Software, Automation, and the Futility of Requirements

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Software, Automation, and the Futility of
Requirements

• Paul DourishInformation Computer ScienceUC
  Irvinejpd_at_ics.uci.edu

ASE Workshop, 6/28/02
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cscw and social science

• cscw as an interdisciplinary endeavour
• hci looked to psychology and cognitive science
• cscw has looked to social science
• methodologically
• methods for investigating social action
• theoretically
• models for understanding and analysing social
  action
• a more disturbing relationship
• computer science and cognitive science fit
• the social critique is more radical
• challenges the foundations of building systems

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plans and situated actions

• a foundational text
• Plans and Situated Action, Suchman, 1987
• a social science critique of cognitive science
• the elevator story
• cogsci/AI offers the planning paradigm
• social studies reveal improvised conduct
• the eponymous situated actions
• the conventional interpretation
• need to accommodate exceptions
• software should refer to circumstances of use
• e.g. Brooks et al

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plans and situated actions

• the more radical reading
• Suchman recognises a role for plans
• plans as a resource for action
• plans as an account of action
• but
• the example of preparing expense reports
• what constitutes adequacy?
• the inherent incompleteness of systems of rules

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two views of the social world

• the problem of social order
• orderliness from without
• rules, rote, and dispositions
• the judgmental dope
• orderliness from within
• orderliness as a local achievement
• following a rule vs acting in accordance

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practice

• the notion of practice
• practice and process
• practice is, first and foremost, a process by
  which we find the world and our encounters with
  it as meaningful (Etienne Wenger)
• shoemakers and computer scientists

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practice and technology

• Gibson had it right
• The street finds its own use for technology
• but so do the office, the home, the lab
• meaning evolves in use
• the meaning of a word is its use in the
  language
• meaning?
• the role of the technology
• the organisational and practical purpose it
  serves
• what is communicated by its use
• how do we support the evolution of practice?

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a new approach

• supporting appropriation
• the creation of new meaning
• computation as a responsive medium
• think about computation, not applications
• malleable
• active
• representational
• computation as a means of expression
• customising in practice
• creating and sharing meaning

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automation and software

• adaptation and appropriation are inevitable
• in fact, theyre critical
• premature commitment
• traditional software commits to stable settings
  of use
• the crisis of participatory design
• an evolving working setting
• a static bundle of bits

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automation and software

• a new role for automated software eng.
• the site for a.s.e. is the point of use
• not just improving but extending existing
  practice
• extending the development process
• development adaptation as a part of active use
• the ability to adapt and extend
• everyday use should depend on a.s.e.
• but what does it take to move a.s.e. to this
  central role?