Understanding use in the design of smart objects – reflections on the conception of collaborative design

The paper deals with the question how to understand the design process as a collaborative activity and how to facilitate design of smart objects from that perspective. We reflect on some current paradigms of design, and argue that these approaches could be improved further through considering users not only as participants in the design process, but also as designers through their practice in their normal daily actions. In design, form may not follow function but meaning, which brings the user back into the picture and strongly suggest that designers need to discuss not only the contexts in which their forms are used, but also what the formed products mean to the users. We shall demonstrate our argument with the help of an example from a field study on the implementation of a flexible manufacturing system. As a result of this study we identified a need for a collaborative design activity that was seen to comprise of a operation-oriented design and a design-oriented operation. Hence, we consider that as the first step towards a conception of collaborative design, it is necessary to understand design-like actions in users’ normal operating work. With reference to our studies on anaesthesia, we then elaborate features of such actions and the relevance of these actions to design of patient monitors. We also discuss the possibilities to exploit our approach, which was developed for the analysis of user actions, to the analysis of actual situated actions of the designers. 1. Theoretical position Because tools have a central role in shaping the structure of human activity it is important that the significance of tools and their appropriateness for use is anticipated during their design. Hence the semantics or the content of activities should become a self-evident part of the design. This puts great challenges on the design process, on the actual decisions of the designers, and on the methods that the designers exploit. Our experience of design relates to the construction of complex information and communication systems for professional activities. In these contexts the expertise that is required in the use of tools is profound, and to a large extent tacit. Hence, the dependency of the designer on the knowledge and skills of the user is basically great. In particular domains, i.e. aviation or nuclear power industries, which are characterized by critical safety demands, extensive analyses of operations as basis for developing ICT tools and humantechnology interfaces has become a necessity, and it already has long traditions. Such an extensive consideration of users’ activities is much less usual in the design of solutions to other industries. With regard to the consumer products, i.e. everyday tools of knowledge society, the relationship between the designer and the user has traditionally been conceived differently. The designer represents the user and is therefore able to anticipate the users’ needs. The design problem is that of mediating the designers’ insight to the user through the interface of the appliance for acquiring correspondence with the user and designer models (Norman 1986). This way of thinking is currently receding, however, as the role of the user as a constructor of meaning through making use of the tools in practice has become evident. As Krippendorff writes “The increasingly appealing suggestion that form may not follow function but meaning, brings the user back into the picture and strongly suggest that designers need to discuss not only the contexts in which their forms are used, but also how these forms are made sense of, or what they mean to someone other than themselves”(Krippendorff 1998). Pressing demands for understanding user activities, emerge also because the economical success of technical innovations assume the emergence of meaningful use and usage cultures. The attribute “human-centred” has become an accepted qualification of design. In order to take seriously the abovementioned profound connection of design and use in creating meaning into the functionally formed artefacts we may have to reconsider our understanding of the term “human-centred”. Bannon recently drew attention to this need and noted that rather than simply considering the user in design, we should place understanding people and their practices in the forefront in the design of technology (Bannon and Kaptelinin 2000; Bannon 2002). But, as Bannon further notes, such a framing does not only require adoption of certain values in design. It also assumes theoretical consideration and empirical analysis of human activity. We may, furthermore, add that the incorporation of knowledge of human practices into the design provides an unsolved important problem to the HTI research. In the analysis of human conduct, we advocate an ecological approach and conceive behaviour as an interaction within a human-environment system (Norros submitted). This interaction has a mediated structure, i.e. consciousness emerges and behaviour becomes controlled and communicated through external signs (Vygotsky 1978). Signs may be material tools or symbols and they are embedded not only in the interactions with the physical environment, but also in the social interactions within a community, in the form of norms, rules and in the structures of division of labour. These mediated relationships constitute a complex activity system, within which the individual actions are organized, and in which they find their societal motivation (Engeström 1987). Through the signs the environment becomes a usable and meaningful object for the human actor. One of the strengths of the theory of Engeström is that the problem of context, which has become one of the recognized issues of current humantechnology interaction (HTI) research, is build in its very basis. The activity-systems constitute the meaningful contexts of actions. Situation awareness has become another fashionable HTI issue in the past few years. There is a clear need to identify the situation of use and adapt the functions of the artefact accordingly. However, even when considered a feature of an artefact, situation or context awareness is deemed an empty phrase if it is treated as simple recording of the environmental features. Situation awareness links with the notion of intentionality i.e. things having reference outside themselves. Human intentionality expresses itself both in the rational and embodied object-orientedness of action (Dreyfus 2001). It denotes the subjective readiness to interact with the environment, which shapes perception and the construction of situated actions. This aspect of human conduct has been emphasized in The Computer Supported Co-operative Work approach (CSCW). Consequently, the advocates of the CSCW have devoted much effort to develop tools for the analysis of actions in real life settings. The notion of context awareness refers often to a particular functional feature of consumer products for mobile users. Vicente has treated the contextual demands as a fundamental problem of design of any ICT artefacts in complex environments. Such environments may be considered open systems (Vicente 1999). Because of the context-conditioned variability within these systems, there is the inherent need for designing adaptation into the artefacts to support the situationally appropriate actions of the users. 