Accounting for System Behaviour: Representation, Reflection and Resourceful Action

A clear tension exists between the traditional process-oriented view of interface design and the emerging improvisation-oriented view of interface activity, which arises particularly from sociological investigations of computer-based work. This paper attempts to address this disparity and begin to bridge the gap, focussing on technological foundations and implications, in a way which makes the insights of sociological investigations “real” in computational design. It presents a novel approach to interface architectures, based on the use of explicit, causally-connected self-representations in computational systems. These are treated as “accounts” which systems offer of their own activity. The paper traces some of the consequences of this approach both for system design and interaction, and shows how it addresses current problems in the design of flexible interactive systems.