This article reports our experiences in developing a work-oriented design practice. We sketch our general approach to relating work practice studies and design, including our use of case-based prototypes. We go on to describe our entry into the law firm that was the setting for this project and our decision to focus our design efforts on two forms of work at the firm. We discuss our experiences in developing a case-based prototype to support the work of document search and retrieval. We then describe our encounters with organizational politics at the firm in the context of a joint exploration of image analysis technologies in relation to the work of litigation support. We conclude with findings on the practices of working with document collections, the value of case-based prototypes, and recommendations for combining work practice studies and design interventions.

Although the document imaging industry has taken off in the last few years, document image filing for the individual information worker is still not widespread or effective. In this paper, we focus on building an electronic tiling system for paper documents that supports the ad hoc, multifarious work of information workers. Motivated by interviews with researchers and a survey of descriptive studies of paper document filing, we have focussed on minimizing or delaying costs of document filing and supporting a rich variety of methods for accessing and using stored documents. We have implemented a prototype system called Protofoil for storing, retrieving, and manipulating paper documents as electronic images that integrates many user interface-paper and workstation—and information retrieval technologies. Protofoil has been tested through use in our laboratory. and has been deployed in a field study at a lawyer’s office.

In this paper, we look at how people working in a governmental labor inspection agency tailor their shared PC environment. Starting with standard off-the-shelf software, the tailors adapt that software to the particular workplace in which they are embedded, at the same time that they modify and extend the practices of that workplace. Over time, their adaptations and the tailoring processes themselves become structured and systematized within the organization. This tendency toward systematization is in part a response to the requirement that the results of tailoring be sharable across groups of users. Our study focuses on several dimensions of the work of tailoring: construction, organizational change, learning, and politics. We draw two kinds of lessons for system development: how better to support the work of tailors, and how system developers can learn from and cooperate with tailors.

The author of a complex hypertext document is often faced with the problem of conveying the document's meaning to future readers through a shared computer environment. Two tools implemented in the NoteCards hypertext environment, guided tours and tabletops, allow authors to employ annotation, graphic layout and ordered presentation when communicating to readers. This paper describes these tools and gives examples of their use. Issues of remote deictic reference arising from an application in legal argumentation are discussed as well as early work on the use of these tools to support sharing of hypertext strategies among NoteCards users.

The author of a complex hypertext document is often faced with the problem of conveying the document's meaning to future readers through a shared computer environment. Two tools implemented in the NoteCards hypertext environment, guided tours and tabletops, allow authors to employ annotation, graphic layout, and ordered presentation when communicating to readers. This paper describes these tools and gives examples of their use. Issues of remote pointing arising from an application in legal argumentation are discussed as well as early work on the use of these tools to support sharing of hypertext strategies among NoteCards users.

NoteCards is an extensible environment designed to help people formulate, structure, compare, and manage ideas. NoteCards provides the user with a “semantic network” of electronic notecards interconnected by typed links. The system provides tools to organize, manage, and display the structure of the network, as well as a set of methods and protocols for creating programs to manipulate the information in the network. NoteCards is currently being used by more than 50 people engaged in idea processing tasks ranging from writing research papers through designing parts for photocopiers.

This paper describes a methodological and topical framework for studying collaboration in research settings. The framework is intended to capture the central activities and issues in research collaboration, and to represent them in a way that can inform the design of computer support. In this paper we present our starting premises for studying collaboration, describe our use of qualitative and naturalistic methods, and report our preliminary findings.

This paper describes a project underway to investigate computer support for collaboration. In particular, we focus on experience with and extensions to NoteCards, a hypertext-based idea structuring system. The forms of collaboration discussed include draft-passing, simultaneous sharing and online presentations. The requirement that mutual intelligibility be maintained between collaborators leads to the need for support of annotative and procedural as well as substantive activities.

Textnet is a new system for structuring text. The Textnet approach uses one uniform data structure to capture graphlike pools of text, as well as embedded hierarchical structures. By using a semantic network formalism of nodes connected by typed links, the relationships between neighboring pieces of text are made explicit. Also described is our partial implementation of the Textnet approach, which makes use of an object-oriented window/menu-driven user interface. Users peruse the network by moving among object menus or by reading text along a path through the network. In addition, critiquing, reader linking, searching, and jumping are easily accessible operations. Finally, the results of a short trial with users are presented.