Due to the heterogeneity of the Festival year, the researchersÕ methods for enacting work-like situations did not work as expected, pointing to the need for new instruments for the design activity, new design artefacts. A more straightforward instance of contradictions between design situation and de-sign artefact was the contradiction between the DBMS and the need in the situation to support cooperation in a non-networked architecture.
The design artefact versus design situation contradiction is an unavoidable secondary contradiction between instrument and object, but it was also a quaternary contradiction between the production of instruments for coopera-tiv design in a non-cyclic setting, and the use of these artefacts in the
Festival project.
In general, a contradiction between actual design praxis and prescription embedded in the design artefacts should be expected (Bertelsen, in
progress).
Discussion
Systematic application of the notion of contradiction yielded important knowledge about the structure behind fundamental obstacles in the Festival
project. The activity theory framework served as a good way of structuring the analysis.
The primary contradiction between use and exchange value was present as a contradiction of computers as being both utensils and epaulettes. The only secondary contradiction identified in the analysis was between design and the existing methods for enactment of work-like situations. As the project aimed at developing new instruments for pre-production, secondary contra-dictions between the available instruments and other corners of the pre-production activity should be expected. However, being a computer scientist, the author did not see a need for new instruments as a necessary precondi-tion for the initiaprecondi-tion of a design project. A detailed analysis of contradic-tions between instruments and other corners of a considered activity will be a valuable resource in a design project. However, secondary contradictions emerged in the Festival activities, due to general knowledge among volun-teers about how tedious office work can be done easier with computers. Thus tertiary contradiction subsequently induced secondary contradictions in Festival activities. The relation between use and design in the project has some elements of a tertiary contradiction, but in relation to the development of computer support in the Festival, the surrounding culture, e.g. at the vol-unteers daytime workplaces, was clearly examples of more advanced activi-ties. Most of the identified contradictions were quaternary, which should come as no surprise since the analysis did not depart from the identifica-tions of one central activity.
The main difficulties in applying the activity theory framework for analysis of the project are related to the heterogeneity of the considered project.
When heterogeneity can be captured in terms of quaternary contradictions, the Finnish approach (Engestršm 1987) is very fruitful, but if the considered activity systems have the cyclic nature of the festival activities, the Finnish approach is not straight forward to use. In terms of process-structure and structure-process diagrams (Mathiassen 1981), the problem is that the Finnish triangle models do not capture the situation when the considered activity is a structure subsuming a processual succession of more or less stable structures.
Thus key definitions in the Finnish approach may have to be adjusted or re-interpreted. Firstly, The notion of a more advance activity should be re-in-terpreted in a direction emphasising heterogeneity on the expense of histori-cal materialism. Secondly, analysis of the Festival project showed the need for methods to deal with interwoven activity systems, and activity systems that have a very cyclic nature. It will be possible to deal with both these is-sues without rejecting the basis of activity theory, e.g. by incorporating Leigh StarÕs (1989) notion of boundary objects (see, Bertelsen in prep, for a discus-sion of boundary objects in the festival project). Thirdly, the Festival project showed that politics and power are issues which it is necessary to take into
consideration, but due to its strong emphasis on production, activity theory did not yield much in the analysis of this and other strange cultural phe-nomena.
ManagementÕs constant obstruction of the project was to some extend grounded in false fear of the consequences of new technology, thus some bar-riers could have been overcome by applying socio-technical techniques (e.g.
Mumford & Ward 1968) for motivation and elimination of false fear. We may, humorously, call this a reversed socio-technical approach. However, contradictions between parties with different amount of power in the Festival organisation was the one most important reason why the project did not become a successful design project, despite the absence of tradition-ally recognised sources of conflicting interests, e.g. private economic gain.
Thus, the project indicates that power struggle is a universal feature of or-ganisations that should be made explicit and controlled by organising the design project as a negotiation between conflicting parties (Ehn & Sandberg 1979).
When developing computer support for praxises with a strongly cyclic na-ture, it is difficult to establish simulated work situations, because the dif-ferent phases of the work cycle are only present during the full cycle in the form of anecdotes. Thus simulations of work are likely to degenerate into discussions about work. The project points to a need for the development of methods for simulation of work in such situations.
As system development researchers, we tend to believe that computer sup-port is a mean for improving production: computers are utensils used to carry out a job. It is not new knowledge that computers are also epaulettes;
they have been so on managing directorsÕ desks for years. The new is that this aspect of computer support seems to have reached the floor. In the fu-ture, computer support will not only be a possible change of working condi-tion and a de-skilling factor, but new computer technology will also be sym-bols of social status, epaulettes. In such a situation, the real challenge in system development may be to develop computer support without any func-tionality.
