Kathleen A. Carter

User-tailorable systems: pressing the issues with buttons

It is impossible to design systems which are appropriate for all users and all situations. We believe that a useful technique is to have end users tailor their systems to match their personal work practices. This requires not only systems which can be tailored, but a culture within which users feel in control of the system and in which tailoring is the norm. In a two-pronged research project we have worked closely with a group of users to develop a system to support tailoring and to help the users evolve a “tailoring culture”. This has resulted in a flexible system based around the use of distributed on-screen Buttons to support a range of tailoring techniques.

Realizing a video environment: EuroPARC's RAVE system

At EuroPARC, we have been exploring ways to allow physically separated colleagues to work together effectively and naturally. In this paper, we briefly discuss several examples of our work in the context of three themes that have emerged: the need to support the full range of shared work; the desire to ensure privacy without giving up unobtrusive awareness; and the possibility of creating systems which blur the boundaries between people, technologies and the everyday world.

Participatory design in Britain and North America: responses to the “Scandinavian Challenge”

It has been argued that the successes of participatory design in the Scandinavian countries will be difficult to reproduce in North America or Britain, because of significant differences in labor, legislative, and workplace environments. This panel is composed of people actively pursuing participatory design in corporations outside of Scandinavia. We focus on what accommodation(s) were required in participatory design techniques to meet the needs of our environments — and on what accommodations occurred in our environments in response to experiences with participatory design. INTRODUCTION The “Scandinavian Challenge,” as proposed by Bjerknes, Ehn, and Kyng [2], is a set of perspectives and practices for increasing the role of users as active participants in the process through which computer artifacts are designed that have impact on the users’ lives in and out of the workplace. This work has come to influence the SIGCHI community through the work of B@lkeret al. [5, 6], Ehn and Kyng [9, 10, 11], and Thoresen [21], and commentaries by Suchman [20] and by Grudin [14], as well as PDC’90 [19] and panel sessions at several conferences. It has been argued that the workplace democracy themes of the Scandinavian challenge are difficult — or even impossible— to carry out in corporate or institutional environments that are not characterized by high unionization, by legislative protection of the users’ roles in system design, or by a relatively small-scale, highly integrated software development process. However, several projects outside of the Scandinavian countries have begun to use participatory design techniques —e.g., Blomberg [3,4], DykstraandCarasik [7, 8], MacLean, Carter, Lovstrand, and Moran [16], Muller [17, 18,22], and in some ways Bennett et al [ 1], These projects argue for the feasibility of democmtic design procedures in apparently “hostile” environments. They also open questions of mutual accommodation between participatory design procedures and corporate/ institutional culture. This panel session brings together participatory design work that is being conducted in various settings outside of Scandinavia. Each panelist emphasizes how those settings have influenced the participatory design paradigm, and how participatory design has influenced the work setting. JEANEllE L. BLOMBERG: IMPROVISING TECHNIQUES TO ACHIEVE PARTICIPATORY DESIGN GOALS: EVERYONES CHALLENGE In discussing the relevance of ethnographic field methods for the design of new technology with practitioners from the Scandinavian school of participatory design, it became apparent that ethnography and participatory design shared a similar orientation. Specifically, ethnographic field methods require an improvisational style of work [3], where adjustments are made in strategy and appropriate techniques as more is learned about the particular situation at hand. Similarly there is an improvisational quality to much of the Scandinavian work in participatory design. There is a recognition that no two situations are alike. Each situation reqttiresacreative weaving of skills, technologies, people, organizations, and opportunities for change. This leads to the question: If no two situations are alike, each requiring a unique way of doing things, then in what sense can we talk about a participatory design approach or for that matter about adapting the “Scandinavian Approach” to the North American context? What isit that unites those of us who identify ourselves aspracticingparticipatory design— whether in Scandinavia or North America? Perhaps what we should be focusing on is not a set of techniques, a list of necessary conditions, or a collection of appropriate technologies, but instead a commitment to a few basic goals: improving the quality of the working lives of those for whom we design technologies, involving the users in the coltaborat.ivc development of new technologies, and providing opportunities to iterate the design in response to the every&y requirements of the work situation [4]. Our techniques and strategies then will reflect the different contexts in which the technology develop-

Keeping people apart

This paper reports findings of research into the nature of collaboration in a design company. Observations of the shared work of two groups, architects and building services engineers, are discussed and the role of meetings considered. It will be argued that the achievement of ultimate ends in this organisation is through a division of labour involving discrete working practices. Consequently, technology that brings people together is inappropriate and could unsettle working harmony. This finding is not offered as a discovery but as a reminder: CSCW is in part about sensitivity to social and organisational issues in system design and evaluation. However, in the pursuit innovative technology, those sensitivities can often be lost.