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
Genre ecologies: an open-system approach to understanding and constructing documentation
ACM Journal of Computer Documentation (JCD)
SIGDOC '01 Proceedings of the 19th annual international conference on Computer documentation
Designing for lifeworlds: genre and activity in information systems design and evaluation
Designing for lifeworlds: genre and activity in information systems design and evaluation
Examining the use case as genre in software development and 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
Four ways to investigate assemblages of texts: genre sets, systems, repertoires, and ecologies
Proceedings of the 22nd annual international conference on Design of communication: The engineering of quality documentation
SIGDOC '06 Proceedings of the 24th annual ACM international conference on Design of communication
Visualizing writing activity as knowledge work: challenges & opportunities
SIGDOC '06 Proceedings of the 24th annual ACM international conference on Design of communication
Researching proposal development: accounting for the complexity of designing persuasive texts
SIGDOC '06 Proceedings of the 24th annual ACM international conference on Design of communication
Playing in genre fields: a play theory perspective on genre
SIGDOC '07 Proceedings of the 25th annual ACM international conference on Design of communication
Triangulating communication design: emerging models for theory and practice
SIGDOC '07 Proceedings of the 25th annual ACM international conference on Design of communication
Visual documentation of knowledge work: an examination of competing approaches
SIGDOC '07 Proceedings of the 25th annual ACM international conference on Design of communication
Advances in understanding knowledge work: an experience report
Proceedings of the 26th annual ACM international conference on Design of communication
Practice theory & the foundations of digital document encoding
Proceedings of the 27th ACM international conference on Design of communication
Proceedings of the 27th ACM international conference on Design of communication
Proceedings of the 30th ACM international conference on Design of communication
A qualitative metasynthesis of activity theory in SIGDOC proceedings 2001-2011
Proceedings of the 30th ACM international conference on Design of communication
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The genre ecology framework is an analytical framework for studying how people use multiple artifacts - such as documentation, interfaces, and annotations - to mediate their work activities. Unlike other analytical frameworks, the genre ecology framework has been developed particularly for technical communication research, particularly in its emphasis on interpretation, contingency, and stability. Although this framework shows much promise, it is more of a heuristic than a formal modeling tool; it helps researchers to pull together impressions, similar to contextual design's work models, but it has not been implemented as formally as distributed cognition's functional systems.In this paper, I move toward a formal modeling of genre ecologies. First, I describe the preliminary results of an observational study of seven workers in two different functional teams of a medium-sized telecommunications company (a subset of a larger, 89-worker study). I use these preliminary results to develop a model of the genres used by these two teams, how those genres interconnect to co-mediate the workers' activities, and the breakdowns that the workers encounter as genres travel across the boundaries of the two teams. I conclude by (a) describing how formal models of genre ecologies can help in planning and designing computer documentation and (b) discussing how these models can be further developed.