Representations of Work: Bringing Designers and Users Together

Abstract

Over the past several years, we have been engaged in work practice and codesign projects with users of office systems products. In order to share and make explicit our understanding of user work practices with a wide base of technology developers, much of our emphasis has been on developing ways to describe the rich and complex world of user work practices. This paper describes a variety of approaches that we are using to represent user work practices in order to inform the development of emerging technologies so that they more closely align with the needs and work practices of users of the technologies.