| Increasing sensitivity towards everyday work practice in system design | ||
|---|---|---|
| Prev | Chapter 2. Bridging work practice and system design | Next |
My work of exploring the integration of everyday work practice and participatory design builds upon the research carried out in the approaches introduced in the previous section and attempts to continue and contribute to the interdisciplinary endeavour. This section describes the research approach at which I have arrived but which was not yet apparent in the first publications of this thesis.
My research approach is interdisciplinary (section 2.5.4). The research process has been a combination of both empirical investigation of being immersed in the ‘real world of work’ as well as analysis and theoretical reflection. In the empirical work I have combined video-assisted, ethnographically informed fieldwork (section 2.5.1) with action research oriented participatory design approach (section 2.5.6). My theoretical approach has been inspired by the ethnomethodological perspective of studying everyday work practice and technologies-in-use (section 2.5.3). The theoretical reflection has included analyses pertaining both to the actual interaction and concrete activities (section 2.5.2) as well as the members’ views on their work, to make sense of radiology work and system design, self-reflective deliberations of researcher location (section 2.5.5), and, naturally, a continuous dialogue with research in the topic area.
To investigate the relations of work practice, system use and design I have adopted an approach that could be characterised as video-assisted, ethnographically informed investigation. Ethnographic traditions[1] hold that immersion and participation in others’ social worlds are essential for developing an understanding of what the world looks like from the point of view of the persons studied (e.g. Agar 1986, Hammersley & Atkinson 1995, Denzin 1997). Accordingly, in attempting to understand what happens in mundane work practice I have seen it of utmost importance to study people acting and interacting in the context of their everyday work. Fieldwork has enabled me to learn firsthand about the practitioners’ world of work, i.e. how they carry out everyday work, how they talk at work and about their work, and the ways in which circumstances affect their conduct.
Video-assisted fieldwork has become used in ethnographic workplace studies in such settings where asking questions and observation is not enough (Blomberg et al. 1993, Jordan 1996a, Brun-Cottan 1996). Video recording can be used to complement and extend conventional methods for data gathering when it is impossible to capture and preserve the richness of the phenomenon under study without augmenting the human observational capabilities. The use of video in fieldwork allows for creating a stable data corpus. Video data provides a rich and relatively permanent primary record available for an unlimited number of (co-)viewings. Video captures complex data and therefore it is particularly useful in settings where dense, concurrent dialogues and activities take place. Video provides access to behavior that would remain invisible without replay technology. Repeated viewings and possibilities to play the tapes in slow or accelerated motion in analysis allow for exposing otherwise invisible phenomena and patterns of activities. Furthermore, video, by recording events as they happen, allows to counteract certain observer bias, such as highlighting particular aspects of work while passing over others. Video recordings also assist in avoiding the say/do problem by approximating the nature of direct observation of what ‘really’ happened rather than people’s recollections and opinions of events. (Jordan & Henderson 1994, Jordan 1996a, Ruhleder & Jordan 1997.)
The above general characteristics of using video in fieldwork made it suitable also for the study of radiology work. First, radiology work is especially complex in its pervasive and intensive technological mediation, instances of professional peer communication, and interactions between practitioners and technologies. Further, in radiology practice there are activities that unfold so fast and are so complex that they become understandable to an outsider only when carefully viewed and analysed in detail after the actual activity is over.
For the detailed analysis of video materials I have turned to Interaction Analysis (Jordan & Henderson 1994) which is an interdisciplinary method for the empirical investigation of interaction.[2] It has been used in combination with ethnographic fieldwork[3] (Suchman & Trigg 1991, Ruhleder & Jordan 1997) and it has proved a powerful tool in the investigation of human activity, particularly in complex, multi-actor, technology-mediated work settings. Its roots lie in ethnography, sociolinguistics, kinesics, proxemics, and ethology, but it has been shaped most consequentially by conversation analysis and ethnomethodology (Jordan & Henderson 1994)[4].
Interaction Analysis depends on the technology of audio-visual recording for its primary records and on playback capability for their analysis. It consists of the in-depth micro-analysis of how people interact with one another, their physical environment, and the documents, artifacts, and technologies in that environment. As video provides process data rather than snapshot data, Interaction Analysis allows to expose mechanisms and antecedents of activities. It looks for orderliness and patterns in people’s routine interactions, and operates at a finer level of detail than conventional ethnographic observation. In Interaction Analysis the bias of an individual analyst is counteracted both by challenging preconceived notions in multidisciplinary group analysis and repeatedly viewing the tapes that give access to members’ categories and world views (Jordan & Henderson 1994, Ruhleder & Jordan 1997.)
