Coherence: An Approach to Representing Ethnographic Analyses in Systems Design

This paper is concerned with how to represent in system design the kinds of features of work settings as reported by ethnographic studies of work. Various researchers and practitioners have found that ethnomethodological analyses of work settings can provide useful insights to the work processes and settings that system design is interested in. Previously at Lancaster, we have examined ways in which ethnography can be used in the design process, and how the results of ethnographic analyses can be presented in such a way as to be useful components of the design process. This paper reflects an effort to approach these methodological issues from a different perspective, by examining how the lessons learned from ethnographic studies can be reflected in the design process itself, and in particular how design artefacts (models, documents, etc.) can express the type of information which ethnographic studies produce. The paper focuses on how ethnographic analyses can influence the main representational artefact in systems design—the model of the system being developed. We examine how the Unified Modelling Language (UML) for object-oriented design can be used to express information about awareness in cooperative systems Prepared for HCI journal special issue on Representations in Interactive Systems Development 2 Coherence: an approach to representing ethnographic analyses in systems design Stephen Viller and Ian Sommerville Computing Department, Lancaster University Lancaster, LA1 4YR, UK {viller, is}@comp.lancs.ac.uk Abstract: This paper is concerned with how to represent in system design the kinds of features of work settings as reported by ethnographic studies of work. Various researchers and practitioners have found that ethnomethodological analyses of work settings can provide useful insights to the work processes and settings that system design is interested in. Previously at Lancaster, we have examined ways in which ethnography can be used in the design process, and how the results of ethnographic analyses can be presented in such a way as to be useful components of the design process. This paper reflects an effort to approach these methodological issues from a different perspective, by examining how the lessons learned from ethnographic studies can be reflected in the design process itself, and in particular how design artefacts (models, documents, etc.) can express the type of information which ethnographic studies produce. This paper is concerned with how to represent in system design the kinds of features of work settings as reported by ethnographic studies of work. Various researchers and practitioners have found that ethnomethodological analyses of work settings can provide useful insights to the work processes and settings that system design is interested in. Previously at Lancaster, we have examined ways in which ethnography can be used in the design process, and how the results of ethnographic analyses can be presented in such a way as to be useful components of the design process. This paper reflects an effort to approach these methodological issues from a different perspective, by examining how the lessons learned from ethnographic studies can be reflected in the design process itself, and in particular how design artefacts (models, documents, etc.) can express the type of information which ethnographic studies produce. The paper focuses on how ethnographic analyses can influence the main representational artefact in systems design—the model of the system being developed. We examine how the Unified Modelling Language (UML) for object-oriented design can be used to express information about awareness in cooperative systems.