Technological innovation in the workplace is a dynamic endeavour. Productive states of work affording ensembles of technologies, people, materials and spaces, though they may be stable, are not static, but result from a continuous process of change. Intricate interconnections between all components of such work affording ensembles demand that technological innovation be understood as one aspect of a much more comprehensive process of change. To address this demand, the WorkSPACE team has opted for a design approach that is interdisciplinary, participatory, and that aims to envisage the rounded 'bricolage' of future working cultures that include the technologies developed. In the following we briefly delineate the motivations and implications of this approach.
Technologies arise from and are embedded in, an 'ecology' of human practices, other technologies, and materials. From the hammer's handle that anticipates the user's hand, or the interfaces of computer applications that anticipate user actions in their menus and options, to the social, cultural, and political practices that employ and draw on technological potential, human and machine are inextricably linked. Yet, while the analogy with ecology correctly captures the fragility of this blend of the social and the technical, it conceals the activities involved in its maintenance. The heterogeneous blend of work-affording ensembles teems with friction and is, therefore, perhaps better understood through the metaphor of 'bricolage' than the metaphor of 'ecology' with its connotation of self-calibrating balance and harmony achieved through slow evolution. The notion of bricolage highlights the uncertainty and unknowability of the outcome of change, the sometimes ad-hoc, creative, active and purposeful practices of combining elements at hand that bring about change, and the risks, costs, and upheavals such change brings (Büscher, Gill et al. 2001). Technological innovation needs to be mindful, and part, of a whole process of change in order to ensure the 'fit' of new technologies. A design approach that acknowledges this requires the participation of users/practitioners.
Recent years have seen the growth of closer and more intensive forms of collaboration between users and designers. For ourselves, ideas about designing 'technologies in use'), and of using off-the-shelf components for quick insights into emergent new ways of working, provide an incentive to acknowledge bricolage practices and the dynamic, bricolaged character of work affording ensembles for technology design. In order to fully exploit technological potential, use, evaluation, and design have to go hand in hand. This introduces an element of bricolage into the design process, in the sense of requiring a continuous demand to 'fit' new technologies into changing work practice. User involvement is evidently crucial to such an approach. However, achieving a practical crossover between technology production and use is only one way of making use of different perspectives within a multidisciplinary design team.
While interdisciplinary collaboration between system designers and ethnographers carrying out workplace studies has become accepted as a useful resource for design, the involvement of users as co-designers has a less strong tradition. In our case, the combination of system design, work analysis, and the architects' expertise in designing inhabitable spaces and environments populated by tools provides a useful and inspiring set of perspectives, because it addresses the sociality and spatiality of practice for the purposes of system design.