Work - arounds , Make - work ,

Human-Centered Computing column " The State of Cog-nitive Systems Engineering, " 1 we had a lengthy discussion on the question, What is a user-hostile system? The following quote is from that essay: The road to user-hostile systems is paved with user-centered intentions on the part of the designers. Even smart, clever, well-intentioned people can build devices that are fragile and hostile, devices that force the human to adapt and build local kludges and work-arounds. Worse still, even if one is aware of this trap, one will still fall into it. We decided that the terms kludge and work-around, and also the related concept of make-work, have yet to be clearly defined for the intelligent systems community. Human-centered systems are different from user-hostile systems as well as from systems based on a designer-centered approach. 2 In this essay, we try to clarify the senses of these three terms and suggest ways we might study work-arounds, make-work, and kludges as an integral part of human-computer systems—rather than as embarrassing necessities that are best swept under the computing research rug. We all have had to create and use a work-around at some point to get a user-hostile computer to do our bidding. Documented evidence attests to the pervasiveness of work-arounds. 3 Sometimes the work-around is inspired by a friend's hint; sometimes it's spelled out in a help page on the Web; sometimes it's discovered by flailing around until something just happens to work, more or less. Although work-arounds might seem inherently ad hoc, in many situations they make the difference between success and failure. The Concise Oxford Dictionary definition of work-around is " a method for overcoming a problem or limitation in a program or system. " (Neither the Oxford Un-abridged Dictionary nor the Oxford Dictionary of Computing lists " work-around, " but, ironically, the Concise Oxford Dictionary does. Go figure.) This definition doesn't go far enough to pin down the concept so that it might be more amenable for study. Does the " problem " being overcome mean a design defect or something as simple as a component failure due to wear-out? Does " limitation " mean an unimplemented (but clearly imaginable and clearly useful) feature, an intentionally precluded action, or an inability to use the tool to cope with an unanticipated operating environment? And is the work-around method written down, foreseen by designers, or made up on the fly? Wikipedia, a …