Challenging Practice: an approach to Cooperative Analysis

Abstract

Cooperative Analysis takes as its starting point the tradition of user-involvement in system development in Scandinavia, especially cooperative design. It points to the mismatch in this tradition between analysis as passive observation and design as cooperative intervention. Cooperative Analysis is conducted cooperatively and through intervention in the practice beeing analysed. Cooperative Analysis is seen as part of a large development process, and is thus seen as facilitating taking action in order to bring about change. The primary approach is one of provoking current practice through concrete experience. Provocation serves the purpose of calling forth hitherto taken-for-granted issues as well as it challenges the existing practice to investigate its dynamics and open up for new possibilities. As two specific means to this end, the book introduces an approach of using artifacts (e.g. commercially available products, prototypes, and mock-ups) to trigger new understandings of current practice and it introduces dilemma games to challenge current practice by exposing it to some of its inherent dilemmas.

Users and Computers - A Contextual Approach to Design of Computer Artifacts

“…As the body of experience grew and as the trends in society, on which much of the initial work had revolved, weakened the pressure for continued work producing concrete experience lessened and at the same time the need for theoretical work up increased. Thus theoretical work such as (Bødker, 1991;Ehn, 1989;Grønbaek, 1991;Mogensen, 1994) played an increasing role in CRA since the mid nineteen eighties. Finally, in the current stage of my research -and that of our group in Aarhus -we have come to a point where a major effort is directed towards realizing a computerbased development environment (Kyng, 1994a).…”

Talking Work: Language-games, Organisations and Computer Supported Cooperative Work

“…* 16 In mapping the grammar of the language-game in different organisational regions of work, similarities and differences in practice become apparent. Specific local arrangements of work are (naturally) less easy to detect and in our own project, largely came to light in the course of conducting prototyping activities (Mogensen, 1994) with a wide range of practitioners in a variety of regional settings. A notable consequence of local requirements (primarily, external conditions of work, such as common local business practice or legal demands) was the highly customisable character of the system.…”

Staging a professional participatory design practice

“…The current practice needs to be confronted as discussed by [23]. Diversity in perspectives and in prototypical solutions makes confrontation of ideas possible.…”

“…As the planning process proceeded it became clear, however, that the prototypes could be used to sys- Eventually the reflections were reified in prototypes and scenarios enabling the dialogue between users and designers. The dialogue was conducted in a workshop session, where designers and workers discussed future work practice and technologies in a reflective setting (see also [1,23]). planned, yet changeable manner, based on the experiences gained in the process.…”