sengers at cs.cornell.edu, kab18 | sd256 | jofish at cornell.edu As computing moves into every aspect of our daily lives, the values and assumptions that underlie our technical practices may unwittingly be propagated throughout our culture. Drawing on existing critical approaches in computing, we argue that reflection on unconscious values embedded in computing and the practices that it supports can and should be a core principle of technology design. Building on a growing body of work in critical computing, reflective design combines analysis of the ways in which technologies reflect and perpetuate unconscious cultural assumptions, with design, building, and evaluation of new computing devices that reflect alternative possibilities. We illustrate this approach through two design case studies.

The design of commercial products that are intended to serve millions of people has been a challenge for collaborative approaches. The creation and use of fictional users, concrete representations commonly referred to as ‘personas’, is a relatively new interaction design technique. It is not without problems and can be used inappropriately, but based on experience and analysis it has extraordinary potential. Not only can it be a powerful tool for true participation in design, it also forces designers to consider social and political aspects of design that otherwise often go unexamined.

Contemporary business process systems are built to automate routine procedures. Automation demands well-understood domains, repetitive processes, clear organisational roles, an established terminology, and predefined plans. Knowledge work is not like that. Plans for knowledge intensive processes are elaborated and reinterpreted as the work progresses. Interactive process models are created and updated by the project participants to reflect evolving plans. The execution of such models is controlled by users and only partially automated. An interactive process system should - Enable modelling by end users, - Integrate support for ad-hoc and routine work, - Dynamically customise functionality and interfaces, and - Integrate learning and knowledge management in everyday work.

ry design interventions into technology projects in the clinic of radiology. The adopted theoretical attitude of interweaving construction and reconstruction necessitates questioning and reconfiguring some of the taken-for-granted assumptions of disciplinary dichotomies and conventional frames of reference both with regard to ethnographic traditions focused on current practices as well as technology-centered and future-oriented system design. Radiology, with its ongoing and complex transition from film-based to digitally mediated work, has provided the concrete setting for thinking about the relations between researcher, designer and work practice practitioner in an attempt to find ways in which to sensitise system design towards everyday work practice. Establishing the relevance between ethnographic findings of work and design specifications requires a reformulation of work practice that appreciates the everyday fluency of work practice and recognises the endogenous change for the ne

Abstract—Understanding how to implement software process improvement (SPI) successfully is arguably the most challenging issue facing the SPI field today. The SPI literature contains many case studies of successful companies and descriptions of their SPI programs. However, the research efforts to date are limited and inconclusive and without adequate theoretical and psychometric justification. This paper extends and integrates models from prior research by performing an empirical investigation of the key factors for success in SPI. A quantitative survey of 120 software organizations was designed to test the conceptual model and hypotheses of the study. The results indicate that success depends critically on six organizational factors, which explained more than 50 percent of the variance in the outcome variable. The main contribution of the paper is to increase the understanding of the influence of organizational issues by empirically showing that they are at least as important as technology for succeeding with SPI and, thus, to provide researchers and practitioners with important new insights regarding the critical factors of success in SPI.

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One of the central concepts in human-computer interaction (HCI) is usability. Interestingly, in spite of its brief history as a scientific and applied discipline, HCI has already produced several different views on usability. These views are, in turn, interrelated with how research and systems development are seen. This paper identifies five different perspectives on usability: general theory, usability engineering, subjectivity, flexibility and sociality. Their interrelations and implications for usability-oriented systems development are discussed.

This paper follows recent science studies in theorizing information technologies as socio-material configurations, aligned into more and less durable forms. The study of how new technologies emerge shifts, on this view, from a focus on invention to an interest in ongoing practices of assembly, demonstration, and performance. This view is developed in relation to the case of the ‘prototype’, an exploratory technology designed to effect alignment between the multiple interests and working practices of technology research and development, and sites of technologies-in-use. In so far as it is successful, the prototype works as an exemplary artefact that is at once intelligibly familiar to the actors involved, and recognizably new.

This work is about supporting user interface design by means of explicit design representations, in particular models.

Information exploration involves building bridges between document space (the realm of information artifacts, ranging from books to e-mail to bibliographic citations) and concept space (the context and knowledge required to interpret documents). This dissertation proposes an interactive, structure-mediated approach to exploring information in a heteroge- neous, distributed environment---such as a digital library. It presents a conceptual model for information exploration, a system (SenseMaker) that embodies the proposed model, and several evaluative user studies. Two principles form the crux of our structure-mediated conceptual model, which supports users in moving back and forth between document space and concept space: . Users should be able to build document-based structures for document collections by interactively organizing them around contextual dimensions (e.g., author). These higher-level structures reveal key concepts (e.g., specific authors). . Users should be able to cre...