Abstract: We have considered the role of workplace studies from the CSCW literature which are intended to inform system design and implementation. We present a critique of these studies, categorised according to which phase of the design process they most inform, and discuss the tensions between providing explanatory accounts and usable design recommendations, the pressures on fieldworkers to provide both, the purposes different approaches serve, and the transition from fieldwork to system design.

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...

Domain-oriented design environments are cooperative problem-solving systems that support designers in complex design tasks. In this paper we present the facilities and architecture of Argo, a domain-oriented design environment for software architecture. Argo’s architecture is motivated by the desire to achieve reuse and extensibility of the design environment. It separates domain-neutral code from domain-oriented code, which is distributed among intelligent design materials as opposed to being centralized in the design environment. Argo’s facilities are motivated by the observed cognitive needs of designers. These facilities extend previous work in design environments to support reflection-in-action, opportunistic design, and comprehension and problem-solving. Keywords: Domain-oriented design environments, critics, software architectures, architectural styles, humancomputer interaction, human cognitive skills.

ii Computer software has become increasingly complex as advances in technology permit substantially more functionality to be provided to the user, a phenomenon which has led some people to describe today’s heavily featured software as “bloated”. Despite the prevalence of this trend, the impact of complexity on the user has received little attention in the research community. This dissertation describes research that addresses that problem. Study One, a comprehensive study that looked at the experience of 53 users of Microsoft Word, showed that while many users would like to have unused functions “tucked away”, most users were uncomfortable with the complete removal of unused functions. These findings suggested personalization as a promising direction for design and led to our Pilot Study which evaluated a multiple-interfaces prototype for Microsoft Word, where one of the interfaces was personalized to the user’s individual needs. Results from that informal Wizard-of-Oz evaluation with 4 participants encouraged refinement of our prototype. Study Two, a field study that included 20 participants, tested the effects of different interface

Many organisations need to respond quickly to change and their workers need to regularly develop new knowledge and skills. The prevailing approach to meeting these demands is on-the-job training, but this is known to be highly ineffective, cause stress and devalue workplace autonomy. Conversely, organisational learning is a process through which workers learn gradually in the work context through experience, reflection on work practice and collaboration with colleagues. Our approach aims to support and enhance organisational learning around enriched work representations. Work representations are tools and documents used to support collaborative working and learning. These are enriched through associations with formal knowledge models and informal discourse. The work representations, informal discourse and associated knowledge models together form on organisational memory from which knowledge can be later retrieved. Our methodological approach to supporting organisational learning is drawn from three industrial case studies concerned with machine maintenance, team planning and hotline support. The methodology encompasses development and design activities, a description of the roles and duties required to sustain the long term use of the tools, and applicability criteria outlining the kind of organisations that can benefit from this approach.

As digital video is manipulated by increasingly powerful computers, many new applications are becoming viable. This report investigates the programming language aspects of controlling such video applications. It presents the design, implementation, and use of PAVES, a direct manipulation system that combines aspects of visualization and multimedia systems to form an interactive video programming environment. PAVES is novel in the degree to which it emphasizes liveness and in its approach to extensibility. It extends the VuSystem media processing toolkit through flow graph and textual programming windows. Flow graph windows are used to control the media processing component of applications. Textual programming windows are used to issue interpreted commands and view source code. They work together to allow the user to combine methods as needed. While developing PAVES, I confronted a number of programming language issues related to the support of multiple program representations. I defined a cooperative model for translating across these representations and implemented the model by leveraging a presentation-style synchronization approach and Object Tcl, an object-oriented extension to the Tcl language.

Abstract. The field of molecular biology is in a remarkably rapid period of change, as the genome sequencing projects and new experimental technologies have generated an explosion of data To analyze and draw insights from the vast amounts of information, biologists use a new generation of bioinformatics software tools, often working closely with mathematicians and computer scientists There are elements of both collision and convergence in these interdisciplinary encounters We conducted user studies with biologists engaged in investigating the molecular basis of disease. We describe several issues that arise in this collision/convergence of disciplines, drawing on the notion of boundary objects m-the-makmg. We provide recommendations on building technology for people whose work now sits at the crossroads of diverse and rapidly changing scientific fields.

This paper presents an approach to support computer-aided conceptual design of mechatronic assemblies in a collaborative, multi-user environment. We describe a system, Conceptual Understanding and Prototyping (CUP), that allows a team of design engineers, collaborating over the Internet, to develop a high-level structure-function-behavior (S-B-F) description of an assembly in a VRML-based virtual environment. Our goal is to enable users to navigate intricate product data management (PDM) and case-based design knowledge-bases, providing the ability to perform design at conceptual level and have intelligent CAD tools that can draw on details from large repositories of previously archived designs. This work furthers research efforts in computer support for collaborative design activities---drawing on work in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Computer Supported Collaborative Work (CSCW). We envision CUP to be a network interface to next-generation of engineering PDM systems and CAD dat...

this paper is structured as follows. The next two sections describe the design of the document enrichment architecture. Section two describes the identification and redesign of shared documents to capture informal knowledge. Section three describes the development of the underlying formal knowledge structure. Section four describes the evolution of the organisational memory. Section five discusses the applicability of the approach. 2. Characterizing shared documents

Several studies show that despite experience, many users with basic command knowledge do not progress to an efficient use of complex computer applications. These studies suggest that knowledge of tasks and knowledge of tools are insufficient to lead users to become efficient. To address this problem, we argue that users also need to learn strategies in the intermediate layers of knowledge lying between tasks and tools. These strategies are (a) efficient because they exploit specific powers of computers, (b) difficult to acquire because they are suggested by neither tasks nor tools, and (c) general in nature having wide applicability. The above characteristics are first demonstrated in the context of aggregation strategies that exploit the iterative power of computers. A cognitive analysis of a real-world task reveals that even though such aggregation strategies can have large effects on task time, errors, and on the quality of the final product, they are not often used by even experienced users. We identify other strategies beyond aggregation that can be efficient and useful across computer applications and show how they were used to develop a new approach to train-Suresh Bhavnani specializes in computational design and human–computer interaction with a research focus on the identification, acquisition, and performance of efficient strategies to use complex computer systems; he is assistant professor at the School of Information in the University of Michigan. Bonnie John is an engineer and psychologist researching methods for usable systems design, especially computational models of human performance; she is an associate