I have used Interaction Analysis to gain more in-depth understanding of radiology work, especially of image interpretation and for the analysis of participants’ activities in the workshops. And I have come to complement the researcher-only analyses with sessions where practitioners also participate in analysis, e.g. stimulated recall interviews (see section 3.2.3).
Ethnographic fieldwork has been used by a variety of theoretical perspectives, e.g. structural functionalism, cultural and cognitive anthropology, ethnomethodology, critical theory and post modernism. Consequently, the justification of ethnography is marked by philosophical and theoretical diversity rather than consensus. I have turned to the insights of ethnomethodology (e.g. Coulon 1995, Livingston 1987, Garfinkel et al. 1981, Garfinkel 1972, Sharrock & Anderson 1986, Lynch & Peyrot 1992, Heritage 1984) because I have been especially concerned with the mundane ways in which practitioners organize their unfolding work activities and make sense of the material and social world around them – as I have already explained in relation to my understanding of work practice in section 2.2.
Ethnomethodology studies the common-sense resources, procedures, and practices through which the members of a culture produce and recognise mutually intelligible objects, events, and courses of action. It stresses that social actions and social organisation are produced by knowledgeable agents who guide their actions by the use of situated common-sense reasoning. Rather than treating the achievement of social organisation as given from which the analysis of social structure could proceed (to which ethnomethodology, in fact, emerged as in reaction), ethnomethodological research is directed at the hidden social processes underlying that achievement. (Heritage 1991, Feldman 1995, Holstein & Gubrium 1991).
Ethnomethodological studies of everyday life have made major contributions to our understanding of work in a variety of organisational settings (e.g. studies of work (Garfinkel 1986), science (Lynch 1993) and technology (Button 1993)) as they have provided detailed, naturalistic accounts of competent occupational practices by addressing the ‘just whatness’ of work (Atkinson 1988).
I subscribe to ethnomethodologically informed ethnography and participatory design without being a ‘true’ member of either community. I have served an apprenticeship in both of them through practical fieldwork and education/training to develop the necessary sensitivity to their ‘registers’ (Salter & Hearn 1996). This kind of ‘interdisciplinary position of an outsider’ and the possibility to engage in exploring the insider-outsider views may offer insight that is not available to the regular community members by allowing one to see what others take for granted (ibid.).
I have considered it necessary to address fundamental issues also by questioning epistemological and ontological issues in the integration of work practice and system design, instead of being satisfied with only borrowing methods, categories through which Salter and Hearn distinguish between conceptual and instrumental interdisciplinarity respectively (1996). In engaging in conceptual interdisciplinarity that has taken place ‘within one researcher’ (Salter & Hearn 1996), I have been confronted with two kinds of fundamental examination. First, I have had to question my own assumptions and ways of thinking, and secondly, I have questioned the assumptions and conventional frames of reference of the traditions though my starting point most definitely resides in their strengths. I have engaged in so much questioning and deconstruction at a time that the reconstruction – thereby also influencing practice - has been possible. This way I have been able to ground my work and argumentation on concrete practice and lived experience. Furthermore, I have tried to avoid the disciplinary dichotomic confrontation all too often found in interdisciplinary research, and in fact, by sustaining a continuous connection with practice and learning from the actual activities of work oriented participatory design I have become able to question the purported disciplinary dichotomies in the integration of work practice and system design.
Anderson has encouraged the kind of ethnographic research with interventionist impulse that would have a determination to stay with the technology and at the same time focus on lived-work of use (Anderson 1994, p. 179). Ina Wagner was the first one to make me understand that there are different kinds of ethnographies and that the system designers’ ethnographies might be the ones that have been missing so far. In commenting a draft for Kuutti & Karasti (1995) she wrote: “We can think of a multiplicities of ethnographies written in different voices, also the voice of a systems designer who speaks e.g. from her or his location in a computer company or research institute and who might look at a field for points of departure for systems design and therefore give her or his partial account of what one has experienced from a specific place within a specific field and this in a narrative mode. ... What might be missing is the systems designers’ ‘voice’ her or his ‘partial truth’, ‘cultural translation’ of encountered practices into something that makes sense for the practice of systems design. How then all those different partial truths and knowledges should be connected, I don’t know, that seems to be the trick!”
As a fieldworker I have been my own research instrument (cf. Jordan 1996a), therefore I have reflected upon the changing researcher roles of participant observer and participant interventionist. My reflection of researcher knowledge and location began in Karasti (1997a), publication I, through gendered fieldwork experiences and I have come to see it as such an important issue that it has become one of the most essential methods for carrying out this work.