Acknowledgements
I want to thank the Sound and Light group and the other people from the Festival with whom we worked in the reported project; my co-workers in the Festival project, Morten Kyng, Preben Mogensen, Kim Halskov Madsen and Henrik B¾rbak Christensen; Susanne B¿dker, Jesper Just and the anony-mous IRIS 19 reviewers for comments on a much earlier draft of this paper, Christina Nielsen and Niels-Oluf Bouvin for proof reading and comments on the present version; and finally, Jacob Bardram for comments and discus-sions.
References
Bannon, L. & B¿dker, S. (1991), Beyond the Interface: Encountering
Artifacts in Use, in Carroll, John M. (ed.) Designing Interaction, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Bannon, L. J. & Kuutti, K. (1993). Searching for Unity among Diversity:
Exploring the ÒInterfaceÓ Concept, In Ashlund, Stacey et al. (eds.), INTERCHI '93: Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
INTERACT '93 and CHI '93 Bridges Between Worlds. New York, N.Y.: ACM Press.
Bansler, J. (1989): Systems Development Research in Scandinavia: Three theoretical schools, Scandinavian Journal of Information Systems vol. 1, Aug.
1989, pp. 3-20
Bertelsen, Olav (1994), Fitts' Law as a Design Artefact: A Paradigm Case of Theory in Software Design, in Blumenthal, Gornostaev, and Unger(eds.) Human-Computer Interaction. 4th International Conference, EWHCI Ô94 St.
Petersburg, Russia, August 1994. Selected Papers, Berlin: Springer Verlag Bertelsen, Olav W. (in prep), The Festival Checklist: design as the transformation of artefacts. (not yet rejected conference paper)
Bertelsen, Olav W. (in progress), Perspectives on design artefacts, ph.d.-thesis.
Bjerknes, G. and Bratteteig, T. (1988): ComputersÑUtensils or Epaulets?
The Application Perspective Revisited AI and Society vol. 2 no 3, pp. 258-266 Borum, Finn and Enderud, Harald (1981), Konflikter i organisationer: - belyst ved studier af edb-systemarbejde, K¿benhavn: Nyt Nordisk Forlag
Ehn, Pelle & Dan Sjšgren (1991), From system description to script for action, in Greenbaum, Joan and Morten Kyng (eds.), Design at work:
cooperative design of computer systems. Hillsdale: LEA.
Ehn, Pelle & •ke Sandberg (1979) ÔGod UtredningÕ in Sandberg, •. (ed.), Utredning och fšrŠndring i fšrvaltningen, Stockholm: Liber fšrlag
Engestršm, Yrjš (1987) Learning by expanding: an activity -theoretical approach to developmental research. Helsinki: Orienta-Konsultit Oy.
Engestršm, Yrjš (1990) Learning Working and Imagining: twelve studies in activity theory. Helsinki: Orienta-Konsultit Oy.
Kyng, Morten (1994), Making Representations Work, in Suchman, Lucy (Ed.) (1995), Representations of Work, Guest edited section of
Communications of the ACM, vol. 38, no 9, pp. 46-55.
Leontjev, A. N. (1978). Activity, consciousness, and personality, Engelwood Cliffs NJ: Prentice Hall.
Marx, Karl (1962) Das Kapital, vol. I, Berlin: Dietz Verlag
Mathiassen, Lars (1981), Systemudvikling og Systemudviklingsmetode [in Danish: System development and system development method], Aarhus:
Computer Science Department DAIMI PB-136
Mumford, Enid & T.B. Ward (1968) Computers: Planning for People (quoted from the Danish translation, EDB, system og menneske, K¿benhavn: Steen Hasselbalchs Forlag, 1970)
Nardi, B. (ed.) (1996). Introduction to Context and Consciousness: Activity Theory and Human Computer Interaction, Cambridge: MIT Press.
Rumbaugh, James, M. Blaha, W. Premerlani, F. Eddy, & W. Lorensen (1991), Object-Oriented Modelling and Design, Prentice-Hall International Editions, 1991.
Star, Susan Leigh (1989), The Stucture of Ill-Structured Solutions:
Boundary Objects and Heterogeneous Distributed Problem Solving, in Gasser, Les and Michael N. Huhns Distributed Artificial Intelligence, volume II, London: Pitman Publishers, pp37-54
Vygotsky, L.(1978). Mind in society: The development of higher mental processes, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Wartofsky, Marx W (1973), Perception, representation, and the forms of action: toward an historical epistemology, in Wartofsky, M. W., Models, Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1979.
Winograd, T. & Flores, F. (1986). Understanding Computers and Cognition Ñ a new foundation for design. Norwood, N.J: Ablex.