Representations of work

more and less explicit assumptions about the work that is to be done with it. Standard system development methods prescribe representational techniques aimed at rendering working practices into forms narrowly relevant to design concerns. Recent issues of Communications dedicated to participatory design (June 1993), social computing (January 1994), and requirements gathering (May 1995) evidence a growing interest among the ACM readership in the problem of how to expand our understandings, as designers, of the environments and activities of system use. This special section continues that discussion, with a particular emphasis on critical questions and new approaches to representing work for purposes of design. Morten Kyng, best known as a founding figure in cooperative design approaches to system development. In “Making Representations Work,” Kyng views representations as tools developed to depict both current and future work practices, as well as associated system design possibilities. He argues that the adequacy of representations as design tools turns on their effectiveness in providing not only professional system designers but also those whose work is represented with insights into emerging designs. Kyng’s emphasis on end-user cooperation in system design will likely strike many readers as an unrealistically stringent requirement, not applicable in cases where systems are designed for unknown populations of prospective users. But it is arguable that computer-based systems intended to serve as the primary tools for some domain of work must eventually be tailored to meet the specific requirements of that domain. Whether the work is done by vendors, systems integrators, third-party or local developers, ultimately the need for customization, and for the representational resources and cooperative design practices that Kyng advocates, becomes relevant. The leading characteristics of the resources and practices that Kyng describes are the diversity of materials used (graphical mock-ups, textual narratives, computer-based prototypes) and the partiality and openness of the representational forms. While the latter characteristics make the design artifacts Kyng describes dynamic and flexible, they also mean that the intelligibility and usefulness of the artifacts turns on their interpretation with reference to knowledges, interests, and experiences that the artifacts evoke but that are not directly represented by them. L u c y S u c h m a n G u e s t E d i t o r