Situated Action, Located Accountabilities and Artful Integration

Anthropologist and HCI researcher Lucy Suchman made a seminal intervention into the field as a writer and practitioner, bringing together feminism and Science and Technology Studies (STS) with practice in information system design. Suchman worked as an anthropologist at Xerox Parc Research Center during the 1980s. In 1987 she published Plans and Situated Actions: The Problem of Human-machine Communication (1987). This book provided an early and

important voice challenging the cognitive science based approach to HCI, adding detail, theoretical perspectives and methods that challenged engineers to think completely differently about the systems they designed. Suchman's was a bold voice who described herself as working with 'a small network of allies' across different disciplines and in different countries. The position of those allies is an explicitly critical one. Taking a retrospective view of this network she says:

“What bound us together were a series of dissatisfactions regarding the regime within which we were asked to work, and a set of partial but related imaginings of how things might be different”

(Suchman 2002b p.3)

Suchman's idea of Situated Action is firmly rooted in observable experience, and observation of behaviour is valued above any other forms of data gathering. In common with Lave and Wenger, human behaviour is seen as inseparable from its context, by which we mean its environment or 'setting' and the artefacts involved. The wider work of Jean Lave, with its appreciation of the 'improvisational' character of human behaviour inspires Situated Action. For Lave, activities are seen as unique responses to an un-repeatable set of problems and

circumstances. Suchman took this challenging view into the heart of technology production at Xerox Parc. Creating technical solutions that match this analysis are challenging, but Suchman suggests that plans should be seen as “resources for action”, rather than ways to determine action (Suchman 1986).

Suchman also poses questions about the “cultural practices” in technology development and use.(Suchman 2002a) . She does this by citing the feminist contributions to STS that challenge the idea of singular objectivity and connecting them to design by pointing out that our

technologies are the results of these scientific conventions. As an alternative, Suchman argues that we should always locate our work with technology, analysing our position in the process and our contributions within or across boundaries which may be local to our group of collaborators, or stretch globally to encompass all the networks of industry and labour that supply our technologies. Coming with this challenge to locate our perspective comes the imperative to take responsibility or be accountable for the knowledge we have and how we deploy it. This is the concept of “located accountability” (Suchman 2002a).

Expressing her work as single concept, Suchman put forward the idea of “Artful Integration”. This concept acts as a counterpoint to the tendency in wider culture to attribute all good design to the personal talents of individual designers, or specially innovative studios or companies. Instead, Artful integration recognises that effective designs are more likely to be a unique re- combination of existing things and networks of people that have been deployed into a particular context with insight and sensitivity (Suchman 2002b). The PD community enthusiastically embraced this notion. Artful Integration was the theme of the 2004 Participatory Design

conference, during which an “Artful Integrators” award was also launched that is now presented at each PDC . Later in this review we see how this concept has inspired the idea of

infrastructuring in the PD context.

As a situated practice, PD practitioners acknowledge the uniqueness of every design project and its participants. The idea of a situated practice also enables effective design outputs to be

measured in modest terms. Just as there is no universal design context, PD outputs do not claim universal applicability. As the result of partial knowledge and unique constraints, effective designs are most often modest steps that are new or a re-configuration of existing resources, artefacts and social relations and this should be more widely recognised.

In this section I have covered the themes of situated action, located accountabilities and artful integration quite briefly. They are based on highly theoretical concepts that have been explored extensively in feminism, cultural studies and philosophy of science. For me, PD is important because it is able to find an expression of these ideas through practice and, moreover, use them to inform the creation of technological tools that people actually make use of and can control. They are also useful in enabling practical projects to avoid having to make grandiose claims in order to be valued within their own community.

These concepts of situatedness and locatedness are very important for understanding the

Hublink project. They set the scope and relevance of the research, define what is valuable in the research and where its findings are applicable, and how responsibilities should be recognised, shared and taken forward. They have also influenced the format and writing style of the project description. These issues have both informed practice, and overlap with the research

methodology of this study. Therefore they are also discussed in the chapter on methodology. These topics are important for two reasons. Firstly because they further extend the subject of this review which is to explore the field of PD and its applicability to the community context and FLOSS. Secondly, because situated practice creates a thread that links between all parts of this research project; the review, methodology and the project description, its style of

presentation and the claims made.

3.2

After Design: Infrastructuring, Appropriation And