Cooperative analysis and design for generic products

In the above section the focus has been on situations in which the aim was to develop one or more computer applications and to change organisational structures in a specific practice. In this section I address the question of what cooperative analysis has to offer in situations where the aim is to develop generic products to a market.

The aim of EuroCoOp was and the aim of EuroCODE is (1993) to develop generic CSCW applications to a market. To this end, GB was chosen as an appropriate setting for getting experiences with the possible uses of these applications. GB was appropriate partly because of its complexity and its distributed work. What probably counted more, was that the GB had the resources and the interest in actually working with the suggested new technologies enabling them to challenge our designs and provide new ideas.

What made GB an appropriate user-site was not so much a question of whether it was representative or typical, it was more because they were committed to actually use the designs and committed to actually challenge them.

Put a bit simplistic, one could say that the aim in these projects is not for us (the researchers) to change and develop for the GB, but rather vice versa that the task of GB to a large extent is to change our designs. Metaphorically, we can say that the situation in the AT project resembled one in which we had a nail and the problem of getting it into the wood looking for suitable hammers, whereas the situation in EuroCoOp/EuroCODE is more characterised by having a hammer looking for nails to apply it on. (The challenge is of course not, like the baby, to take everything for a nail.)

Consider the outline of the interplay between cooperative analysis and design for the AT project presented above. Regarding the situation in the EuroCoOp/EuroCODE project the picture is in a way turned upside down.

The point of departure was not constraints and potentials within a given use-practice, but more or less concrete designs (ranging from initial design ideas to industrial prototypes). The possibilities investigated was not future practices at the GB as such, but possible uses of the given applications.

On the other hand, there is a close resemblance between the two situations.

In a way, we are talking about the same components but from two entirely different perspectives. What are current constraints and potentials for the designers, the current designs, represent long term possibilities for the people at the GB. What are current constraints and potentials for the people at the GB, their current practice, represents possible use-situations for the applications.

GB is a partner in EuroCoOp/EuroCODE and thus paid for the work. This can ensure that the people from GB participate, but it cannot ensure that they participate interested. Their own accounts on their motivation for participating were that the participation opened up new possibilities hitherto not known to them and thereby made them see their current practice from new perspectives. For the people at GB, the work was thus, to a large extent, seen as building up of new (long term) possibilities which they used to analyse current constraints and potentials - challenge established practices.

From the perspective of the designers, it was the factual constraints and potentials within GB that challenged current designs and led to redesigns. In the beginning of the EuroCoOp project the conceived possibilities were focused on supporting the sharing of materials, particularly cooperative authoring. These possibilities contributed to focus the analysis. The analysis revealed, however, that the problems in current practice were more fundamental and were related to actually finding the material (the re-finding was a prerequisite for sharing). As mentioned in Section 2.2 we introduced in the analysis the idea of interlinking documents with respect to content instead of only searching via key-words, without much success. It was a fundamental part of existing practice that searching was accomplished via key-words (and thus solutions had to be found in better key-words) and it was hard for people to grasp what it could mean to interlink documents. As a consequence, our first prototype focused on showing some of the possibilities in interlinking primarily text-documents. This prototype was introduced to the people from GB, and people could now experience the possibilities in interlinking documents. This challenged the current way of organising material at the GB, and people began to reconceptualise current work in light of the new possibilities. That the idea of interlinking material was actually conceived as a possibility-that-mattered and thus revised with respect to

supporting the work at GB led to several challenges for the design. One of the major challenges was that we had to support the interlinking of not only one type of documents, but had to interlink material from all the diversity of applications present at the GB. This lead to second and much more extended and general prototype of a hypermedia application. Today the hypermedia is an industrial prototype (aimed at the market) and it is one of the main components in the CSCW shell being developed in EuroCODE, interlinking many of the applications developed in this project.³¹

Comparing our starting point and the results, there is no doubt that cooperative analysis and design in this case provided indispensable input to the process of designing generic applications.

The extent to which these experiences apply more generally has to be seen.

There are, however, some initial arguments that may motivate further investigation.

Firstly, by addressing actual situations within a concrete use-practice the investigated possibilities, as seen from the practitioners, become possibilities-that-matter, and thereby the work with these possibilities becomes worth pursuing.

Secondly, it addresses the issue of blindness (‘tunnel vision’, ‘model effect’) discussed in Section 5.2 by using specific situations to challenge current design, i.e showing its constraints and potentials.

Thirdly, it draws on the practitioners' competencies in doing so, i.e. it turns the practitioners into a much more constructive and active role than the passive one of being 'objects of study' or one of answering questionnaires (confirming or denying the pre-understanding of the ones asking).

Finally, by virtue of the three arguments above, it might serve as a means to go beyond the respective pre-understandings of the developers and practitioners, potentially leading to qualitatively new designs.

31For further information concerning the hypermedia, see for example (Grønbæk, Hem,