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We tend to design systems and websites with a one-size-fits-all interface, where the priority and placement of various information is determined by designers. Most people do not think like web-designers. They have different priorities and interests, based on what they do. We…
We talk about design as if it were fixed: as if there were one best way to design everything. We celebrate designers who produce especially elegant or usable artifacts as if they were possessed of supernatural powers. Yet design should be easy.…
I was musing about the differences between these three concepts. They are not explained clearly in any resource I could find (although many people take a stab at this), so I thought I’d try bending my brain around the problem. The three…
Why is design improvisational? We talk about design as if it were fixed: as if there were one best way to design everything. We celebrate designers who produce especially elegant or usable artifacts as if they were possessed of supernatural powers. Yet design…
Brown and Duguid’s (2001) concept of a “network of practice” has been niggling away at my consciousness. The idea is that a collection of people are enabled to understand each others’ work because of commonalities in practice, but not to the extent…
I manage the website for an Animal Rescue shelter. I have been struggling with the design of the site for some time now, as I have some users who are still using IE6 under windows XP (on an SVGA screen), some who…
Sociomaterial Networks of Resources (Human and non-Human) A recent emphasis on sociomateriality appears to have entered the IS literature because of discussions by Orlikowski (2010) and the excellent empirical study of Volkoff et al. (2007). Now that people have been sensitized to…
Recently, I have been using a new social media platform to run one of my classes. The idea was, that as we are studying social informatics, we could study the effect of using social media on our own workflows first hand. I…
I have been working for a while on comparing the results from some very complex research studies of collaborative design in groups that span disciplines or knowledge domains. I was stunned to realize that I had different types of group activity depending…
While browsing and working on a recent paper, I mused on the missed opportunity of interaction design. Reading Terry Winograd’s (1997) From Computing Machinery to Interaction Design, I was stunned to see how visionary this was, in the context of contemporary HCI…
I can’t help but reflect on the similarities between research methods, processes and outcomes, and design methods, processes and outcomes. I read an article which argued that there were two types of people: people with tidy offices and people with untidy offices.…
Double-loop learning occurs when we question the values, assumptions and recipes-for-success that we typically apply to a situation. This type of paradigm-shift is essential when the business environment, or the context of work changes.Typically, we learn how to do something well and…
The focus of IS design has moved “upstream” of the waterfall model, from technical design to the co-design of business-processes and IT systems. This focus requires an improvisational design approach. IT-related organizational innovation deals with wicked problems. Wicked problems tend to span…
