Debate on Alison Kidd's concept of knowledge work
Organised by Steve Draper (steve@dcs.gla.ac.uk)
Abstract:
I suggest we structure the discussion under 3 issues (20 mins each?)
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1) Are there actually 2 kinds of work (knowledge work and procedural work)?
And is it 2 kinds of person (worker) or just 2 kinds of work?
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2) Messy desks. Do these correlate with type of work, or type of person,
or with nothing in particular? (There is some quite good evidence; but not
perfect).
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3) General vs. specific computational tools. Alison Kidd's claims in her
talk this summer (as opposed to her paper) suggested that while most software
(e.g. WORD) claims to be powerful by having lots of features specific to
rather narrow tasks, her users actually liked rather simple, weak tools if
they applied to absolutely everything. For instance, currently to send
someone a paper, we have lots of different tools depending on what they can
receive and what we have on our desks and what form the paper is in: and we
the user have to know all of this and do different things each time (email,
fax, mail, different formats for ascii, postscript, .....). This is a deep
HCI issue. And it may interact with the knowledge/procedural one, as in
other areas highly specialised tools are most worthwhile when tasks are highly
routinised as on an assembly line. Where tasks vary each time, general
purpose tools may be best.
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Kidd paper:
CHI'94 pp.186-191, Alison Kidd "The marks are on the
knowledge worker". Phil Gray has organised some copies you can pick up from
the computing science dept. office.
Adrian also suggests looking at the Mark Weiser paper CACM 1993 July; I think
on the issue of general vs.specific tools.
Steve Draper, Chris Johnson, Adrian Williamson are the only ones committed to
say something (a little about each of the 3 issues above), but we expect
everyone to join in. Adrian has a long research interest in messy
desks, though a different one from Alison.
Steve Draper