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Studying the transition in technologically mediated work practice and system development in radiology through participation has required that I as a researcher change roles. The exploration of these roles has, to a great extent, formed the basis for exploring the relations between researchers, practitioners and designers. This section summarises the reflections upon using the experiences and location of an interdisciplinary researcher for the exploration of sensitizing system design towards actual work practice and arrives at arguing for a new role for the participant interventionist in work practice oriented participatory design.
The use of a researcher’s or a designer’s experiences or ideas as a starting point for developing techniques, methods and technologies is nothing new in system design nor in other engineering-oriented approaches to research. However, the expert role and expertise of the designer is customarily taken for granted instead of reflecting and exploring the researcher’s knowledge and assumptions.
I have reflected upon my experiences and researcher location throughout my work (starting in Karasti 1997a, publication I). Pursuing such introspection and self-reflexivity is indigenous to the philosophical stance of ethnography, because there it is recognised that the fieldworker is her own research instrument (Jordan 1996a). Examining one’s presumptions is also indigenous to my understanding of interdisciplinary research that is based on questioning one’s own assumptions (cf. conceptual interdisciplinarity, Salter & Hearn 1996). Furthermore, the problems I have encountered in the practical research work have incited me to reflect on what is possible in a particular setting (cf. Plowman et al. 1996). My qualitative approach has been questioned on a continuous basis within the quantitative research field of radiology (cf. Forsythe 1999). My wandering between ethnographic fieldwork and system design in the borderlands of disciplines has often been received with perplexity.
The exploration of researcher roles has taken place on two intertwined levels of inquiry, namely with regard to empirical fieldwork and interdisciplinary research. The considerations of a fieldworking researcher have been as if enclosed by or embedded in the interdisciplinary interests; they have been entwined in and all through my work, for instance, in my choices of the research setting and approach, in the questions for inquiry, epistemological assumptions and methods for data gathering and analysis.
Simultaneously to questioning the fundamental assumptions of my ‘own’ discipline I have searched for alternatives. By familiarising with and serving an apprenticeship in an ‘other’ discipline I have attempted to broaden my researcher perspectives. By consciously changing fieldworker roles in my engagement in ‘real world’ enterprises I have learned to carry out interdisciplinary work between these disciplines. Through the reflections on my experiences in participation and analysis I have become able to articulate the tacit knowledge and invisible skill of the practical reasoning of a participant interventionist (cf. Forsythe 1999). In the following I try to make visible some of the aspects of working as a participant interventionist as a potential way to promote sensitivity towards actual work practice in system design also more generally.
As ethnographers involved in technology development have reflected upon their changing researcher roles (Rogers 1997, Jordan 1996b, Plowman et al. 1996), I have reflected upon my changing roles and location as a researcher through my engagement in two fieldworker roles, namely those of the participant observer and participant interventionist.
In an attempt to gain sensitivity towards work practice it was essential to start from the actual work of radiology practitioners by becoming a participant observer. I learned to observe and appreciate work practice ‘as it is’. I became more reflective and analytic through the realisation that I needed to intentionally forget some assumptions and automatic exclusions of the design perspective. In the double role of an insider and outsider I learned not to cease in the ‘as it is’ but to continue to make the practitioners’ world problematic by taking for granted as little as possible of the everyday work. I learned to look for the ‘essentials’ of work practice as well as the tacit knowledge and lived experience that practitioners find difficult to articulate but that make the actual work practice accountable to them. (chapter 3).
In turning into a participant interventionist I learned to use my experience in system design as a point of reference in forming my understanding of the technologies’ usefulness at work and of further design issues while continuing to maintain sensitivity towards the actual work practice and the practitioners’ point of view. Hence, the role of participant interventionist is intimately based on and relies upon the fieldworker having constructed an understanding of work practice in the role of a participant observer. In both roles I learned to hold a careful epistemological discipline of the observed and the recounted, and between the inside and outside views. (sections 4.1 and 4.2).
Though I had changed researcher roles my research had remained constantly focussed on the socially organised and technologically mediated work practice, endogenous change in work and sensitizing system design towards actual work practice. The location in the two different roles facilitated the development of different perspectives upon the same topic whereas the analysis of work practice, evaluation of system in use situations and envisionment of redesign issues progressed relatively unhampered (cf. Salter & Hearn 1996).
