Some notes on Spinuzzi’s excellent book “Tracing Genres Through Organizations” (MIT Press, 1993), written on my desktop computer as the laptop ist kaputt.
Spinuzzi’s work is very close to what I did in my PhD albeit from a different perspective. He follows what I perceive to be a postmodern approach to interpreting work, that attempts to transcend the system- and user-centred perspectives.
At first he analyzes the traditional bi-pole of system- vs user-centred design as it is depicted by Johnson (1998).
|
System-centred |
User-Centred |
|
Formalist |
Social constructionist |
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Rationalist, determinist, modernist |
Postrationalist, nondeterminist, postmodernist |
|
Centrally controlled design |
Collective, cooperative |
Spinuzzi notes that although User-centred design claims to be all these things, it still relies on a designer to “save” the worker-victim. While user-centred design is supposed to be collaborative, the user is treated as an input rather as a collaborator. The designer is still the only one who possesses the expertise to transform the work practice.
I agree with Spinuzzi’s critique, and I would add that User-centred design is definitely modern, as it still relies on an Archimedean vantage point (Luhmann, 1984) - designer’s view. If we follow Coyne’s (1995) categorization, user-centred and especially participatory design belongs to the critical tradition of empowering workers, rather than enabling them to empower themselves. So in essence user-centered designs are either descriptive in that they just attempt to modify the existing setup as little as possible, or normative in that the designer imposes his vision on the new worksystem with some input from the users.
Central to Spinuzzi’s critique is the methods’ treatment of worker’s innovations:
Yet worker’s innovations often continue to be invisible. They generally do not fit the accepted, official ways of doing things, so they tend to be ephemeral and rarely spread beyond the individual or small group that originated them. Only a very few are officially adopted by an organization and spread to a wider audience.
Worker’s innovations (or catachreses) are the ways of user’s appropriating technology or even designing:
She picks up available tools, adapts them in idiosyncratic ways, and makes do. Through these “invisible” innovations she subverts the information system, inventing her own ways to turn it to her needs.
References
Coyne, R. (1995). Designing Information Technology in the Postmodern Age: From Method to Metaphor. MIT Press.
Johnson, R.R. (1998). User-centered technology: a rhetorical theory for computers and other mundane artifacts. SUNY Press
Spinuzzi, C. (2003). Tracing Genres through Organizations: A Sociocultural Approach to Information Design. MIT Press
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