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Tech Report kmi-96-07 Abstract


Evolution, Not Revolution: PD in the Toolbelt Era
Techreport ID: kmi-96-07
Date: 1996
Author(s): Tamara Sumner and Markus Stolze

An emerging software development context the toolbelt context offers new challenges and opportunities to participatory design. A case study illustrates how professionals working in product design domains assemble and evolve collections, or "toolbelts," of off-the-shelf software tools to support their ongoing work practices. An analysis shows that while the toolbelt context is a politically empowering software development context, domain professionals still need help: (1) identifying suitable tools and "gluing" them together to create a coherent system, (2) designing information representations, and (3) evolving better long-term work practices. A new model of participatory design is proposed - participatory evolutionary development - as a potential technique for addressing these challenges.

Publication(s):

To appear in: Computers in Context, Edited by Morten Kyng and Lars Mathiassen, MIT Press
 
KMi Publications Event | SSSW 2013, The 10th Summer School on Ontology Engineering and the Semantic Web Journal | 25 years of knowledge acquisition
 

Social Software is...


Social Software
Social Software can be thought of as "software which extends, or derives added value from, human social behaviour - message boards, musical taste-sharing, photo-sharing, instant messaging, mailing lists, social networking."

Interacting with other people not only forms the core of human social and psychological experience, but also lies at the centre of what makes the internet such a rich, powerful and exciting collection of knowledge media. We are especially interested in what happens when such interactions take place on a very large scale -- not only because we work regularly with tens of thousands of distance learners at the Open University, but also because it is evident that being part of a crowd in real life possesses a certain 'buzz' of its own, and poses a natural challenge. Different nuances emerge in different user contexts, so we choose to investigate the contexts of work, learning and play to better understand the trade-offs involved in designing effective large-scale social software for multiple purposes.