During my years in the field I struggled to understand the obviously shared knowledge of radiology practitioners in their technologically mediated everyday practice. However, in my interpretation of these work activities I always also drew on my background in information systems which made my view distinctly different from the ones of radiology practitioners. I started to make a distinction between two kinds of data as is done in anthropology: an orientation in research centered on the native or the insiders’ view of reality produces emic data and an orientation of outside researchers, who have their own categories by which the subject’s world is organised, yields etic data (see e.g. Jordan 1996a, Forsythe 1999)[5].
Furthermore, Haraway has proposed situated knowledges and the privilege of partial perspective instead of various forms of universal and unlocatable, and thus irresponsible, knowledge claims (Haraway 1988, p. 583). She has argued for: “politics and epistemologies of location, positioning, and situating, where partiality and not universality is the condition of being heard to make rational knowledge claims” (ibid., p. 589). Consequently, I started to reflect the situated and partial knowledge of my researcher location in relation to the members’ situated and partial knowledges, and the possibilities opening up from having simultaneously knowledge of being both an insider and an outsider (cf. Star 1991a).
As my aim has been to explore in practice ways in which to bridge work practice and system design I have engaged in local change processes throughout my involvement with the clinic of radiology. I have participated and intervened in the technology procurement and development projects by promoting participatory design with a special emphasis on everyday work practice. As part of my action research engagement I have constructed a participatory tool that would increase the sensitivity of system design towards actual work practice.
Following the tradition of action research, in addition to participating in action and change, I have also attempted to create knowledge and to increase understanding of the issues involved also more generally (e.g. Stringer 1999, Greenwood & Levin 1998). Though I started out with the problematics of design practice I have ended up engaged in analysing and reflecting on the relations between researchers, practitioners and designers as well as exploring a set of assumptions.
The work has proceeded in three phases. To begin with, a practical tool was developed to support radiology practitioners, researchers and design professionals in communicating and co-constructing shared understandings of work practice, system use and development in connection to the experimental teleradiology system redesign (Karasti 1997c, publication III). In the development of this tool I drew on my own fieldworker experiences of learning about radiology work practice and considering its technological support (chapters 3 and 4).
Then, convinced that we need to study actual instances of system design as any other everyday work practice to be able to understand what really takes place in design and to learn more about the problematics involved, I have scrutinised the participants’ activities and interaction in the workshops. The focus in these analyses has been on how the relations between practitioners, researchers and designers were constructed as part and parcel of the collaboration. The views and understandings which participants employed in analysing the existing work practices, in evaluating the experimental system use situations and in envisioning improvements and new ideas for a future teleradiology system and work practice have been delineated in Karasti (2000), publication IV. The elements of interaction that participants particularly utilized in the co-construction of shared understandings of radiology work practice and in rendering them relevant as design considerations have been identified in Karasti (2001), publication V.
Finally, these findings have been brought into a dialogue with research that deliberates upon the problematics involved in the integration of ethnographic studies of work and system design (section 5.3). In this discussion I compare and contrast how other approaches have addressed the relations between practitioners, designers and researchers, the integration of actual work practice and change thinking, and the work practice based requirements specification.
| [1] | Introductions to the sociological antecedents of ethnography can be found in Hughes et al. (1993) and COMIC Deliverable 2.4 (1995) as well as to the anthropological ones in Jordan (1996a) and Blomberg et al. (1993). |
| [2] | As an example of the diversity of approaches in video analysis: in an ACM CSCW’98 conference a panel called "Six Readings of a Single Text: A Videoanalytic Session” six researchers with different theoretical backgrounds and with extensive experience in using video analysis in the study of collaboration presented their analysis and findings of a pre-selected segment of videotaped activity. |
| [3] | For the integration of ethnographic and interactional analysis see e.g. Moerman 1988 and Hopper 1990/1991. |
| [4] | Another approach to interaction analysis with influences from conversation analysis and ethnomethodology is institutional talk (e.g. Drew & Heritage 1992) which, however, did not seem suitable for my purposes as it was too focussed on the interaction of practitioners/professionals and lay persons in the borders of institutions whereas my analyses were of professionals’ peer-talk deep within institutions. |
| [5] | The terms ‘emic’ and ‘etic’ in anthropology were originally introduced by the linguist, Kenneth Pike, who coined them using the suffixes of the familiar categories in linguistic analysis: phonemic and phonetic. These terms distinguished sound structure, as analysed by a linguist (phonetics) from the meanings of the sounds to the native speaker (phonemics). |