Coordination, Cooperation, and Collaboration

I was musing about the differences between these three concepts. They are not explained clearly in any resource I could find (although many people take a stab at this), so I thought I’d try bending my brain around the problem. The three types of collectivity appear goal-oriented (as in, sharing a common purpose), but there … Read more

Designing for Real Users

We tend to design systems and websites with a one-size-fits-all interface, where the priority and placement of various information is determined by designers. Most people do not think like web-designers. They have different priorities and interests, based on what they do. We should let users configure their own interface around the items they want to see.

Improvising Design

Why is design improvisational?  We talk about design as if it were fixed: as if there were one best way to design everything. We celebrate designers who produce especially elegant or usable artifacts as if they were possessed of supernatural powers. Yet design should be easy. It is the application of “best practice” principles to a … Read more

The Co-Design of Business & IT Systems

Business analysts, change managers, and IT systems analysts are in a no-win situation. They are expected to understand myriad interpretations of the business strategy, reconcile conflicting viewpoints on how business processes work, and – somehow – define a coherent set of change objectives that pleases everyone. While the stakeholders of change each understand only a … Read more

Design Methods as Performative Objects

Brown and Duguid’s (2001) concept of a “network of practice” has been niggling away at my consciousness. The idea is that a collection of people are enabled to understand each others’ work because of commonalities in practice, but not to the extent that a Community of Practice creates shared ways of framing and performing work: … Read more

On Realizing The Relevance of Actor-Network Theory

A recent emphasis on sociomateriality appears to have entered the IS literature because of discussions by Orlikowski (2010) and the excellent empirical study of Volkoff et al. (2007). Now that people have been sensitized to the literature on material practice, actor-network theory is classified as “tired and uninformative” [1]. Which leads me to wonder just … Read more

Designing Social Media Platforms For Online Learning

Recently, I have been using a new social media platform to run one of my classes. The idea was, that as we are studying social informatics, we could study the effect of using social media on our own workflows first hand. I also thought that – in these days of daily Facebook and Twitter use … Read more