"...and Do It the Usual Way": Fostering Awareness of Work Conventions in Document-mediated Collaboration

In this paper, we concentrate on how conventions among practitioners are put at work for the sake of cooperation in those work settings where coordination is mediated at a large extent by complex webs of documental artifacts. Our case study focuses on coordinative conventions exhibited in the hospital domain and mediated by compound patient records. We conceive of the provision of document-mediated awareness information as a “learning device” by which these conventions can be made explicit in all those situations where practitioners need support in coping with and solving cooperative problems in the articulation of their activities. To enable such a context-dependent and usercentered provision of awareness, we also present and outline the WOAD framework that provides users and designers with a conceptual model and language aimed at facilitating the construction of a conventionand collaboration-aware layer on top of traditional architectures of electronic documental systems. To this aim, we take the case of the Electronic Patient Record (EPR) as paradigmatic. Awareness as a “device” for local conventions The idea of considering the provision of suitable awareness information as a way to support cooperative work by facilitating the learning of work-related conventions and their inclusion into practice was first seminally introduced by Mark (Mark, 2002). We share Mark’s suggestion to address the requirement of establishing and maintaining appropriate conventions within a distributed group of cooperating actors in terms of collaboration awareness as “an active learning device”, i.e. as a means that takes the innovative function of helping cooperating