized in a practical, secure, dependable and cost-effective way.
... Its role for ensuring the effectiveness of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in work environments has been extensively studied, for example, the fashioning of 'work arounds' in the work place in order to expedite processes or deal with technical failures (e.g. Ciborra and Lanzara 1994;Shapiro et al. 1996;Hartswood et al. 2000;Voss et al. 2000;Büscher et al. 2001Büscher et al. , 2002Büscher and Cruickshank 2009). However, its role in the domestic arena has been less studied (Blackwell 2006). ...
We report findings from a study that set out to explore the experience of older people
living with assisted living technologies and care services. We find that successful ‘ageing in place’
is socially and collaboratively accomplished – ‘co-produced’ – day-to-day by the efforts of older
people, and their formal and informal networks of carers (e.g. family, friends, neighbours). First, we
reveal how ‘bricolage’ allows care recipients and family members to customise assisted living
technologies to individual needs. We argue that making customisation easier through better design
must be part of making assisted living technologies ‘work’. Second, we draw attention to the
importance of formal and informal carers establishing and maintaining mutual awareness of the
older person’s circumstances day-to-day so they can act in a concerted and coordinated way when
problems arise. Unfortunately, neither the design of most current assisted living technologies, nor
the ways care services are typically configured, acknowledges these realities of ageing in place. We
conclude that rather than more ‘advanced’ technologies, the success of ageing in place programmes
will depend on effortful alignments in the technical, organisational and social configuration of
support.
... If an active model is to be reused in another setting, agreement on semantics is more important. Social quality of interactive models in fl uences the processes of negotiating meaning and domesticating reusable model fragments into the local situation and work practice (Voss et al. 2000 ) . In these processes, the ability to represent con fl icting interpretations and make local modi fi cations is just as important as the ability to represent agreement (the end result) in an unambiguous way. ...
We have so far in this book described the generic framework (described SEQUAL-Gen in Fig. 6.1) and quality of modelling languages in Chaps. 4 and 5 respectively. As indicate here, a number of specialisations have been made for different types of models.
... However, this can only be achieved through a long-term commitment to developing and supporting local configurations of technological arrangements, through a partnership between IT specialists, end-users and other organisational stakeholders (cf. Hartswood et al. 2000, Voss, Procter and Williams 2000, Hartswood, Procter, Rouncefield, Slack and Voss 2007. Such a partnership can make the work of envisaging and realising new technological options more achievable, through stepwise design and experimentation. ...
... Our activities in this setting aim at making IT design and development work visible to, and accessible for, the control room workers and involving them in these activities as much as is feasible (Voß et al., 2000). As in the toxicology ward, actual design and development work was preceded by a period of familiarisation with the setting through observation, interviews, etc. ...
This paper calls for a respecification of IT systems design and development practice as co-realization. Co-realization is
an orientation to technology production that develops out of a principled synthesis of ethnomethodology and participatory
design. It moves the locus of design and development activities into workplace settings where technologies will be used. Through
examples drawn from case studies of IT projects, we show how co-realization, with its stress on design-in-use and the longitudinal
involvement by IT professionals in the “lived work” of users, helps to create uniquely adequate, accountable solutions to
the problems of IT-organizational integration.
... The idea of getting users involved in the design process has broadened since then, and other user-oriented approaches have been developed (c.f. [10,26,42]). Although PD is a well-known and quite commonly used approach, practical formalised guidelines applying it to ISD have not been established 1 . ...
Creating requirements specifications is one of the most challenging tasks in the systems development. For a complete specification, different kinds of information are gathered. This includes information about the domain and context specific technical issues, and about multifaceted cultural, political, communicational, motivational, and personal issues. As there is no information systems development (ISD) method that would yield such information comprehensively, it could be achieved by user-oriented approaches, for instance by participatory design (PD). Reciprocally, unfortunately those do not provide detailed instructions for the systems development. In this paper, we will present our experiences from two research projects where user participation was emphasised in the ISD process. We argue that a multi-methodological ISD approach that utilises prototyping and a set of different communication means for gathering and elucidating requirements in a workplace would produce better systems from the end-users point of view. Further, these experiences can be used when developing a formalised user-oriented ISD method.
... Thus, the IT specialist is always available to the user and users are said to be driving the development process. However, as with most PD studies, the developments currently under consideration are small scale and focused in particular departments and functions (Hartswood et al., 2000; Voß et al., 2000). Hartswood et al. (2002) themselves recognize some of these limitations but current projects have yet to report (publicly) on the (full) integration of such focused systems within larger organizational systems or the continuation of these systems once the research group has left. ...
The organizational practice of user participation in IT system development remains problematic. Two of the major issues identified are establishing the most effective strategy and selecting the most appropriate user representatives. Opinions on these issues vary according to theoretical perspective and empirical evidence does not provide definitive solutions. Taking a social constructionist perspective, this longitudinal case study of a contested technological change process allowed the exploration of organizational talk about user participation over time. In particular, we focus on differing and changing constructions of ‘the user’ and ‘effective participation’. We argue that claims about who represented an appropriate user and what was an appropriate participative strategy varied across time and fulfilled particular political functions. We conclude that issues identified as problems in the literature on user participation may rather be manifestations of the political and socially constructed nature of organizations.
... In practice, we expect that questions of how co-production might be implemented in other projects and other settings must be worked out in ways that acknowledge the specifics of those projects and settings. We are exploring such scale and complexity issues in another co-production project within a plant manufacturing engines [20]. ...
... Co-realisation calls for creating a shared practice between users and IT professionals that is grounded in the lived experience of users and a commitment to 'stick around and see what happens' once a new IT system or artefact is deployed [4,8]. Co-realisation's goal is to achieve a situation where users and IT professionals can spontaneously shift the focus of their attention between the different phases of the system/artefact lifecycle, even to the extent that these cease to exist as separable activities. ...
... The essential practical step for co-realisation is how to organise 'being there' through taking the technical work of design and development into the user's workplace. We have been exploring the realities of doing co-realisation in case studies set in two quite different work settings [4,8]. ...
... Work in the control room of EngineCo's manufacturing plant (producing diesel engines) involves various tasks like monitoring the production process, adjusting parameters, translating between the production process and the work of various other professionals (e.g., quality control), and being involved in continuous re-organisation and optimisation activities that are required to constantly match the plant's working to outside requirements [8]. Because of this mix of tasks, some of which require constant attention, there are few opportunities for control room workers to participate in systems development activities that are shaped along the more traditional lines of project work. ...
This paper critically examines Beyer and Holtzblatt's contextual design methodology. As a way of addressing what we argue are contextual design's limitations, we propose co-realisation, a methodology that calls for a long engagement: i.e., a longitudinal commitment from designers to building a shared practice with users. We illustrate what doing co-realisation means as practice with extracts taken from case studies of two projects.
