| Increasing sensitivity towards everyday work practice in system design | ||
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In addition to everyday work practice, system design comprises another important starting point for this study. This section describes my inclination to two alternative approaches within the field of Information Systems (IS), i.e. participatory and feminist system design.
There is an identifiable ‘orthodoxy’ in IS research according to the paradigmatic analysis of ‘contemporary’ schools of information systems development (Iivari 1991). The dominant orthodoxy is characterised by, for example, the view of information as descriptive facts, an information system as a technical artifact with social implications, a structural view of organisations, positivist epistemology, a means-end-oriented view of IS Science and values reflecting organisational and economic goals (ibid.).
In delineating my approach to system design I have turned to approaches that provide alternatives to the prevailing mainstream of information systems development (Iivari & Hirschheim 1992, Iivari et al. 1998). In this process two issues have paramounted: taking into account everyday work practice and transgressing the separation of use and design, for which I have turned to two specific approaches, namely Participatory Design (see e.g. Schuler & Namioka 1993, Muller & Kuhn 1993, Trigg & Anderson 1996, Greenbaum & Kyng 1991, Floyd et al. 1989, Bjerknes et al. 1987, Ehn 1988) for its particular interest to care for the work context, and feminist information system development (see e.g. Green et al. 1993, Vehviläinen 1997, Mörtberg 1997, Berg 1996, Webster 1995, Balka 1997a) where the one-sided design expertise has been problematised, and the separation of use and design has been questioned.
These traditions recognise that design is a social process that is fundamentally about intervention to create change and respect the right of practitioners to have a direct influence on the decisions that affect their working lives. Consequently, system design is not perceived merely as a matter of professional designers creating innovative computer-based technologies but as a collaborative effort to design both technical and work systems where the participation of intended users is considered one of the fundamental preconditions.
I have promoted Participatory Design (PD) throughout my involvement with the clinic of radiology; the professional designers involved in the various projects have not been proponents of PD. In studying the technology projects I have questioned and reconstructed what needs to be taken into account in the development, procurement and implementation of information systems. My intention has also been to contribute in a direct and immediate manner to designing the technical and organisational systems of the work community. I have attempted to influence within individual projects of technology development by seeking for and developing alternative ways of intervening (cf. Gärtner & Wagner 1996).
PD approaches have traditionally cared for and emphasised work relevant issues. However, the essential work concerns such as work place democracy, quality of working life, and worker skills, may have emphasised the political nature of work more than the actual ways of working. Furthermore, in PD the focus has been on designing systems where the commitment is to design technical and organisational systems that are informed by and responsive to people’s everyday work practices, but there is no explicit interest in studying work practice per se. An understanding of the working practices of end users may emerge but it is not a goal of the project (Blomberg 1995). Fairly recently PD researchers have started to explicitly incorporate analyses of existing work practice into the design projects thus making a more deliberate attempt to understand everyday work practice (e.g. Mogensen 1994, Bødker et al. 1993, Simonsen & Kensing 1994). I also have an explicit interest in actual work practice and I argue for grounding all design activities on an analysis of everyday work activities. Technology design proceeds together with work design.
Bridging work practice and system design in actual practice involves consideration of issues of collaboration, for instance, who participates and in which collaborative activities. The traditional way of carrying out participatory design is through direct and unmediated collaboration of workers and designer/researchers, increasingly also with other members of the organisation, such as managers in the MUST method (e.g. Simonsen 1994).
The rationale for user participation has varied over time and across approaches, from political or representational correctness to more neutral formulation of active collaboration of users and designers. PD projects have varied with respect to how and why workers have participated. Worker participation may have been limited to providing designers with access to workers’ skills and experiences without having a say in the decision making (e.g. descriptions of their current work practices and testing/evaluation of technology). Other projects have been committed to cultivating the possibility of real worker influence over the direction and outcome of the technology design effort. (Greenbaum 1996.) As ethnographers have come in contact with system design, the typical way to organise working together between practitioners, fieldworkers and designers has been collaboration where ethnographers have acted as mediators between use and design communities (e.g. Hughes et al. 1992, Bentley et al. 1992, Blomberg & Trigg 2000).
In my work the aim has been to create possibilities for and to facilitate direct multiparty collaboration between practitioners, designers and fieldworker/researchers. In accordance with the emphasis on work practice my rationale for practitioner participation has been formed into covering all situated views from within the actual everyday work practice. The extended practitioner participation involving all occupational groups to collaborate in the design activities challenged the politics and realities of the prevailing occupational stratification coupled with peer-socialisation typical in medical work organisations. For example, participation in the initial design team of the experimental teleradiology project had been limited to radiologists, medical ‘techies’ and professional designers. The inclusion of other occupational groups into the spheres and activities of new technology turned out to be a political issue and the multioccupational cooperation in system development was considered extraordinary.
