Chapter 1. Introduction

This thesis argues for the importance of work practice in system design and deliberates upon how to increase the sensitivity of system design towards actual, everyday work practice. It addresses some traditional questions of information systems design and research, though in a less conventional way. What is at the heart of this work relates to one of the most essential and invariable topics of system design, i.e. how to define what is needed in the system and how the system functions. In persisting in the inclusion of social concerns alongside of technical matters in what is customarily understood as ‘requirements engineering’ the thesis joins the research representing many fields of study that has raised similar concerns (e.g. Jirotka & Goguen 1994, Thomas 1995, Suchman 1995b, Holzblatt & Beyer 1995, Robinson & Bannon 1991).

Work practices have remained invisible in a majority of requirements engineering practices in traditional system design (Suchman 1995b, Nardi & Engeström 1999). Even in design approaches where the context of system use and work have been considered important, interest in work practice has been limited. Typically the emphasis of design is so much on technology development that the actual ways in which these technologies are used appear less significant. The prevalent future orientation of designing innovative technologies refuses interest in the current ways of working. Furthermore, the problem-solution frame of reference (see e.g. Anderson 1997) directs the scarce attention in work towards the difficulties or deficiencies in the existing practices to be cured with new technologies whereas the smoothly organising routines and customary everyday practices go unnoticed and unsupported.

There is, however, an increasing recognition that an understanding of current work practices would be useful in the design of new technologies and attempts have been made to overcome the separation of use and design. Particularly participatory design and ethnographic workplace studies have provided alternative ways for making work accountable in design (Blomberg 1995). In participatory design user involvement has traditionally been relied on to provide for the knowledge and experience of work context for design activities (e.g. Muller & Kuhn 1993, Schuler & Namioka 1993, Floyd et al. 1989, Greenbaum & Kyng 1991). In ethnographic studies of work, in turn, the social scientists have brought into design process understanding of the contextual details of work and interaction by mediating between worksites and system design (e.g. Blomberg et al. 1993, Blomberg 1995, Button 2000, Crabtree et al. 2000, Hughes et al. 1995, Jordan 1996a, Rogers & Bellotti 1997). These traditions have only rarely been combined (Kensing & Blomberg 1998), but for the study at hand they provide the starting points and dialogue partners.

The strategy of this thesis comprises the integration of ethnographically informed study of everyday work practice and participatory design. Work practice, obviously, needs to be made visible in the efforts of increasing design’s sensitivity towards it. The ways in which people work is not always apparent and too often assumptions are made as to how tasks are performed rather than unearthing the underlying work practices (Suchman 1995a). Making work intelligible for the purposes of system design requires an intimate knowledge of and familiarity with the actual practice. Therefore, I have chosen as the most essential starting point everyday work practice both for studying the work where technologies are used as well as the work of design. I see work practice as a form of unfolding activity in actual communities that is concrete and situated, complexly socially organised and technologically mediated. The roots for this lie in the traditions of ethnographic and ethnomethodological studies of work and in approaches where work is seen as technologically mediated activity.

However, establishing the relations between an ethnographic study of work and design specifications is such a complex challenge that simply providing ethnographic findings is not enough. It is my contention that more collaborative ways of constructing the relevance of work practice for system design are needed. I further argue in Karasti (2000), publication number IV in this thesis, that the practitioners’ views are needed in this for their professional expertise of everyday practice and their lived experience which are hard to match by outsiders in envisioning informed images of future system use practices. I have turned to the tradition of Participatory Design (PD) for its extensive experience of user involvement in collaborative design. I have been especially interested in practitioners’ participation in the analysis of their work which has not received much attention in previous studies on the integration of work practice and system design (Karasti 2001, publication number V in this thesis).

The attempt to bridge work practice and system design necessarily relates to (at least) two very different bodies of knowledge: the everyday work activities and related knowledge of practitioners, and what is considered relevant information for requirements analysis in system design. The knowledge that has traditionally been considered legitimate within system design is not the knowledge of those who use the technology in their work, with the exception of Participatory Design and a few other approaches that have explored more multivoiced alternatives. More typically in system design the knowledge of the designer, ‘from without’ work practice, has been legitimate – authoritative, privileged and therefore deeply biased (Vehviläinen 1997, Suchman & Jordan 1989).

In principle, the entire epistemological and methodological repertoire of investigation has been at the disposal of system design, especially with the commonly entertained idea of Information Systems (IS) as an interdisciplinary field of methodological pluralism (Mumford et al. 1985, Nissen et al. 1991, Lee et al. 1997). This has, however, rarely been realised in practice, instead information systems design and research have been confined to a limited set of models and methods. Paradigmatic research of system design method­olo­gies within information system development (ISD) has revealed an epistemological orthodoxy, and the epistemological assumptions tend to uniformly follow the traditional, positivist paradigm (Iivari 1991, Iivari & Hirschheim 1992). There has been no room in them for the knowledge of everyday work and practitioners’ experience. Furthermore, there is a paucity of studies of system design as practice as much of the research has focused on the development of methods or methodologies for systems design (Wynecoop & Russo 1995, Nandhakumar & Avison 1999).

