I’ve been re-reading Winograd’s “A language/action perspective on the design of cooperative work” from 1988 and I’m amazed at how relevant it still is. It presents the work that Winograd and Flores did using speech act theory to capture the structure of cooperative work. Their approach is based on the notion that workflow has an intrinsic syntax, that can be re-enforced by using an explicit structure. Speech Act theory is about the things you can do with utterances besides statements.
things you can do with an utterance: Assertive: Commit the speaker (in varying degrees) to somethings being the case — to the truth of the expressed proposition. Directive: Attempt (in varying degrees) to get the hearer to do something. These include both questions (which can direct the hearer to make an assertive speech act in response) and commands (which direct the hearer to carry out some linguistic or non-linguistic act). Commissive: Commit the speaker (again in varying degrees) to some future course of action. Declaration: Bring about the correspondence between the propositional content of the speech act and reality (e.g., pronouncing a couple married). Expressive: Express a psychological state about a state of affairs (e.g., apologizing and praising).
The meshing of these utterances creates larger conversation/cooperation structures:
An important example is the simple conversation for action, in which one party (A) makes a request to another (B). The request is interpreted by each party as having certain conditions of satisfaction, which characterize a future course of actions by B. After the initial utterance (the request), B can accept (and thereby commit to satisfy the conditions); decline (and thereby end the conversation); or counter-offer with alternative conditions. Each of these in turn has its possible continuations (e.g., after a counter-offer, A can accept, cancel the request, or counter-offer back).
Can the formalization of these processes lead to better work (the holy grail of workflow)? There is a problem with the tension between formality and informality in a worksystem (or between communication and conversation (Allen, 1990)). The software that Winograd describes, “The Coordinator”, suffered from overformalization, as evidence in an ethnographic study of its use:
the basic finding was…the stoppage of use by a majority of subjects. In this sense their actions spoke louder than their words. When questioned, they stated that the format of their interaction pattern encouraged by the software was ‘unnatural,’ ‘uncomfortable,’ and ‘made no sense’ to them.
This was to be expected as no worker would like every utterance to be a commitment: this is not the army. But on the other hand email is too messy: can we find the sweet spot? Can the web2.0 milieu help?
References
Allen, C. (1990). Groupware Communication & Conversation. Applied Groupware, Fall 1990 Winograd, T. (1990). A Language/Action Perspective on the Design of Cooperative Work Human-Computer Interaction 3:1 (1987-88), 3-30
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