2. Designing for adaptation in smart objects Even though adaptation is usually not taken as a deliberate goal in the frameworks of cognitive engineering or humancomputer interaction design (Vicente 2002), we claim that the strive for human-centred design may be interpreted as an expression of an attempt to create adaptation in humantechnology systems. Adaptation is then understood in a broad sense as an ability of the user to act, and use artefacts entrained fluently in the changing environment. Promoting adaptation assumes collaborative design. Collaborative design is understood as an activity that comprehends design and use as one activity system that is devoted to maintaining and developing human-environment interaction through creation of meaningful artefacts. We shall briefly reflect on some current paradigms of design, the Human-Centred Design (HCD), the Contextual Design (CD) and the Ecological Interface Design (EID) and view how these approaches view the interaction between design and use. The human-centred design concept (HCD) is a widely accepted approach in the design of interactive systems. It has recently acquired the status of an international standard (ISO13407 1999), which may be considered an important hallmark in promoting the user-centered point of view in the design process. In the HCD the design problem is framed as to create devices that meet the user goals and needs in a specific task. Within this frame the task is to bridge the gulfs of execution and evaluation (Norman 1986) , which the HCD may be considered to sufficiently accomplish. However, because this approach is restricted to comprehending users as informants in a design process, the perspective to user actions remains limited. The contextual design (CD) (Beyer and Holzblatt 1995) and ecological interface design (EID) (Flach, Hancock et al. 1995; Vicente 1999) approaches offer an important complementary view to the human-centered design. They emphasize the significance of understanding of the context of use and provide elaborated tools for analysing these contexts as domains that put constraints on user actions and, hence, on the design of tools for these actions. The strength of the Contextual Design approach is that it changes the focus from the design of technical products or services to the construction of new ways of work. Consequently, in the proposed and well defined design process much effort is devoted to the analysis and modeling of the users’ real practices. A further important point in the concept is that the authors do not consider the user studies as a straight forward process of gathering or eliciting user data, but instead emphasize that the designers have to learn to infer what this information means for design. The weaknesses of the CD are related to the way of defining user practices. The approach is both prescriptive and descriptive, i.e. the analyses of use restrict to definition of present or future particular realizations of action and human-technology interactions. This characterization also applies to the ethnographic studies of the CSCW approaches. The unpredictability of open systems and the context of use would, however, demand modeling of behaviour in a way, which is not restrict to any particular course of action. The above-mentioned deficiency in the CD and CSCW is overcome in the ecological design concept by Kim Vicente (Vicente 1999). He proposed that the conceptualization of action should be conducted from a more generic functional point of view. It should make explicit the constraints and possibilities of maintaining successful interaction with the environment. The modeling approach that he developed to complement the prescriptive and descriptive modeling approaches is the formative modeling. Formative modeling should not focus on the users’ tasks and actions, but instead on the domain and context, in which these actions take place, and on which the actions exercise their effects. The features of the domain are taken as intrinsic constraints that define the boundaries of action, and therefore shape behaviour. This reorientation with regard to the modeling approach is based on the work of Jens Rasmussen (Rasmussen and Pejtersen 1995). The formative modeling approach provides a major advantage, because through concentrating on the boundaries of action it supports adaptation. We find the ecological approach of Vicente a significant step in defining new design practices. Vicente has also been able to provide evidence of the appropriateness of interfaces, which have been design according to the principles of ecological design (Vicente 2002). However, we find a need to complete this approach in one point. Vicente characterized an ecological approach as one, in which the analysis of practices should start from the environmental constraints and finish with an analysis of person-related factors. The latter analysis is supposed to be accomplished as a cognitivist analysis, and the traditional information processing vocabulary is introduced to guide its accomplishment. From these premises follows that the new objective of creating user practices instead of merely technologies appears less central in the methodology. The above-mentioned consequence is, however, not a necessary result from an ecological analysis, as it first may appear. In a genuinely ecological analysis the environment and the human actor should be treated as mutually connected with each other. For example, in an ecological perspective the environmental intrinsic constraints should be defined from the point of view of the human user, whose qualifications and possibilities for interaction with the environment are historically formed. The environment itself is a human environment, and as such not definable in strictly objective terms. A completion is, therefore, needed for analyzing the human actors’ ways of making use and sense of those environmental features that the analysis of the domain may first reveal. Only then we may state, what are the actual affordances of the domain and reveal different logics of their exploitation in user actions. We may also discover completely new possibilities for interaction. We have proposed one solution for replacing the cognitivist analysis of actions with an ecologically oriented one (Norros submitted). We make use of the cultural historical theory of activity to provide an activity systemic model of the domain. This model is completed with the functional analysis of the intrinsic constraints. The model constitutes the frame for inferring what could be meaningful reasons to act in this environment. The pragmatist concept of habit (Peirce 1998e) opens up a possibility to model the operators’ potentials for action in connection with the environmental affordances that are potentially meaningful for appropriate action (Norros and Klemola in press). The attempt to complete the methodology of Vicente in the above mentioned sense also implies that the users are considered not only as participants in the design of technology, but even more, as designers through their practice in their normal daily actions. In this way, we attempt to reach that what was claimed necessary by Krippendorff in the above cited reference. 3. An example of spontaneous collaborative