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.

This paper describes ethnomethodologically informed ethnography (EM) as a methodology for information science research, illustrating the approach with the results of a study in a university library. We elucidate major differences between the practical orientation of EM and theoretical orientation of other ethnographic approaches in information science research. We address ways in which EM may be used to inform systems design and consider the issues that arise in coordinating the results of this research with the needs of information systems designers. We outline our approach to the “ethnographically informed” development of information systems in addressing some of the major problems of interdisciplinary work between system designers and EM researchers.

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.

me development of shared environments and displays has rdso seen the emergence of faci~ties to Wow some form of subjective tailoring of shared interfaces.~s paper considers the need to dynamically re-couple tailored intetiaces as users become increasingly aware of each other.We present a gened model to support awareness based re-coupling of shared interfaces and show its implementation in cooperative virtual environments and shared user intefices.

This paper addresses the design of Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs).More specifically, it considers key design issues concerning the use of either real world 'facsimile' representations or more abstracted means of delivering CVEs.We suggest that the use of ethnographic studies of the context-of-use of the CVE under development is a useful means of informing these design issues in contrast to more in-principle means of drawing conclusions.This approach is illustrated by informing the development of a virtual environment from and ethnographic study of work.

Article Talk and embodiment in collaborative virtual environments Share on Authors: John Bowers Department of Psychology, Manchester University, U.K. Department of Psychology, Manchester University, U.K.View Profile , James Pycock Department of Psychology, Manchester University, U.K. Department of Psychology, Manchester University, U.K.View Profile , Jon O'Brien Department of Sociology, Lancaster University, U.K. Department of Sociology, Lancaster University, U.K.View Profile Authors Info & Claims CHI '96: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing SystemsApril 1996 Pages 58–65https://doi.org/10.1145/238386.238404Online:13 April 1996Publication History 88citation1,748DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations88Total Downloads1,748Last 12 Months108Last 6 weeks9 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

Article Free Access Share on Practically accomplishing immersion: cooperation in and for virtual environments Authors: John Bowers Department of Psychology, Manchester University, U.K. Department of Psychology, Manchester University, U.K.View Profile , Jon O'Brien Department of Sociology Lancaster University, U.K. Department of Sociology Lancaster University, U.K.View Profile , James Pycock Department of Psychology, Manchester University, U.K. Department of Psychology, Manchester University, U.K.View Profile Authors Info & Claims CSCW '96: Proceedings of the 1996 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative workNovember 1996 Pages 380–389https://doi.org/10.1145/240080.240349Published:16 November 1996Publication History 50citation877DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations50Total Downloads877Last 12 Months48Last 6 weeks5 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 SiteeReaderPDF

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.