The Design Challenge - Creating a Mosaic out of Chaos Summary of Opening Plenary CHI '95 ProceedingsTopIndexes
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The Design Challenge - Creating a Mosaic out of Chaos Summary of Opening Plenary

Joan Greenbaum LaGuardia Community College
City University of New York, USA
E-mail: wk01817@worldlink.com

Morten Kyng Computer Science Dept., University of Aarhus
DK-8000 Aarhus C; Denmark
E-mail: mkyng@daimi.aau.dk

© ACM

As designers we usually find ourselves - and our de- signs - in complex organizational settings, where diverse and often conflicting interests co-exist. Yet design is often seen as a process where the ‘one best solution' is developed instead of allowing the rich mosaic of conflicting perspectives to be brought to light. Sooner or later the official pictures of the foreground are contradicted by current practice and create conflicts that may seriously jeopardize systems built on them. With hindsight we can see how this happened, for example in the 1960's and ‘70's when mainframe system software was designed to follow the automation-like flow of production work, controlling work process and workers and dividing labour and tasks. In the 1980's, despite the use of new software tools and the emphasis on PC-based applications, designers focused on the tasks and procedures of given work flows instead of embarking on approaches that would have allowed them to learn about how new software might be appropriated, put to use and tailored in an organization.

We argue that these are not simple mistakes. They are partly due to the failure of our methods and techniques - and more broadly to the failure of system design practice - to seriously confront political, social and economic issues, allowing power, politics and perspectives to stay hidden.

In order to address these issues, some background as- sumptions about work and users must be challenged, together with ideas about tools and techniques .

BEYOND RULES

Although the devastating effects of "working according to the rules" are known at most workplaces, systems are often designed to impose just this. "Work-flow hard-liners" might argue that we just have to find and elaborate the right rules. In our view there is sufficient evidence for the non-algorithmic nature of work to take a different approach - an approach where the goal is to design computer support to be wielded at the users' discretion. In doing so we also address assumptions concerning users. We acknowledge that people in their daily work constantly exercise skill and judgement, for example in making the specific situation at hand fit the rules. This "situated sense- making" doesn't happen individually, in a vacuum, but is shaped in an organizational context where people interact, through cooperation and negotiations and thus recreate their understanding of how to handle day-to-day issues like travel expenses, customer complaints, or inaccurate construction drawings. We offer travel planning as an example of situational sense-making activities where critical issues lie hidden in the background. The design rationale of reservation systems has focused on carrier type (e.g. airline) and rested on the assumption that destination is the primary search key. Yet, go into any travel agency or listen to a reservation agent trying to find the cheapest flights or the connecting flights for different ‘legs' of a trip, and one can see that travel agents are caught in a vise where they need to break rules in order to get what they want out of the system.

Indeed, switching our focus beyond the workplace we can see that we, as consumers of airline ‘services', are often inconvenienced by reservation systems that are not designed to answer our questions. How much time have you wasted calling to find the cheapest price ticket, the most direct route or change your itinerary? Broadening the perspective again we can see that businesses, as larger consumers of airline services, face the same problems when they try to arrange a meeting or need to evaluate the costs of setting up meetings or conferences. Now as orga- nizations cut back on their travel budgets they are struck by many of the same issues that individual travellers have faced.

We are not suggesting that any one framework or set of techniques could work for all issues in this example. Rather, we believe that by bringing multiple and broader perspectives into the foreground, design work could be focused so that issues like efficiency, productivity and quality of service can be seen in a better light. Certainly, the ‘efficiency' of travel agents trying to make a commis- sion, and the ‘service' to consumers in a hurry for answers, is not met in the carrier type, destination-based assump- tions of systems dominated by "single-carrier providers" such as airlines - and improving the usability of a carrier-based system "in isolation" will not make it more useful.

A deeper and more insidious example arises when we peer again into the background and realize that many airlines monitor their reservation agents for speed of handling calls and making reservations - an issue of power and control over working conditions. Look more closely still and one can see a wide range of skills being used by reservation agents-skills that call upon their sense-making knowledge of customer needs - yet skills which go unrecognized and indeed unsupported in the system and undercompensated for in their paychecks. The question can be asked if these issues can be brought into the foreground of design or will remain hidden in the background behind simplified assumptions about work, skill and power. If the issues remain buried, the critical sense-making skills of reser- vation clerks don't get to be viewed in the broader frame of providing better customer service. And the danger remains that contradictions that arise from hidden issues such as these grow to inhibit effective use of the system.

DESIGN AS COOPERATIVE ACTION

Design needs to view work as an activity that makes sense of rules and situations in contexts based on compromise. If our designs are not simply used, but appropriated by people and made sense of in situations, then we need to bring the end-users' situated sense-making into our design process. In our approach this is done through simulations of future work situations using mock-ups and prototypes. This allows end-users to acquire a sense of what it will be like to work with the emerging design. For such simulations of future work to function it is crucial that the situation actually allows the end-users to exercise their situated sense-making. This requires more than the traditional lab setting, requiring instead situations so familiar to the end-users that they can bring their work- related skills and experience to bear in appropriating the emerging design, putting it to use in doing their work and tailoring it to suit the context and situations. It requires the design to be grounded in the work of the users in this very concrete way. It also requires the design process to be grounded in the work of the users - in ways that go beyond traditional design tools and techniques, reaching instead for a design process that supports the end-users in understanding the nature of the emerging design. Only when end-users acquire this kind of knowledge of and familiarity with the design process can we - the design team - hope for our designs to better fit everyday work situations.

Often this kind of design work is most effectively carried out as a cooperative activity involving professional designers and end-users in ways that blur the traditional distinction between designers and non-designers/end-users. This involves processes of mutual learning, where designing end-users learn about technological possibilities and limitations, where professional designers learn about work process possibilities and limitations and where all those involved learn about possibilities and limitations for change.

In this overview of our presentation we have criticized naive, but pervasive assumptions about work and rules - assumptions that focus on the idea that work is rule- following and that a good design reflects and enforces rules. However, we do not claim that rules are there by mistake. They are one way of ensuring that organizations function according to specified managerial perspectives. At the same time, however, the way that people in an organization make sense out of rules is also an instance of organizational compromise over conflicting interests, competition for resources and inconsistent goals. Systems and applications will be bought or developed to support the organization that pays the bill, yet they are used by people who have different needs and uses from the stated design. Viewed this way cooperative design may present an opportunity for new groups of end-users to exercise influence. To the degree that this actually happens these groups will benefit from more appropriate computer support - for example in a payroll office clerks and employees can benefit from systems that don't require records to be filed by social security number or from systems that allow machinists to adjust plans and programs. In short, groups of workers can benefit from systems that enhance the quality of working life - to use the words of Article 3.1 in the new ACM Code of Ethics. From the perspective of the organization paying for the system, bringing background issues of customer and worker concerns into the foreground may broaden definitions of service, quality and efficiency.

Not all of these concerns are design issues, nor should they be brought within the decision-making power of designers. But unacknowledged and unrecognized, they can seriously damage the usability of a system and undermine workers' rights and customer needs.

Through various examples, our talk illustrates different interests and viewpoints in system design; showing how they may challenge, complement, frustrate and support one another. In most cases all are valid; designing as though some of them did not exist, will not make them disappear. Cooperative Design presents an opportunity to create mosaics in such chaos.

It is outside the scope and style of this plenary summary to use and provide references in the traditional way. The interested reader is referred to: