The workaday world as a paradigm for CSCW design

  • Authors:

  • Thomas P. Moran;R. J. Anderson

  • Affiliations:

  • Rank Xerox EuroPARC, 61 Regent Street, Cambridge CB2 1AB, England;Rank Xerox EuroPARC, 61 Regent Street, Cambridge CB2 1AB, England

  • Venue:
  • CSCW '90 Proceedings of the 1990 ACM conference on Computer-supported cooperative work
  • Year:
  • 1990

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Abstract

EuroPARC is developing an integrated multi-media environment as an integral part of its formal and informal working environment. From our initial experiences with this kind of technology, we and our colleagues believe that it exhibits several qualitatively different properties, which seem to call into question many of our ideas about what computer systems are and how people relate to them. This has caused us to step back and take stock of the design principles we are using and, more generally, to ask what are appropriate principles for CSCW applications and technologies.Like many others in this field, EuroPARC's concern is not simply with artifacts and their enabling technologies, but with understanding the processes and relationships which such artifacts support, including the processes by which they are designed. The discipline of design must involve a constant movement back and forth between the design and use of technologies and reflection upon those activities.This paper is in the reflective mood. We begin to lay out a design paradigm for understanding the social significance of the new technologies available for CSCW.1 By “paradigm” we are not referring to Kuhn's (1962) notion of a revolutionary theory or set of ideas, but rather to a more general pre-Kuhnian notion. We are striving for a design paradigm, not a scientific paradigm; it is a heuristic for bringing forth the important issues facing the designer. For us here, a design paradigm can be any coherent intellectual framework for guiding design. It may be a theory or a metaphor describing the central character of the design domain, both the character of the designed artifacts and the environments in which they fit.