Lucy Suchman

Office procedure as practical action: models of work and system design

The design of office technology relies upon underlying conceptions of human organization and action. The goal of building office information systems requires a representation of office work and its relevant objects. The concern of this paper is that although system designers recognize the centrality of procedural tasks in the office, they tend to ignore the actual work involved in accomplishing those tasks. A perspicuous instance of work in an accounting office is used to recommend a new line of research into the practical problems of office work, and to suggest preliminary implications of that research for office systems design.

Interactional Troubles in Face-to-Face Survey Interviews

For statistically based social science, survey research is the principal means of obtaining data about the social world. The interview from this point of view is a standardized data-collection procedure that uses a questionnaire as its instrument of measurement; however, the interview is an essentially interactional event as well. From the moment that the interviewer sits down across from the respondent and begins to talk, the survey interview assumes and relies on a wealth of conventions and resources from ordinary conversation. At the same time, the concern with standardized procedures and the statistical notion of error that standardization is intended to address impose constraints on the survey interview that make it significantly different from ordinary conversation. Those constraints have consequences for both the way the interview proceeds and the data that it produces. In this article we look at the survey interview as a standardized procedure that relies on, but also suppresses, crucial elements of ordinary conversation. Our analysis is based on videotapes of five special interviews, three using the General Social Survey (GSS) and two using the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS). The videotapes were made for research purposes in conjunction with the Seminar on Cognitive Aspects of Survey Methodology sponsored by the Committee on National Statistics of the Commission on Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education of the National Research Council. [For a report on that seminar see Jabine, Straf, Tanur, and Tourangeau (1984).] They show interviews with volunteer respondents. Trained U.S. Census Bureau interviewers were hired by the committee to administer the NHIS questionnaire as they would for the survey; similarly, trained interviewers administered the GSS questionnaires. These particular interviews, however, were not part of the respective surveys. Our analysis of the videotapes was carried out during the summer of 1986, funded by the Committee on Cognition and Survey Research of the Social Science Research Council and by Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. We take the

Working relations of technology production and use

This paper explores the relevance of recent feminist reconstructions of objectivity for the development of alternative visions of technology production and use. I take as my starting place the working relations that make up the design and use of technical systems. Working relations are understood as networks or webs of connections that sustain the visible and invisible work required to construct coherent technologies and put them into use. I outline the boundaries that characterize current relations of development and use, and the boundary crossings required to transform them. Three contrasting premises for design-the view from nowhere, detached engagement, and located accountability — are taken to represent incommensurate alternatives for a politics of professional design. From the position of located accountability, I close by sketching aspects of what a feminist politics and associated practices of system development could be.

Reconstructing Technologies as Social Practice

This article provides an overview of a research program developed over the past 20 years to explore relations between everyday practices and technology design and use. The studies highlighted reflect three interrelated lines of inquiry: (a) critical analyses of technical discourses and practices, (b) ethnographies of work and technologies-in-use, and (c) design interventions. Starting from the premise that technologies can be assessed only in their relations to the sites of their production and use, the authors reconstruct technologies as social practice. A central problem for the design of artifacts then becomes their relation to the environments of their intended use. Through ethnographies of the social world, the analyses focus on just how social/material specificities are assembled together to comprise our everyday experience.

Centers of Coordination: A Case and Some Themes

This chapter identifies a class of worksites characterizable in terms of participants’ ongoing orientation to problems of space and time, involving the deployment of people and equipment across distances according either to a timetable or to the emergent requirements of a time-critical situation. To meet simultaneous requirements of mobility and control, centers of coordination must function as centers to which participants distributed in space can orient, and which at any given moment they know how to find. At the same time, to coordinate activities distributed in space and time, personnel within the site must somehow have access to the situation of co-workers in other locations. One job of technologies in such settings is to meet these requirements through the reconfiguration of relevant spatial and temporal relations. This general characterization is explored through ethnographic materials from an investigation of the work of airline ground operations at a metropolitan airport on the west coast of the United States.

Practice-Based Design of Information Systems: Notes from the Hyperdeveloped World

This paper offers reflections on information systems design based in everyday practices. Drawing on experience in what I name the hyperdeveloped world of industrial research and development in the United States, I outline a series of concerns, organized under the themes of information flows, local improvisations and work practices. I then offer a set of alternative understandings of change and innovation that underwrite a practice-based design approach. These include a view of innovation as indigenous to technologiesin-use, an emphasis on the investments needed to create sustainable change, and an orientation to artful integration as an objective for information systems design.

