At Tuesday night’s UPA conference round-up, one of the participants described an experience she had had at conference workshop. In this workshop, she and a team of three other people conducted “actual field research” by interviewing one of the people working at the conference hotel. Her role was observer and she observed that the worker had two phones on his desk: an internal hotel phone and a phone for making outside calls. The team concluded that the two phones were obviously redundant and the worker was burdened with having two phones on his desk.
This story well illustrates Clay Spinuzzi’s premise in Tracing Genres Through Organizations. In this situation, the designers saw an apparent problem and decided that the user was a victim of bad design or bureaucracy or organizational politics or some such. There was no other evidence that the two-phone system was a problem. In particular, there was no evidence that the worker found the two-phone system to be a burden. Spinuzzi says that user-centered design field methods frequently frame the user as a victim and the designer as a hero, as was done in this case. Indeed, the phones may have been a solution devised by the worker himself, who may have always forgotten to dial 9 to get an outside extension, or who just got sick of the extra keypress. Spinuzzi says that designers frequently either disregard informal solutions devised by the workers themselves, dismissing them as outliers, or attempt to formalize these informal solutions to the point of uselessness.
In the first two chapters of his book, Spinuzzi elaborates on this premise and establishes a foundation for building a new field methodology that attempts to position informal solutions correctly. He also defines a framework — based on activity theory — for studying the organization from three points of view: macro, meso, and micro. One of Spinuzzi’s central claims is that typical user-centered design methods examine problems at only one level and therefore focus on solutions at that level. In reality, according to Spinuzzi, a problem at one level indicates problems at all levels.
Spinuzzi calls this “coconstituting,” which I think of as a “whole is greater than the sum of its parts” kind of thing. Identifying a problem at one level implies that there are problems at the other levels, too. More importantly, attempting to solve a problem at only one level will have an impact on the other levels.
- Microscopic. At this level, a work scenario is considered a collection of unconscious gestures that have been operationalized, like picking up the phone and dialing a number.
- Mesoscopic. Analyzing a work scenario at this level reveals an individual, conscious action, like making a phone call to research new equipment for the hotel.
- Macroscopic. A work scenario also exists in the greater organizational context, like providing hotel customers the best equipment while remaining in the hotel’s budget.
Since I’m only 75 pages in, I’m not sure how a design solution at one level can impact the other levels, but I can take a guess. Consider Johnny Two-Phone from the story at the beginning of this post. Imagine the designer steps in and replaces the two phones with one that requires the worker to push a button to get an outside line. Now imagine a scenario where the worker needs to have two people on the phone at the same time: on one line he needs to talk to an ouside vendor and on the other line he needs to talk to a team-member who’s assessing the situation in one of the hotel conference rooms. This is a problem at the mesoscopic level, since he can’t perform an action he needs to perform. There is an impact at the macroscopic level because the worker can’t effectively meet customer needs, and there’s an impact at the microscopic level because for the first time the worker needs to consciously think about how to have two people on the phone at the same time.
Look at the situation from the microscopic level: Johnny Two-Phone now needs to contend with a button for making external calls. This brings the gesture of dialing a phone number to the locus of his attention, whereas previously it was virtually unconscious. He may make mistakes, forgetting to push the button, or pushing the button when he meant to push redial. All of these mistakes cascade up the chain, to have an impact at the higher levels of the work scenario. Perhaps Two-Phone’s frustration rises and he doesn’t treat customers well. Perhaps he becomes less productive. Not having read much past chapter two of Spinuzzi’s book, I’m not prepared to say whether these interpretations of his ideas match up with his conclusions, but they seem like logical extensions.
In the first two chapters of Tracing Genres, Spinuzzi offers a number of useful concepts and distinctions:
| fieldwork-to-formalization |
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Spinuzzi says most user-centered design methods use a fieldwork-to-formalization process, where the design team conducts research into their users and then transforms their findings into some kind of formal model. He concludes that these formal models try to extend workers’ informal methods across the business and dilute the value of those methods.
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| user-centered design |
system-centered design |
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Focuses on the user as the primary driver of design.
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Focuses on the technology as the primary driver of design. Spinuzzi notes that system-centered design is actually a ficticious strawman set up as a means for contrasting with the “heroic” approach of user-centered design.
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| functional empowerment |
democratic empowerment |
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Conceiving of users as victims leads to a strange notion of freedom. To free the users is to “empower” them to perform their functions in a prescribed manner, by creating formal, structured processes out of the informal methods they have assembled for themselves.
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On the other hand, to empower users democratically is to give them a “decision-making role in how their organization operates and how technology fits into their jobs” (13).
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| official solutions |
unofficial solutions |
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When a solution to a problem has been incorporated into the business at-large, and has a formal documented process, it is considered official. |
People develop their own “workarounds” for dealing with seemingly difficult tools and documents. These workarounds are called “unofficial” because they have not yet been formalized. Typical user-centered design processes co-opt unofficial solutions and attempt to normalize them across the business.
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| genre |
Spinuzzi draws from the North American school to define genre. A genre is a tradition — “culturally and historically grounded ways of ’seeing and conceptualizing reality’ … Genres are not discrete artifacts, but traditions of producing, using, and interpreting artifacts (41). Here was the part that really struck me as a bridge between genre theory and exemplar theory:
Genres convey a worldview, not by laying out a set of explicit propositions, but by ‘developing concrete examples’ that ‘allow the reader to view the world in a specific way’” (42).
And later:
Genres are the result of an ongoing dialogue among speakers in a particular sphere of activity, and the past dialogue of those speakers imposes itself on present speakers in ways they might not even recognize. (43)
Good stuff. A subsequent blog post will have to explore how this is related to the documentation we produce as information architects.
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Chapters 3 - 6 describe the application of Spinuzzi’s genre tracing approach to the Iowa department of transportation’s traffic accident database. I’ve just started reading about it, and his first step is to trace the history of traffic accident tracking. He reviewed records from the 1960s onwards, and found how the method of recording an accident has changed (or not changed) since then. The two main forms completed after an accident — the driver’s report and the officer’s report — have not changed in the last 40 years. Although they appear in different formats, the basic concept has remained the same. He uses a biological metaphor to describe the evolution of these artifacts, saying that there are genetic links between the paper forms and subsequent electronic forms.
Watch this space for further reviews.
