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In this paper, we look at how people working in a governmental labor inspection agency tailor their shared PC environment. Starting with standard off-the-shelf software, the tailors adapt that software to the particular workplace in which they are embedded, at the same time that they modify and extend the practices of that workplace. Over time, their adaptations and the tailoring processes themselves become structured and systematized within the organization. This tendency toward systematization is in part a response to the requirement that the results of tailoring be sharable across groups of users. Our study focuses on several dimensions of the work of tailoring: construction, organizational change, learning, and politics. We draw two kinds of lessons for system development: how better to support the work of tailors, and how system developers can learn from and cooperate with tailors. KEYWORDS: Tailoring, customization, emergent use of standard technology, development and use of sha...

Recent years have seen a shift in perception of the nature of HCI and interactive systems. As interface work has increasingly become a focus of attention for the social sciences, we have expanded our appreciation of the importance of issues such as work practice, adaptation, and evolution in interactive systems. The reorientation in our view of interactive systems has been accompanied by a call for a new model of design centered around user needs and participation. This article argues that a new process of design is not enough and that the new view necessitates a similar reorientation in the structure of the systems we build. It outlines some requirements for systems that support a deeper conception of interaction and argues that the traditional system design techniques are not suited to creating such systems. Finally, using examples from ongoing work in the design of an open toolkit for collaborative applications, it illustrates how the principles of computational reflection and metaobject protocols can lead us toward a new model based on open abstraction that holds great promise in addressing these issues.

Co-adaptive phenomena are defined as those in which the environment affects human behavior and at the same time, human behavior affects the environment. Such phenomena pose theoretical and methodological challenges and are difficult to study in traditional ways. However, some aspects of the interaction between people and technology only make sense when such phenomena are taken into account. In this dissertation, I postulate that the use of information technology is a coadaptive phenomenon. I also argue that customizable software provides a particularly good testbed for studying co-adaptation because individual patterns of use are encoded and continue to influence user behavior over time. The possible customizations are constrained by the design of the software but may also be modified by users in unanticipated ways, as they appropriate the software for their own purposes. Because customization patterns are recorded in files that can be shared among users, these customizations may act ...

Interfaces to databases have traditionally been designed as single-user systems that hide other users and their activity. This paper aims to show that collaboration is an important aspect of searching online information stores that requires explicit computerised support. The claim is made that a truly user-centred system must acknowledge and support collaborative interactions between users. Collaborative working implies a need to share information: both the search product and the search process. Searches need not be restricted to inanimate resources but people can also search for other people. The ARIADNE system is introduced as an example of computerised support for collaboration between browsers. A number of systems offering varied approaches to supporting collaboration are surveyed and a structure for analysing the various aspects of collaboration is applied.

In contrast to the common view of spreadsheets as “single-user ” programs, we have found that spreadsheets offer surprisingly strong support for cooperative development of a wide variety of applications. Ethnographic interviews with spreadsheet users showed that nearly all of the spreadsheets used in the work environments studied were the result of collaborative work by people with different levels of programming and domain expertise. Cooperation among spreadsheet users was spontaneous and casual; users activated existing informal social networks to initiate collaboration.

Corporate databases increasingly are being viewed as potentially rich sources of new and valuable knowledge. Various approaches to"discovering" or "mining " such knowledge have been proposed. Here we identify an important and previously ignored discovery task, which we call data archaeology. Data archaeology is a skilled human task, in which the knowledge sought depends on the goals of the analyst, cannot be specified in advance, and emerges only through an iterative process of data segmentation and analysis. We describe a system that supports the data archaeologist with a natural, objectoriented representation of an application domain, a powerful query language and database translation routines, and an easy-to-use and flexible user interface that supports interactive exploration. A formal knowledge representation system provides the core technology that facilitates database integration, querying, and the reuse of queries and query results. Keywords: data archaeology, knowledge discov...

Continuous visual feedback is becoming a common feature in direct-manipulation programming systems of all kinds--from demonstrational macro builders to spreadsheet packages to visual programming languages featuring direct manipulation. But does continuous visual feedback actually help in the domain of programming? There has been little investigation of this question, and what evidence there is from related domains points in conflicting directions. To advance what is known about this issue, we conducted an empirical study to determine whether the inclusion of continuous visual feedback into a direct-manipulation programming system helps with one particular task: debugging. Our results were that although continuous visual feedback did not significantly help with debugging in general, it did significantly help with debugging in some circumstances. Our results also indicate three factors that may help determine those circumstances. Keywords Direct manipulation, debugging, end-user progra...

The design of tailorable systems is an important issue for fields of application which are characterized by differentiation and dynamics. We show how tailorability can be combined with approaches of evolutionary and participative software-engineering and discuss some conceptual problems arising from this approach. Moreover, we present two case studies on how to design tailorable functionality in a groupware development project.

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