The social life of engineering authorizations

We may view documents, not only as containers for information, but also as active participants in organizing and sustaining communities. This paper discusses our experiences in designing a web-based tool for writing and managing engineering authorizations, and the social perspectives influence on our understanding of the problem and the design of our system. It presents observations based on our fieldwork with users, and the evaluation of a set of prototype systems. It shows how these observations changed our central metaphor for the system, moving it from a machine model to a society of agents metaphor. Finally, it illustrates the way this new metaphor changed our system functionality and architecture.

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