A Drifting Service Development

Drift is one of the visible phenomena observed in an ambient assisted living project. In this project, services for elderly people were developed that would be ordered using a digital pen technology. In this project, the method of the Sociotechnical Walkthrough (STWT) for an integrated development was applied to clarify technology usage, technical aspects, and the work processes. This approach was combined with several other methods to form a multi-facetted sociotechnical design approach. During the course of the project several shifts in perspectives, breakdowns of understanding, and negotiations could be observed. This chapter describes how using this approach of sociotechnical design facilitated the identification of drift phenomena and its processing in service design. The authors observations also clearly show the limitations of up-front process planning for complex environments such as service processes.

IS-Related Organizational Change and the Necessity of Techno-Organizational Co-Design(-In-Use)

This chapter considers some aspects of an ethnomethodologically oriented ethnography that has been carried out in a medical Emergency Response Centre (ERC) before, during, and after an IS-related organizational change. After a description of the everyday work in the ERC and its larger social arena, the authors discuss the main changes and the users group’s resistance that mediated the new technologies’ transformative potential: the rejection of abandoning ‘old’ cooperative work practices, and the emergence of an innovative one, with its own condition of appropriateness, applicability, and accountability. Finally, starting from the evidence that solutions to problems emerging in a field must be coherent with the endogenous organization of activities of that field, with the configuration of inter-actions that actually sets up that context, the authors discuss the necessity of co-design(-in-use), and the possibilities provided by ethnomethodological ethnography as a tool for action research in IT design and techno-organizational change management.

Communities of Practice from a Phenomenological Stance

Community (Gemeinschaft in German) has emerged as a relevant concept for understanding the social dimension of human life, at the end of nineteenth century, when in a famous book by Ferdinand Toennies (1925), it was opposed to society (Gesellschaft in German). The debate that accompanied and followed Toennies’ book at the beginning of the twentieth century opposed the irrationality of communities (where no utility value justifies membership) to the rational principle sustaining societies (that are ruled in order to balance costs and benefits of all members). More recently, the concept of community has been again at the center of philosophical debate after its deconstruction by Jean Luc Nancy: it is, therefore, interesting to situate the concept of community of practice within it. What emerges from this analysis offers to designers of ICT-based applications, such as information systems, knowledge management systems, etc., some new hints on the nature of those systems.

Why Is Information System Design Interested in Ethnography?

The chapter reviews the main stages of the collaboration between ethnographers and information system designers, highlighting the reasons and motives for their mutual relationship. Is it possible to consider the ethnographic approach to information system design a “success story”? How is it that information system design— a field seemingly distant from the concerns, history, or tradition of ethnographic research—is today so interested in the approach, the methods, and the “philosophy” of ethnography? What has ethnography to offer information system designers?

Representations, Institutions, and IS Design

In this chapter, the authors discuss some issues emerging from the phenomenological analyses carried out by Claudio Ciborra, in particular in the Labyrinths of Information. The chapter points out that concepts such as Kairos, Drift, Bricolage, unveil a specific odos for the information systems as a discipline. In their perspective, this odos covers a meth-odos towards new opportunities offered to design by answering the provocation coming from considering information systems as infrastructures (Ge-stell). Furthermore, the authors point out that these opportunities come from a deep understanding of the philosophical background of the work of Claudio Ciborra, namely from the idea of phenomenology of Martin Heidegger, whose position refuses the idea of a subject (no matter how pure or transcendental) as the original foundation of our relationships with reality.

About Representational Artifacts and Their Role in Engineering

This chapter is about showing how artifacts impact engineering work processes by representing important issues of individual and collaborative design work. After summarizing the state of the art of engineering as a design process, artifacts, and their representational role in design and engineering, a selection of rich descriptions of artifacts’ creation and use in engineering work including team-based coordination and decision activities will be presented. The studies are based on ethnographic research carried out for several years in different design and engineering companies. Artifacts used in these studies will be analyzed from their representational point of view to discuss their important role in design and engineering, by considering users’ motivation to use and sometimes adapt them as well as internal and external constraints given in work settings which call for improvisations, before concluding this chapter.

