Scandinavian Design: On Participation and Skill

In Scandinavia we have for two decades been concerned with participation and skill in the design and use of computer-based systems. Collaboration between researchers and trade unions on this theme, starting with the pioneering work of Kristen Nygaard and the Norwegian Metal Workers’ Union, and including leading projects like DEMOS and UTOPIA, has been based on a strong commitment to the idea of industrial democracy. This kind of politically significant, interdisciplinary, and action-oriented research on resources and control in the processes of design and use has contributed to what is often viewed abroad as a distinctively Scandinavian approach to systems design. This Scandinavian approach might be called a work-oriented design approach. Democratic participation and skill enhancement, and not only productivity and product quality, are themselves considered objective of design. [Based on the two research projects, DEMOS and UTOPIA, I have elaborated this approach in detail in Work-Oriented Design of Computer Artifacts (1989). This paper is based on that work.] Two important features of participatory design shape its trajectory as a design strategy. The political one is obvious. Participatory design raises questions of democracy, power, and control in the workplace. In this sense it is a deeply controversial issue, especially from a management point of view. The other major feature is technical—its promise that the participation of skilled users in the design process can contribute importantly to successful design and high-quality products. Some experiences, perhaps most developed in Scandinavia, support this prediction and contribute to the growing interest in participatory design in the United States and other countries; by contrast, “expert” design strategies have too often turned out to be failures in terms of the usability of the resulting systems. These two features together suggest that there should be a strong link between the skill and product quality aspect of user participation and the democracy and control aspect, or else participatory design will be a deeply controversial issue from the point of view of the employees and trade unions. The trade-union-oriented democracy aspect of skill and participation in design is discussed in the first part of the chapter.

Designing Effective Systems: A Tool Approach

Successfully designing large, complex systems requires including people and organization as elements in the system. Many current design approaches consider only the system’s technical aspects. We need an expanded approach to system design that incorporates the insights from each of three disciplines: system engineering, human factors, and organizational design. Only in this way can we address the dynamics of technology, people, and organizations in a single, coherent approach. The need for a new design strategy is magnified by the accelerating rate of change in the business and technology environment. System design efforts are often stymied by the fact that manufacturing businesses have constantly changing needs and requirements. Companies constantly need to shift the balance between quality, cost, and manufacturing capacity to meet evolving market goals. Moreover, these operations have to consider competitive pressures for the control of cost and schedule, rapidly changing product technology, changes in worker demographics, worker skill, and education, and regulatory pressures. The mission of a plant changes over time. Based on the notion that truly effective systems must offer tools for skilled work, our approach to system design offers an alternative to standard automation strategies, one better able to deal with this context of change. Systems designed as tools for skilled work can help organizations take full advantage of the investment they have already made in people, preserve the tacit knowledge and judgment that cannot be automated, and enable workers to solve problems and improve operations. These tools can help to expand the way existing data are used to help identify and solve problems. They can optimize the effectiveness of existing production processes. They do not constrain the workers by demanding that they follow strictly prescribed sequences, but instead enhance the workers’ ability to respond quickly and effectively to constantly changing combinations of events, to allocate and coordinate limited human resources and materials, and to work together more effectively through ongoing, company-wide collaboration. The purpose of this chapter is to describe some key elements of an expanded approach to system design. We first discuss the foundations, perspective, and techniques of our approach to system design.

