It is a commonplace that in the ‘Information Age’, knowledge is the most important factor in the long-term success of an organisation. Such an emphasis is increasingly important as businesses confront a series of intransigent organisational problems connected with the retention and provision of organisational histories, knowledge and skills. ‘Organisational memory’ and its sister concept, ‘knowledge management’, are common glosses for the analysis and treatment of these problems. We analyse some of the conceptual and empirical issues that must precede attempts to provide support for ‘memory’ and ‘knowledge’ in the wider organisational context.

As cooperative virtual environments have become more prominent as a means of allowing users to work together so has the need for users to understand the nature of these environments. This paper presents the development of a set of techniques to allow users to understand the properties of virtual environments as they move between different environments. The development of these techniques is informed by an ethnographic study of a multimedia art museum containing a wide range of different virtual environments.

This paper reflects on the emerging results of a long-standing ethnographic study of everyday work in a large retail Bank. While customers as economic actors have often been overlooked in studies of computer supported work they are generally and necessarily the focus of commercial organisational life. The paper explicates the developing relationship between technology use and these organisational concerns through the notion of 'the customer in the machine.' Features of the contingent and skilful nature of everyday work are documented and used to comment on aspects of working with the 'customer in the machine' or 'virtual customers' within a rapidly changing commercial organisation.

The rapid growth and development of the Internet and the resulting growth in interest in access to network facilities highlight an increasing prominence of computer technology in the home.In this article we report on a study of the social organization of a number of domestic environments in the northwest of England and consider the ways in which an understanding of the nature of the home is of interest to the developers of future interactive technology.Thus, in the first half of the article we consider the everyday nature of home life, and in the second half we report on an ethnographically based evaluation of a prototype set top box for the provision of digital services to the home.In addition to reflecting on the nature of activities in the home we conclude by considering the design implications that can be drawn from an examination of these activities.

Article Recognising "success" and "failure": evaluating groupware in a commercial context Share on Authors: Steve Blythin Project Manager, Support Services and Design, NatWest Bank Plc. Network Strategy & Development, 101-117 Finsbury Pavement, London EC2A 1EH Project Manager, Support Services and Design, NatWest Bank Plc. Network Strategy & Development, 101-117 Finsbury Pavement, London EC2A 1EHView Profile , John A. Hughes Computing and Sociology Departments, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YR, UK Computing and Sociology Departments, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YR, UKView Profile , Steinar Kristoffersen Computing and Sociology Departments, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YR, UK Computing and Sociology Departments, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YR, UKView Profile , Tom Rodden Computing and Sociology Departments, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YR, UK Computing and Sociology Departments, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YR, UKView Profile , Mark Rouncefield Computing and Sociology Departments, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YR, UK Computing and Sociology Departments, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YR, UKView Profile Authors Info & Claims GROUP '97: Proceedings of the international ACM SIGGROUP conference on Supporting group work: the integration challengeNovember 1997 Pages 39–46https://doi.org/10.1145/266838.266852Published:16 November 1997 16citation904DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations16Total Downloads904Last 12 Months3Last 6 weeks0 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteGet Access

This half-day workshop will aim to build a community of interest and research agenda around extending CSCW methods and technologies to home settings. Relevant issues include the coordination of activities in public and private spaces; shared resource technologies; distributed coordination in and between households and the role of technology in everyday life.

We argue that the industrial development of interactive systems has to recognise the social dimension of work if these systems are to fully meet the real needs of their users. Under current approaches this depends on whether an individual requirements engineer implicitly applies a user centred approach, recognises the importance of cooperation and is sufficiently sympathetic and intuitive to understand the work and reflect this in the system requirements. We wish to move beyond this by allowing for the provision of a more systematic incorporation of the social dimensions of work. To this end we focus on developing a novel approach to the presentation of ethnographic material. Our approach is based on the use of number of viewpoints and is embodied within a general hypertext tool.

Ethnography has gained considerable prominence as a technique for informing CSCW systems development of the nature of work. Experiences of ethnography reported to date have focused on the use of prolonged on-going enthnography to inform systems design. A considerable number of these studies have taken place within constrained and focused work domain. This paper reflects more generally on the experiences of using ethnography across a number of different projects and in a variety of domains of study. We identify a number of ways in which we have used ethnography to inform design and consider the benefits and problems of each.

Ethnographic studies of CSCW have often seemed to involve the investigation of relatively large-scale and highly specific systems, consequently ignoring the small office within which many people spend much of their working lives and which is a major site for the introduction and implementation of IT. This paper is concerned with a “quick and dirty” ethnographic study of a small office that was considering the introduction of greater levels of IT. Generic features of office work are outlined: the process of work in a small office and its recurrent features, notably the massive volume of paperwork; the importance of local knowledge in the accomplishment of work; and the phenomenon of “constant interruption.” This paper suggests that despite the obvious contrasts with work settings analysed in other ethnographic studies, similar features of cooperative work can be observed in the small office. It further suggests that the issues of cooperation and the sociality of work cannot be ignored even in small-scale system design.

The paper reviews some aspects of a research project in which ethnographic studies of air traffic controllers at work were used to inform the design of an electronic flight strip. In particular, it emphasises the important role of ethnography in gaining an insight into the fine grained and often ‘invisible’ aspects of work which are essential to its accomplishment and which must be taken account of in the design process. The paper also reviews some of the practical lessons of interdisciplinary working and the role, along with some limitations, that ethnographic studies can play in the system design process.

This paper relates experiences of a project where an ethnographic study of air traffic controllers is being used to inform the design of the controllers' interface to the flight data base. We outline the current UK air traffic control system, discuss the ethnographic work we have undertaken studying air traffic control as a cooperative activity, describe some of the difficulties in collaboration between software developers and sociologists and show how the ethnographic studies have influenced the systems design process. Our conclusions are that ethnographic studies are helpful in informing the systems design process and may produce insights which contradict conventional thinking in systems design. KEYWORDS Air Traffic Control, Systems Design, Ethnography INTRODUCTION One of the most significant influences of CSCW has been to lend a respectability amongst software developers to sociological methods of empirical research. The contribution of sociology, and anthropology, is through the de...

The aim of this paper is to explore some, ways of linking ethnographic studies of work in context with the design of CSCW systems.It uses examples from an interdisciplinary collaborative project on air traffic control.Ethnographic methods are introduced, and applied to identifying the social organization of this cooperative work, and the use of instruments within it.On this basis some metaphors for the electronic representation of current manual practices are presented, and their possibilities and limitations are discussed.