Supporting collaboration in notecards

This paper describes a project underway to investigate computer support for collaboration. In particular, we focus on experience with and extensions to NoteCards, a hypertext-based idea structuring system. The forms of collaboration discussed include draft-passing, simultaneous sharing and online presentations. The requirement that mutual intelligibility be maintained between collaborators leads to the need for support of annotative and procedural as well as substantive activities.

Do categories have politics? the language/action perspective reconsidered

Drawing on writings within the CSCW community and on recent social theory, this paper proposes that the adoption of speech act theory as a foundation for system design carries with it an agenda of discipline and control over organization members actions. I begin with a brief review of the language/action perspective introduced by Winograd, Flores and their colleagues, focusing in particular on the categorization of speakers intent. I then turn to some observations on the politics of categorization and, with that framework as background, consider the attempt, through THE COORDINATOR, to implement a technological system for intention-accounting within organizations. Finally, I suggest the implications of the analysis presented in the paper for the politics of CSCW systems design. No idea is more provocative in controversies about technology and society than the notion that technical things have political qualities. At issue is the claim that machines, structures, and systems of modern material culture can be accurately judged not only for their contributions to efficiency and productivity... but also for the ways in which they can embody specific forms of power and authority. Winner 1986, p. 19. By teaching people an ontology of linguistic action, grounded in simple, universal distinctions such as those of requesting and promising, we find that they become more aware of these distinctions in their everyday work and life situations. They can simplify their dealings with others, reduce time and effort spent in conversations that do not result in action, and generally manage actions in a less panicked, confused atmosphere. Flores et al 1988, p. 158. The world has always been in the middle of things, in unruly and practical conversation, full of action and structured by a startling array of actants and of networking and unequal collectives ... The shape of my amodern history will have a different geometry, not of progress, but of permanent and multi-patterned interaction through which lives and worlds get built, human and unhuman. Haraway 1991, p. 11.

Embodied Practices of Engineering Work

This article explores relationships between activity theoretic and ethnomethodological studies of work and its objects, with specific reference to the case of design practices in civil engineering. My starting point is the shared interest of activity theory and ethnomethodology in the place of artifacts in everyday working practice. I review briefly some basic premises of first ethnomethodological, then activity theoretic studies of artifacts-in-use. I then offer a preliminary account of computer-aided and paper-based design work in civil engineering, informed by both perspectives. My account emphasizes the multiplicity of media and associated objects involved in the work of engineering on the one hand, and their integration in practice into a coherent field of action on the other. The article concludes by returning to the question of relationships between ethnomethodology and activity theory, focusing on differences in their respective stances toward theory itself.

Representations of work

more and less explicit assumptions about the work that is to be done with it. Standard system development methods prescribe representational techniques aimed at rendering working practices into forms narrowly relevant to design concerns. Recent issues of Communications dedicated to participatory design (June 1993), social computing (January 1994), and requirements gathering (May 1995) evidence a growing interest among the ACM readership in the problem of how to expand our understandings, as designers, of the environments and activities of system use. This special section continues that discussion, with a particular emphasis on critical questions and new approaches to representing work for purposes of design. Morten Kyng, best known as a founding figure in cooperative design approaches to system development. In “Making Representations Work,” Kyng views representations as tools developed to depict both current and future work practices, as well as associated system design possibilities. He argues that the adequacy of representations as design tools turns on their effectiveness in providing not only professional system designers but also those whose work is represented with insights into emerging designs. Kyng’s emphasis on end-user cooperation in system design will likely strike many readers as an unrealistically stringent requirement, not applicable in cases where systems are designed for unknown populations of prospective users. But it is arguable that computer-based systems intended to serve as the primary tools for some domain of work must eventually be tailored to meet the specific requirements of that domain. Whether the work is done by vendors, systems integrators, third-party or local developers, ultimately the need for customization, and for the representational resources and cooperative design practices that Kyng advocates, becomes relevant. The leading characteristics of the resources and practices that Kyng describes are the diversity of materials used (graphical mock-ups, textual narratives, computer-based prototypes) and the partiality and openness of the representational forms. While the latter characteristics make the design artifacts Kyng describes dynamic and flexible, they also mean that the intelligibility and usefulness of the artifacts turns on their interpretation with reference to knowledges, interests, and experiences that the artifacts evoke but that are not directly represented by them. L u c y S u c h m a n G u e s t E d i t o r