We analyze a large-scale custom software effort, the Worm Community system (WCS), a collaborative system designed for a geographically dispersed community of geneticists. There were complex challenges in creating this infrastructural tool, ranging from simple lack of resources to complex organizational and intellectual communication failures and tradeoffs. Despite high user satisfaction with the system and interface, and extensive user needs assessment, feedback and analysis, many users experienced difficulties in signing on and use. The study was conducted during a time of unprecedented growth in the Internet and its utilities (1991-1994), and many respondents turned to the World Wide Web for their information exchange. Using Bateson’s model of levels of learning, we analyze the levels of infrastructural complexity involved in system access and designeruser communication. We analyze the connection between systems development aimed at supporting specific forms of collaborative knowledge work, local organizational transformation, and large-scale infrastructural change.

Abstract. This article discusses the integration of work practice and system design. By scrutinising the unfolding discourse of workshop participants the co-construction of work practice issues as relevant design considerations is described. Through a mutual exploration of ethnography and participatory design the contributing constituents to the co-construction process are identified and put forward as elements in the integration of ‘systemic analysis ’ and ‘appreciative intervention’. The systemic analysis proposes collaboratively grounding the emergent understandings on an inductive and iterative analysis of actual technologically mediated work practice. The appreciative intervention, in turn, calls for envisioning images of future system and context through a recognition of presence and change intertwined in the existing ways of working. The identified elements are joined into three dimensions of interplay, namely the analytic distance, the horizon of work practice transformations and the situated generalisations, which reformulate new conceptualisations of what the integration of work practice and participatory system design is all about. It is suggested that these dimensions together with practitioner participation call into question some of the taken-for-granted assumptions and commonly forwarded intractable disciplinary dichotomies and contribute more generally to bridging work practice and participatory design.

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 article discusses the integration of work practice and system design. By scrutinising the unfolding discourse of workshop participants the co-construction of work practice issues as relevant design considerations is described. Through a mutual exploration of ethnography and participatory design the contributing constituents to the co-construction process are identified and put forward as elements in the integration of ‘systemic analysis ’ and ‘appreciative intervention’. The systemic analysis proposes collaboratively grounding the emergent understandings on an inductive and iterative analysis of actual technologically mediated work practice. The appreciative intervention, in turn, calls for envisioning images of future system and context through a recognition of presence and change intertwined in the existing ways of working. The identified elements are joined into three dimensions of interplay, namely the analytic distance, the horizon of work practice transformations and the situated generalisations, which reformulate new conceptualisations of what the integration of work practice and participatory system design is all about. It is suggested that these dimensions together with practitioner participation call into question some of the taken-for-granted assumptions and commonly forwarded intractable disciplinary dichotomies and contribute more generally to bridging work practice and participatory design.

Abstract: As a still-emerging interdisciplinary field of research and practice, CSCL has an opportunity to incorporate the full power of ethnographic analysis into its understanding and scaffolding of collaborative learning. By challenging common sense understandings and revealing cultural assumptions embedded in system designs, the work of Diana Forsythe exemplifies the promise and peril of critical ethnography. Within CSCL several challenges must be confronted, including: the intensifying attacks on the value of qualitative educational research; the perception that ethnography is merely a methodology that any researcher can use regardless of context; and the pervasive, generally unacknowledged influence of positivism. The inextricable, reciprocal connections between method and theory necessitate an approach to ethnographic analysis that is explicitly grounded in social theory. Four strands of current theory and practice (design ethnography, activity theory, ethnomethodology, and situated learning) could all contribute to the development of a critical ethnography of—and for—CSCL. Exemplary Ethnography Anthropologist Diana Forsythe’s (2001) Studying Those Who Study Us: An Anthropologist in the World of Artificial Intelligence, provides an excellent introduction to the goals, concerns, and challenges of critical