Discriminating Conduct: Deploying Systems to Support Awareness in Organizations

Abstract

Alongside the emergence of the use of fieldwork studies for design there has been a discussion on how best these studies can inform system development. Concerns have been expressed as to whether their most appropriate contribution is a list of requirements or design recommendations. This article explores a recurrent issue that has emerged from fieldwork studies in Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, awareness, and with respect to a particular system development project discusses some of the implications for the development and deployment of one particular kind of technology—image recognition systems—in particular, organizational settings. In the setting in question—surveillance centers or operations rooms—staff utilize a range of practices to maintain awareness. Rather than extending field studies so that they can better assist design, it may be considered how workplace studies can contribute to a respecification of key concepts, like awareness, that are critical to an understanding of how technologies are used and deployed in everyday environments.

The research discussed in this article was funded under the EU Projects PRISMATICA, Palcom, and Paperworks. We thank personnel on London Underground who generously provided us with access for fieldwork and video recording and suffered our endless queries and questions. Material relating to this article was presented at the In Situ, In Use: Extending Field Research Methods workshop held in London in October 2005. We are very grateful for the generous comments and suggestions from participants at the workshop and Jon Hindmarsh, Dirk vom Lehn, and Hubert Knoblauch for their extensive support with the issues and materials discussed here. We also thank the editors and anonymous reviewers of the article for their helpful and insightful comments on an earlier draft.