Enacting Design for the Workplace

Innovative design for the workplace runs up against inadequate understanding of both work and design practices. Ideas about work practices comprise an odd mixture of folklore and explicit, programmatic descriptions. Thus, paradoxically, a call for union members to “work to rule” can bring a workplace to a complete hall: no set of rules can describe or define what work really is. Conventional ideas about design practices are similarly limited. Indeed, Thackera (1988b) suggests that the whole concept of design is expanding so rapidly that an entirely new term is needed to encompass the range of issues designers now confront. Our purpose in this chapter is to bring some of the implicit character of work and design into the daylight, as a first step towards making design for the workplace more valid. We explore thirteen topics that we believe are central to understanding design for the workplace. We suggest that conventional design approaches often mask powerful but unnoticed resources that, if tapped, can contribute significantly to successful design. For example, a focus on explicit instruction obscures many other ways in which designs actually rely on valuable implicit understanding. Similarly, a focus on individual users conceals the community of users that develops around successful work systems or processes and is crucial to their successful use. To examine the important collateral resources that conventional design overlooks, we pair such concepts as individual-social, narrow-broad, centerperiphery. This is not to establish rigid dichotomies and thus threaten to shift existing imbalances from one inadequate extreme to another, but to expand the region of the “thinkable” in relation to work and design practices. In an insightful discussion of the way such dichotomies may tighten a noose rather than release it, Bourdieu (1989) describes “paired oppositions” as little more than “colluding adversaries” that “tend to delimit the space of the thinkable by excluding the very intention to think beyond the divisions they institute”. But the elements of most of our pairs (though not all, for a few remained stubborn) are presented here as mutually constitutive components of good design.

Work at the Interface: Advanced Manufacturing Technology and Job Design

The currently dominant view among researchers interested in advanced manufacturing technology (AMT) and job design is that an organization’s choice of job design options—whether skill based or management-control oriented—is socially determined and independent of any technological constraint. Technology is seen as effectively neutral. From the perspective of such research, skill-based production system design is achieved through judicial redesign of organizational variables such as supervisory style, training, role, responsibilities, and/or decentralization of decision making. This view, which one may term technological indeterminism, is summed up by Buchanan (1983), who declares that technological imperatives are weak while organizational choice is strong. The aims of this chapter are twofold. The key theoretical aim is to explore the extent to which the development of skill-based production systems may be constrained by the production technology being utilized within a manufacturing organization. Within the social science research literature examining the relationship between AMT and job design, this is a fundamental, yet largely unanswered, question. A second, related aim is more practical: to examine the ways in which social scientists, users, and others can (re)shape the design and implementation of AMT in order to reduce or remove such constraints. This examination is aided by the inclusion of a number of case examples. I will argue that, although organizational variables are undoubtedly important in the development of skill-based production systems, the neglect of technological variables and the reluctance to open the “black box” of technology may seriously undermine the validity of organization-centered research programs in the longer term. Developments in the theory and practice of “human-centered technology” will be used to support this line of argument. The chapter is in five parts. In the first part, the case against technological indeterminism is examined. This is followed by a brief argument to support the case for a “soft” technological determinism that views the relationship between technology and job design as one in which the design of hardware and software technology may constrain key aspects of job design choice. In the third part, the background to two international project case studies is given.

Skill-Based Design: Productivity, Learning, and Organizational Effectiveness

The effective implementation of new technology, particularly computerbased systems, typically requires more, not less worker skill and judgment (Adler, 1986; Hirschhorn, 1984; Jaikumar, 1986; Majchrzak, 1988; Walton and Sussman, 1987). While a considerable body of evidence has accumulated in support of this proposition concerning technology implementation, we know much less about what this implies for technology design. In this chapter, I argue that an effective technology strategy needs to include new principles for the “skill-based design” of technology. These principles of skill-based design go significantly beyond considerations of traditional human factors and ergonomics to encompass both the process of designing systems and specific design principles, including features and functions of the technology. More generally, I submit that technology design is always explicitly or implicitly based on social as well as technical assumptions. This chapter will show how the social assumptions regarding human capabilities and motivations that underlie the dominant design principles, including those embedded in the seemingly objective calculation of economy and efficiency, are not optimally suited to current production requirements. The key social assumptions affecting cost-benefit assessments concern the nature and degree of workers’ involvement in production, specifically the assumption that worker activity is typically limited to the exercise of a few manual skills, and the assumption that production systems can be understood as mechanistic interactions of these limited skills with the installed technology. Since workers’ activity is assumed to be limited to the exercise of rote manual skills and to be based on limited production knowledge, workers’ participation in production problem solving or performance of skilled work is not valued. On the contrary, worker involvement is seen as an unquantifiable “risk” to system performance. Complex and costly equipment designs are therefore adopted to try to eliminate human intervention. The first part of this chapter suggests a contrast between two technology design philosophies: the traditional technology-based approach and the emergent skill-based approach. The second part examines the social assumptions underlying engineering design approaches through a review of books on the design of mechanical and electro-mechanical manufacturing equipment.