In relation to the technology projects in the clinic of radiology I have encouraged extended practitioner participation in analysis of work practice, evaluation of technology-in-use and (re)design of technology. My starting point has been that active practitioner participation in the analysis of work and technology use raises the practitioners’ awareness and criticalness of the suitability and usefulness of the technologies-in-use for actual work to be carried out rather than merely adjusting and accommodating to the rigidities of technologies. This, naturally, has required providing for such possibilities where the practitioners have been able to step outside the everyday immersion in work to analyse it, e.g. stimulated recall interviews and work practice based design workshops.
The attempt to bridge between work practice and system design in actual technology development situations 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.
In PD the valued expertise of work has been seen as the workers’ craftsman’s skills learned in practices and thus impossible to be accounted for without the presence of the workers themselves (Ehn 1988). Therefore, direct user involvement has been trusted to bring workers’ skill and expertise of work into design processes. Interestingly enough, in some approaches that have attempted to integrate ethnographic studies of work practice and system design, an explicit distrust to user participation has been expressed (e.g. Hughes et al. 1993) as is elaborated in section 5.3.1.1.
In PD, due to different areas of expertise of workers and designers, mutual learning (see especially Utopia (Bødker et al. 1987) and Florence projects (Bjerknes & Bratteteig 1987)) is an important part of “collaboration as a team of different experts” (ibid., p. 325) within specific design projects, i.e. design professionals learn about the actual use context and workers about possible technological options. In fact, there remains a remarked distrust in PD that any user surrogates or representations of work could provide for the skilled craftsmanship and tacit knowledge that are seen to comprise the essence of work (Ehn 1988, Kyng 1991, Kyng 1995). Conversely, it has been pointed out that the comprehension of work as skilled craftsmanship may, in fact, have mystified workers’ everyday work and black-boxed related tacit knowledge out of the reach of researcher/designers (see e.g. Strauss 1988, Star 1991b, Star & Strauss 1999). As an example of this is given that there have been no attempts to conceptually model or articulate work (Iivari & Lyytinen 1998).
From another point of view, the taken-for-granted design expertise of professional designers has been questioned (e.g. Vehviläinen 1997). It has been indicated that system design is inevitably political as all design is in/for someone’s interests (Suchman 1994a). The privilege of professional designers, far away from the actual sites of work to have the authority to design systems that are likely to change the work and life of workers is called into question (ibid.) and the legitimation of the everyday knowledge and expertise in system development has been argued for and emphasised (e.g. Suchman & Jordan 1989). For example, Vehviläinen has encouraged office workers in a study circle to make analyses of their work and thus take their expertise as the starting point for work and technology design (Vehviläinen 1991).
In fieldwork it has been challenging to promote everyday work practice as legitimate in/for system development in the technology projects within the clinic of radiology. It has not only implicitly questioned the sole expertise of the design professionals and the medical personnel responsible for the technology decisions, but even more provocatively it has questioned the traditions of medical expert knowledge and the taken-for-granted organisational hierarchies of expertise and power prevalent in medical institutions. In relation to system design these hierarchies of expertise and power were manifest in such aspects as who was supposed to participate in the technology development/procurement and for whose work the systems were designed. As already mentioned, only the radiologists, medical ‘techies’ and professional designers were seen as legitimate participants in technology development and the inclusion of other occupations was not a straight-forward issue. Furthermore, and also partly as a result of the previous point, both the teleradiology and the PACS systems were mainly developed for radiologists’ work whereas supportive work was scarcely thought about except in relation to automation.
The issues of everyday knowledge and work practice experience have been central to my work. My interest has especially been to explore how to integrate ethnographic understandings of everyday work practice and the multivoiced expertise typical of PD approaches.
The development of tools and techniques has been a key focus in PD (Kensing & Blomberg 1998). Typically the tools and techniques promote a practice where researchers and professional designers are able to learn about users’ work, where both technology and work organisation are in focus, and where users are able to take an active part in technology design, especially through informal cooperation between users and designers (e.g. Bødker et al. 1993, Muller 1991, Wall & Mosher 1994, Kensing 1998). Increasingly techniques that use fantasy and imagined futures have become favored, e.g. organisational games, Future Workshops, mock-up design and cooperative prototyping. Though developing a single PD method has not been the aim, some groups have systematized their design practices into a coherent ensemble of tools and techniques, e.g. the MUST method (Kensing et al. 1998a), Contextual Design (Beyer & Holtzblatt 1998) and Cooperative Experimental Systems Development (Grønbæk et al. 1997).
I have also developed a tool for work practice oriented participatory design and organised multiparty workshops in relation to the experimental teleradiology system project. My concern was with contributing to the further development of the experimental system by making visible and accountable for design the actual system use and the emerging teleradiology work practice. Therefore, the foremost idea was to ground all workshop activities on an analysis of existing work practice.