The field of system design has resorted to other disciplines in questions which cannot be easily addressed from its confines, such as in questions of human or social nature. In turning to other areas of research and theory, one after the other, the idea has been to deploy their strengths and adapt their methods to the problem area in question. The prevalent stance towards interdisciplinarity in system design is pertinently captured in the notion of ‘reference discipline’ (Keen 1980) which indicates any field of study from which IS imports research methods, standards of theoretical constructions to solve a problem.

Another implication of the ‘reference discipline’ stance has been the withdrawal from engagement in reflecting about the involved epistemological issues in interdisciplinary research, i.e. the status of knowledge and the social practices of knowledge creation, that are questions which almost without exception are raised in the context of interdiscipli­nary work (Salter & Hearn 1991). Rather than addressing epistemological issues, the tendency within IS has resembled the process of ‘fission’, i.e. the breaking down of subjects into specialities and subspecialities to deal with certain kinds of issues (Salter & Hearn 1996) which has lead to the proliferation of subfields, such as Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), User-Centered Design (UCD), Usability, Design of Interactive Systems, just to name a few of interest to the work at hand. Consequently, challenging the taken-for-granted assumptions of design from within the discipline has been missing, and design has not taken up the project of deconstruction in order to be able to reconstruct.

I have not simply decided to embrace interdisciplinary research, rather the need arose as I went on and discovered that this particular topic and perspective of study had been neglected in system design. My point of departure for interdisciplinarity has come to be the lacunae in research on everyday practice and related research questions, and challenging the epistemological orthodoxy and constellation of methods that prevail within system design and are insufficient for dealing with everyday practice. As everyday work practice has historically been invisible in design, the perspective proposes challenges to system design. It suggests the dissolution of the barriers existing between designer and user knowledges, and the search for adequate methods to secure the inclusion of practitioner and work practice knowledge in design.

Through reflecting on the researcher location and understanding, which began in Karasti (1997a), publication number I in this thesis, as reflections on the gendered fieldwork experiences, I explore the possibilities of extending the multivoicedness prevalent in Participatory Design with an explicit interest on insider-outsider knowledges and views endemic within ethnographic traditions. Since these other knowledges from within work practice are not automatically accounted for in the currently accepted notions about how design should be conducted, the design process itself needs to be reformulated so that it can encompass the broader range of knowledges. This requires a reformulation of how work practice in system design is seen.

As much as my approach has been about studying and appreciating practice ‘as it is’, it has also had an underlying critical tone. In my position and perspective as an insider-outsider to both participatory design as well as ethnographic traditions, a theoretical attitude of interweaving construction and reconstruction has become a part of my work and I have questioned and attempted to reformulate some of the taken-for-granted assumptions which have often been related to the integration of work practice and system design, such as the notions of current practice and change, and the intractable disciplinary dichotomies.

Interdisciplinarity has been intertwined into both my empirical and theoretical work. In the empirical work I have combined video-assisted ethnographically informed fieldwork of everyday work practices and technologies-in-use with an action research oriented participatory design approach while immersed in the ‘real world of work’ (see especially Karasti 1997b, publication number II in this thesis). In the action research aligned part of my work I have constructed a tool for work practice oriented participatory design introduced in Karasti (1997c), publication number III in this thesis.

During my longitudinal fieldwork spanning a period of four years in the clinic of radiology in Oulu University Hospital (OUH) I have had an abundance of possibilities to study the complex relations and knowledges involved in the thoroughly technologically mediated work practices, and the communities of work engaged in the endogenous processes of technology development and procurement. I have particularly been interested in exploring the relations between researchers, work practice practitioners and designers in the collaborative attempts to sensitize system design towards actual everyday work practice.

One controversy has paramounted in this thesis: how to account for and appreciate the actual existing work practice in the development of new technological systems that necessarily also transform the work practice. This controversy has proved an interesting challenge that conceals a profound dilemma of paradigmatic importance. It may seem, at first, very contradictory to insist to appreciate existing work practice when dealing with the innovation of new information technology and the taken-for-granted inclination to change that goes with it. On the other hand, information technology is so flexible and malleable by nature that it can be designed and redesigned to comply with work practice throughout its development, implementation and use. This intricate complexity has led me to reflect upon the relations of ethnographic traditions of work research that appreciate existing practices and system design approaches that are technology-centered and future-oriented and to build bridges between them (Karasti 2001, publication number V in this thesis).