Design for Usability: Crafting a Strategy for the Design of a New Generation of Xerox Copiers

As designers, we view our work not merely as the production of products, but also as the creation of evocative and evolutionary artifacts that play important roles in shaping people’s lives. Well-designed artifacts tell people what functions they perform and how they perform them—this is why they have been designed, not merely produced or created. More important, through their design, well-designed artifacts also participate in the construction of human experience. In particular, carefully crafted artifacts can participate in the construction of human experiences surrounding how they (the artifacts themselves) can be used. Thus, we arrive at “Design for Usability,” a phrase we use to refer to the design of an artifact’s use through the design of its physical presence in the world. This chapter, then, is about a shift in perspective from “design as the post hoc application of form and appearance elements to functionality, with the intent of communicating that functionality” to “design as the conscious crafting of usability, through the skillful development of form and appearance elements, with the intent of providing people with the resources to perceive and construct usability themselves.” Expressed another way, we are talking about turning innovative concepts into everyday and universal operations through the design of things. As we said to ourselves while working on the “Design for Usability” project we are about to describe: “If we could make the experience of using a Xerox photocopier as simple and straightforward as the experience of walking through a door, then we will have made a truly usable copier.” We will demonstrate the process of designing according to this shift in perspective through a case study of a successful photocopier-design collaboration between Xerox Corporation (Xerox) and Fitch RichardsonSmith (FRS). Historically, Xerox has always pursued the goal of creating products and services intended to improve how people work and the overall quality of people’s work lives. More recently, Xerox copiers have not been designed as objects, but as artifacts that galvanize the work culture at Xerox to produce them and the widely distributed work culture of Xerox’s customers to make them part of their everyday activities.

The Usability Challenge

All too often, new technologies are introduced into the workplace without sufficient planning for their implications for the workforce. To the extent that businesses do plan for these implications, their approach is often governed by two related myths—the idiot-proofing myth and the deskilling myth. In each, technology plays a heroic role, rescuing efficiency from a workforce presumed to be unreliable. In the idiot-proofing myth, the hero is a machine so perfect that it is immune from the limitations of its users. System design based on this perspective is more concerned with how to keep operators from creating errors than with enabling operators to deal with the inevitable contingencies of the work process. The deskilling myth extends the idiot-proofing myth, offering a system so idiot-proof that the business can presumably get along not only with proportionately fewer workers, but also with workers who are on average less skilled and less expensive. Contradicting these myths, an emerging body of research suggests that in the vast majority of cases, new technologies will be more effective when designed to augment rather than replace the skills of users. The key challenge in designing new technologies is how best to take advantage of users’ skills in creating the most effective and productive working environment. We call this the usability challenge. To meet the usability challenge, industry needs to develop more appropriate usability criteria and to implement more effective processes to assure usability. This book provides a background of concepts and experiences that can offer insight into defining these criteria and processes. This introductory chapter situates the usability challenge in its organizational context, develops some core concepts of usability, and outlines the subsequent chapters’ contributions. Our first task is to articulate more clearly what we mean by usability. The design of systems for human use has long been associated with the discipline of “human factors,” in which the operator is seen as a component of a larger system, and the job of the designer is to produce an “interface” that ensures the most efficient fit of this component into the system.