The paper “Hidden aspects of the Anaesthesia Chart” has been accepted by the Journal of Clinical Monitoring and Computing (to appear soon).
The paper is concerned with our research in the domain of anaesthesiology and the anaesthesia chart in particular. The most important insight gained was the fact that constraints outside the worksystem that have nothing to do with functionality or usability can shape artefact use. This is why functionalist, positivist approaches to analysis, which ignore worksystem history sometimes lead to solving the wrong problem. In the case of the anaesthesia chart we discovered that instead of a cognitive artefact (or memory aid) it was acting a a powerful legal document, discouraging anaesthesiologists from using it as a tool.
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