Heidegger’s Notion of Befindlichkeit and the Meaning of “Situated” in Social Inquiries

This chapter is based on a talk presented to the Alpis Information Systems 2009 Annual Conference Carisolo, Italy. It examines the role of phenomenology, most importantly Heidegger’s notion of Befindlichkeit, in social situations. In discussing the meaning of “situated,” the chapter covers the importance of in situ studies, the problems with over-conceptualizing and the limits of Conoscenza Teoretica, Befindlichkeit, itself, and the limits of formal analysis.

Strategic Ethnography and the Biography of Artefacts

In health research and services, and in many other domains, the authors note the emergence of large-scale information systems intended for long-term use with multiple users and uses. These e-infrastructures are becoming more widespread and pervasive and, by enabling effective sharing of information and coordination of activities between diverse, dispersed groups, are expected to transform knowledge-based work. Social scientists have sought to analyse the significance of these systems and the processes by which they are created. Much current attention has been drawn to the often-problematic experience of those attempting to establish them. By contrast, this chapter is inspired by concerns about the theoretical and methodological weakness of many studies of technology and work organisation—particularly the dominance of relatively short-term, often single site studies of technology implementation. These weaknesses are particularly acute in relation to the analysis of infrastructural technologies. The authors explore the relevance to such analysis of recent developments in what they call the Biography of Artefacts (BoA) perspective—which emphasises the value of strategic ethnography: theoretically-informed, multi-site, and longitudinal studies. They seek to draw insights from a programme of empirical research into the long-term evolution of corporate e-infrastructures (reflected in current Enterprise Resource Planning systems) and review some new conceptual tools arising from recent research into e-Infrastructures (e-Is). These are particularly relevant to understanding the current and ongoing difficulties encountered in attempts to develop large-scale Health Infrastructures.

Studying Information Infrastructures

As a result of a steady increase in reach, range, and processing capabilities, information systems no longer appear as independent, but rather as integrated, parts of large scale networks. These networks offer a shared resource for information delivery and exchange to communities, which appropriate them for their respective purposes. Such information infrastructures are complex in several ways. As they are composed of a variety of different components, their openness and heterogeneity make them inherently uncontrollable; through their expansion, these various interconnected networks enter new interdependencies; while they are based on extending existing technical and social networks, they also need to develop and grow over a long period of time; and, they are developed as a distributed activity. Examples of such information infrastructures include the Internet, National Information Infrastructure (NII) initiatives and industry-wide EDI networks, as well as corporate-wide implementations of enterprise systems.

“Whatever Works”

This chapter addresses the general problem of how to design and deploy effective computational tools that support actors of an organization domain in making sense of the information these manage by means of those tools and technologies. To this aim, the chapter recognizes the complementary, but sometimes also diverging, approach of two related disciplines, Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), and Information Systems (IS). Contributions from both these academic communities are put in a common perspective to discuss a comprehensive solution to the apparently incompatible requirements of different communities of users that use the same information for different purposes. The authors take the theme of quality information standards, requirements, and users’ expectations in information-intensive domains such as healthcare and hospital work as a paradigmatic case to discuss the characteristics of their proposal. This encompasses the conceptualization of a general-purpose architecture that they devised to support adequate exploitation by human actors of informative resources regarding how they perform their job and articulate their actions with others; and a specialized design-oriented construct, called Affording Mechanism (AM). An AM is a dyad composed by an artifact (i.e., the schema of a material information tool) and a dynamic relationship between the context of use and the artifact’s affordances. AM relationships are expressed in terms of computable if-then statements that modulate the affordances conveyed through and by the artifact to evoke a “positive” and knowledgeable reaction in the actors’ behavior. On the basis of observations performed in the hospital domain, the chapter discusses in a coherent constructivist light the role of artifacts and derives a set of general requirements for affording mechanisms that support situated behaviors.