Taking the social organization of work into account in human-machine systems design*

In analyzing work with a view to introducing new technologies, a systematic source of inappropriate or inadequate design decisions, which eventually may cause breakdowns and accidents, is posed by the social organization of work if it is not taken into account. This paper argues that analysts engaged in making decisions about the allocation of functionality between human actor and technology should carefully and systematically investigate the social organization of work. The existing environment may for instance have hidden or invisible affordances which, when removed as part of a technological change, may be sorely missed. To illustrate this we report from a field study of ship navigation. Complex time-critical cooperative work like navigation requires much effort on coordinating the distributed activities. Due to the nature of the work, decision making and coordination must be handled ‘on the fly’ while the work is ongoing. Hence, mutual awareness and interaction among the actors become essential. It is concluded that for analyzing this type of work the social organization of the work, the complexity aspects of the field of work, the hidden functions of the existing work arrangement, and the facilities provided by the applied communication means must be systematically addressed.