In deliberations upon teleradiology system redesign interventions I realised wanting to give the participants a chance to engage in processes and perspectives similar to those of a participant observer and participant interventionist. I wanted to offer the others a possibility to engage in collaborative processes of meaning making rather than expecting to directly correlate observations with system requirements (cf. Sommerville et al. 1992). The participants were to have direct contact to both the observable and recounted accounts of work practice for the co-construction of shared understandings. I also saw it important to offer my fieldworker understanding to the participants as an invitation to collaborative authorship in a form that would foster availability and understandability to all participants. The participant interventionist is capable of shifting between the perspectives of a participant observer and participant interventionist both in preparing and facilitating the workshop, and she can support other participants in their shifting. The overall aim of these deliberations was to extend participation in collaborative meaning making, where knowledge and expertise in system design become reconsidered and more widely redistributed.
Many social scientists who have come into contact with technology development describe the role of an ethnographer as a kind of mediator between the work site and system development activities. The anthropologists of the Work Practice & Technology group (Blomberg & Trigg 2000) as well as the sociologists of the Lancaster CSCW group (Randall et al. 1994) characterise their role as mediators in the integration of ethnographic findings with design, but there are also great differences in their lines of argumentation for the mediator role, emphases and ways in carrying out the work in practice. For instance, the ethnographers in the Lancaster CSCW group renounce on taking part in design decisions and rather hold to an informational role by retaining that “it is the ethnographer’s task to acquire knowledge of the skills and expertise of the domain” and “[i];t is for the designer to probe and explore possibilities” (Hughes et al. 1993, p. 137). Whereas the Work Practice & Technology group at Xerox PARC has actively developed alternative approaches to intervene into the practices of professional technology production (Suchman et al. 1999).
In a way I have also been engaged as a mediator, but I have also wanted to embrace a more proactive role than a mere “bridge between the users and the designers” (Hughes et al. 1993, p. 138). I saw it relevant to offer my understanding of radiology work practice and the teleradiology system to others as I learned that it was unique in the project, even though I had become more cautious and considerate about intervention through my initiation in ethnography. I wanted to intervene in system design but to do so reflectively and with an appreciation for the practitioners and their actual work practice. Therefore, the role of a provocateur promoted in CESD appeared too ‘challenging’, problem-focussed and future-oriented: “[a];s a provocateur, the system developer investigates the present and past in order to help the practitioners experience what is wrong with the present before making decisions about the future. The provocateur urges or invites realization – both in the sense of becoming aware of and in the sense of making real – of current problems in order to decide what is needed in the future.” (Mogensen 1991, p. 43.)
The researchers of the MUST program have combined into their designer role also the role of a ‘quasi-ethnographer’ which is described as “researchers with a background mainly in computer science play the role of ‘quasi-ethnographers’ and designers trying to study, adopt, and experiment with ethnographic techniques” (Simonsen 1994, p. 74). The role, even when restricted to the level of borrowing techniques, is ambiguous: “As a designer, I do acknowledge the basic point of the ethnographic approach: that it is very important to achieve a deep knowledge of existing practices if you are to change them. But, as a designer, I also recognise that my purpose and legitimacy is to participate in changing these practices. Ethnographically inspired approaches are thus interesting as a supplement that may be included and adapted to a design process.” (ibid., p. 74.) To me such obvious ambiguity has suggested that careful exploration of and reflection upon the issue is needed.
My experiences as a fieldworker and reflections on the changing fieldworker roles have converged with my considerations of interdisciplinary research. Interdisciplinarity in this research has taken place within one researcher, myself. “It is possible for an individual researcher to draw upon the corpus of more than one discipline or to conduct research within a field of study characterised as interdisciplinary” (Salter & Hearn 1996, p. 7). As this work has been a one-person project, it has been based on introspection, and reflexivity both with regard to my own assumptions as a researcher as well as with reference to the fundamental assumptions of the involved disciplines.
To create the interdisciplinary role of a participant interventionist I have engaged in learning about ethnography and participatory design to be able to both comprehend and appreciate as well as question and challenge them ‘from within’. I see in this similarities to the program of ‘reconstructing technologies as social practices’ by the Work Practice & Technology group in which they have been involved in two aspects of reconstructing, namely “making sense of what we have” and “remaking what we have into something new” (Suchman et al. 1999, p. 393).
