Mundane tool or object of affection?: the rise and fall of the Postal Buddy
Context and consciousness
Field methods casebook for software design
Field methods casebook for software design
User-centered design in a commercial software company
Field methods casebook for software design
Using contextual inquiry to discover physicians' true needs
Field methods casebook for software design
Introduction to participatory design
Field methods casebook for software design
Contextual design: principles and practice
Field methods casebook for software design
Experience Using Web-Based Shotgun Measures for Large-System Characterization and Improvement
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
Contextual design: defining customer-centered systems
Contextual design: defining customer-centered systems
Considering an organization's memory
CSCW '98 Proceedings of the 1998 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work
Information ecologies: using technology with heart
Information ecologies: using technology with heart
SIGDOC '99 Proceedings of the 17th annual international conference on Computer documentation
Reexamining organizational memory
Communications of the ACM
Genre ecologies: an open-system approach to understanding and constructing documentation
ACM Journal of Computer Documentation (JCD)
Activity theory, cognitive ergonomics and distributed cognition: three views of a transport company
International Journal of Human-Computer Studies - Understanding work and designing artefacts
Writing Technology: Studies on the Materiality of Literacy
Writing Technology: Studies on the Materiality of Literacy
IEEE Software
Datacloud: expanding the roles and locations of information
SIGDOC '01 Proceedings of the 19th annual international conference on Computer documentation
Proceedings of the 20th annual international conference on Computer documentation
Proceedings of the 20th annual international conference on Computer documentation
Proceedings of the 21st annual international conference on Documentation
Research methods for revealing patterns of mediation
Proceedings of the 21st annual international conference on Documentation
Playing in genre fields: a play theory perspective on genre
SIGDOC '07 Proceedings of the 25th annual ACM international conference on Design of communication
Lessons from trying to develop a robust documentation exemplar
Proceedings of the 27th ACM international conference on Design of communication
Communication Design Quarterly Review
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Field research in software documentation has a tradition of investigating how artifacts (from documentation to online help to interfaces to mundane equipment such as Post-It? notes) mediate or enable workers to perform complex tasks (see for instance [29]). Understanding artifacts and mediation can be key to understanding how well documentation supports work, and consequently, how we might design information to fit work patterns. Yet the field of technical communication has developed or adapted relatively few analytical frameworks for examining compound mediation, the ways that sets of artifacts work together to help workers get their jobs done. Such frameworks are important to understand because they provide us with guidance for investigating the mediatory relationships among artifacts - guidance which has important ramifications for intelligently designing information systems and inserting designed artifacts (such as documentation) into existing systems.In this paper, I use three analytical frameworks - contextual design's work models [4, 5, 23], distributed cognition's functional systems [1, 2, 13, 24], and genre ecologies [25, 26, 27, 28, 30] - to examine observational and interview data from a 1997 study of software developers. The observational study is a 10-week investigation of 22 software developers at work, focusing on how artifacts (such as manuals, code comments, and the code itself) collectively mediated the developers? production and comprehension of code at three units of the same global corporation. The study provides a good case for basing a comparison of the three frameworks because it (a) involves comparing multiple artifacts and complex use of artifacts across the different sites, and (b) uses ethnographic methods similar to those often used by proponents of the three frameworks.By applying the three frameworks to the same study, I illustrate which aspects of compound mediation are illuminated and unexplored by each analytical framework. Based on the comparison, I discuss the strengths and weaknesses of each framework for exploring compound mediation, and I suggest ways in which the frameworks might be coordinated to produce different pictures of work.