Location in Work Practices: The Social Shaping of a Personal Digital Assistant

In this paper, we describe the design process involved in the production of a Personal Digital Assistant (henceforth PDA) for an Intensive Care Unit in a Swedish hospital. We argue that the functionalities of such a device require much more than a simply geographical concept of location. It requires, we suggest that location should be understood as a feature of the social distribution of expertise. In other words, the design of this wireless technology has to do with understanding the various knowledges of people involved in the shaping of the product. Obtaining this understanding in turn, we suggest, brings to bear a differentiated set of professional knowledges (for example, software developers, IT facilitators, hospital personnel, nurses). Thinking in terms of the social distribution of expertise and knowledge allows us to recover a complex variety of possible uses for such a device (for example, the PDA as an instrumental reminder, or as a tool for continuous training and knowledge updating, or as a tool related to the actual work of medical intervention on bodies, etc.). To illustrate the point, we will review some cases where socially distributed knowledges and expertises raise different but relevant issues around different phases of PDA design for the Intensive Care Unit. We will draw some conclusions from this focus on sociological rather than spatial issues around the nature of communities of practice and use, and in particular on the need to retain an interest in the meaning and nature of work practice whilst at the same time recognising how these practices vary as a result of professional commitments, expertises and knowledges.