I have learned to appreciate ethnographic study of work practice and participatory design from within my own experiences. Having intentionally sought to become a participant observer and then having turned into a participant interventionist, I have gained lived experience in acting as both. For instance, I have learned to value and pursue in practice the creativities germane to each perspective. The creativity of a participant observer manifests itself in and through engagement in analytic work, for instance, in producing fieldnotes and transcripts together with analytic commentary, in selecting and interpreting the collected data, in constructing first tentative then more informed formulations of the practitioners’ categories, identifying assumptions, and even – or especially – in cultivating a careful epistemological attentiveness over the insider and the outsider views and knowledge. The participant interventionist’s creativity, in turn, relates to abilities with intertwining the understanding she has gathered as a participant observer into more future-oriented thinking and innovatively exploring and envisioning the uses of new technologies.
Having learned to appreciate ethnographic study of work practice and participatory design from within my own experiences I have gradually become able to examine and question some of the fundamental assumptions of each perspective as if from within the disciplines. I have compared my experiences and insights in the changing fieldworker roles and the perceptions of workshop analyses with the research that discusses the problematics involved in the integration of ethnographic studies of work and system design (e.g. Sommerville et al. 1993, Grudin & Grinter 1995, Nyce & Löwgren 1995). My findings do not support but rather question some of the issues and argumentation that maintain the taken-for-granted incompatibility of fundamental disciplinary discrepancies as already elaborated in section 5.3.3. Furthermore, I have learned to formulate ‘fundamental issues’ that, with regard to my interest in sensitizing system design towards work practice, have divulged their mutual necessity. I have scrutinised how ‘work practice’ and ‘change’ have been addressed in ethnographic workplace studies and system design as well as in approaches attempting their integration. This has led to reconstructing ‘the horizon of work transformations’ in section 5.3.2 and to the reformulation of work and change from the point of view of actual practice in section 6.1.
I have aspired what Salter and Hearn call ‘conceptual interdisciplinarity’ which “is a theoretical, primarily epistemological enterprise involving internal coherence, the development of new conceptual categories, methodological unification, and long-term research and exploration” (Salter & Hearn 1996, p. 9).
A considerably different approach to interdisciplinarity has prevailed in the collaboration between sociologists and software engineers in the COMIC project: “One approach to collaborative working is for individuals to become experts or, at the very least, to acquire some expertise in both disciplines involved. … We consider this to be arrant nonsense. … Of course, awareness of other disciplines is necessary but we reject the notion that multi-faceted expertise is essential. Rather, we believe that effective collaboration requires multi-disciplinary design teams who respect the skills of each discipline and who are prepared to make compromises in order to work together and to enhance the systems design process.” (Sommerville et al. 1992, pp. 349-350.) According to the categories of interdisciplinarity by Salter and Hearn this approach bears resemblances to ‘instrumental interdisciplinarity’ that “focuses on interdisciplinarity as an applied problem-centered activity. This position does not seek to challenge disciplinary boundaries or the general epistemological assumptions accompanying the disciplinary paradigm. Its approach is one of methodological borrowing. Tools of research and analysis are borrowed and applied across disciplines, but no direct synthesis of knowledge is required or produced. Within this view, interdisciplinarity is purely a functional activity. … this form of interdisciplinarity is designed to respond to the external demands of society. Existing disciplinary categories remain unchallenged, specialization is championed, and interdisciplinarity is seen to result from disciplinary ‘slippage’ leading to the establishment of new hybrid disciplines.” (Salter & Hearn 1996, pp. 8-9.)
Interdisciplinary working within the Lancaster CSCW research group has been largely taken as a project management issue of system design (e.g. Bardram 1996), though the sociologists involved have also raised more critical issues (e.g. Hughes et al. 1991, Shapiro 1994). The four ways of integrating ethnography into system design (Hughes et al. 1994) are all based on the idea of disciplinary division of labour between ethnographers and software engineers. Thus specialization is championed and more fundamental questions have been eluded. The MUST program has followed suit and suggested yet another way to integrate ethnography and system design: “A team of designers, who have integrated an ethnographic style into their design approach, work in a team with users. Together they conduct an analysis and codesign an artifact.” (Simonsen & Kensing 1998, p. 24.) Though they have to a large extent viewed integration as ‘methodological borrowing’, they have also reflected upon how the linking of ethnographic techniques into their way of working has changed their practices in research projects and has a potential of changing professional practices through influences to system design education and curriculum (ibid., p. 28).