Manuel Zacklad

Information Infrastructures for Distributed Collective Practices

The history of this special issue of the CSCW Journal goes back to 1997 and a book entitled ‘‘Social Science, Technical Systems and Cooperative Work: Beyond the Great Divide’’ (Bowker et al., 1997). The book concluded that an increasing number of researchers were electing to take up residence in the great divide in order to produce systems which were organizationally and socially sensitive. After more than two decades of effort, the early war stories of CSCW pitting the human, emotion-laden, contingent context of cooperative work (CW) against the formal, rational and potentially universal character of computer support (CS) were losing their appeal. Social scientists (primarily from sociology and anthropology; and attached either to research laboratories like PARC or universities) and computer and information scientists (primarily from software development, requirements engineering and artificial intelligence) had created a new form of partnership. Three conditions were evoked in order to explain the emergence of this new partnership (Turner, 1997). The first was that the CSCW community had largely moved away from a concern with normative social scientific questions. For example, efforts aimed at understanding how human and technical systems come together in computing systems were, in the 1960s, strongly anchored in concerns about automation (e.g., ‘‘deskilling,’’ stratification and job loss) but, by the middle of the 1990s, this concern had become a plank of accepted CSCW practice. No member of the CSCW community now doubts that the goal of in-depth investigations of the workplace is to develop easier-to-use systems that enhance working conditions rather than impoverishing them. To the

Documentarisation Processes in Documents for Action (DofA): The Status of Annotations and Associated Cooperation Technologies

In this paper, we focus on situations where documents serve to coordinate the work of a distributed collective engaged in common goal-directed activities. After defining the concept of semiotic products as resulting from symbolic communicational transactions, we present some coordination strategies which can be used to compensate for the spatio-socio-temporal distribution typical of these transactions. Among these strategies, it is proposed to study in detail the documentarisation strategy, which makes the material substrate mediating the transactions relatively durable and endows it with attributes making its further use possible. In our study of documentarisation processes, several novel concepts are introduced and used to describe Documents for Action (DofA), their characteristics and the conditions that should be respected for correctly annotating them.

Project Memory in Design

Learning from past projects allows designers to avoid past errors and solve problems. A number of methods define techniques to memorize lessons and experiences from projects. We present in this chapter an overview of these methods by emphasizing their main contributions and their critical points.

Expérimentation d'une approche coopérative et multipoint de vue de la construction et de l'exploitation de catalogues commerciaux « actifs »

Les approches du web Semantique apparaissent prometteuses pour mieux maitriser l’organisation de grands ensembles de documents numeriques commerciaux. Nous proposons pour cela la notion de catalogue commercial « actif », construit et exploite a partir d’une multiplicite de points de vue. Notre hypothese est que pour ce type de collection de documents electroniques, l’utilisation de structures en reseaux semantiques, en s’appuyant sur des approches d’ingenierie des connaissances, donne de meilleurs resultats par rapport aux systemes a classifications monopoint de vue.

Rationalisation of decision-making processes in design teams with a new formalism of design rationale

More and more frequently, the organisation of design fits into a project organisation where different designers have to cooperate with flexibility and reactivity. In order to help these cooperative design processes, we have to respond to new types of needs: a relatively unformalised coordination that requires permanent mutual adjustment, the fact that members of the team are geographically distant, the difficulty of building a shared reference via design documents and technical and organisational decisions that structure the project. In order to provide computer support for these needs, asynchronous Group Ware is often recommended. However, the efficiency of these tools depends on the models that structure the work processes and the knowledge exchanged. In this paper, we present ABRICo, a new Design Rationale formalism that permits the recording of cooperative decision-making processes in complex design situations. We describe the formalism and explain how we intend to use it to specify cooperative design tools usable via an Intranet for computing projects.