Lucy Suchman and Participatory Design

I attended an "early" talk this morning by Lucy Suchman - a professor in the Department of Sociology at Lancaster University. Her talk titled, Practice-based Design: Some Syntheses, was scheduled in a 30 minute time slot, followed by an "unconference style" discussion.

Suchman began by mentioning that she was ambivalent about the act of naming because things do not have fixed boundaries but are fluid. She noted that in research and development venues, labels are an important part of the process. It wasn't clear (at least to me it wasn't - maybe not enough caffeine this a.m.), however, how naming was connected to the remaining portion of this brief talk.

She presented a quote from Donna Haraway that resonated with me. "The only way to find a larger vision is to be somewhere in particular" (Haraway, 1991, p. 196).

Following that quote, Suchman launched into a discussion about her research with Xerox Park in the 1990s. The first project involved air ground control employees and their workspace. The other examined a law firm that was divided into two groups: 1) corporate law, and 2) litigation. Starting with the corporate law side, one lawyer became a librarian of sorts because he maintained a file cabinet of templates. The Xerox group copied and scanned these boilerplates to create an electronic version of the file cabinet.

With regard to the litigation side, Suchman suggested that this work was trickier. These lawyers were in the process of creating a database, and there was an initiative to outsource this work, because it was not "knowledge work." Some employees countered these efforts and "won." In the past, it was commonly accepted that the rote activities would be automated, which would free up the knowledge work for humans to complete. Today, however, Suchman reminded us that all work is knowledge work; thus, the goal is to embed and delegate part of the work to technology. Stated another way, technology is an enhancement.

Near the end of her talk, Suchman outlined two shifts in practice-based design. Instead of designing from nowhere, the move by designers is to understand their own position and stay connected and accountable to what they are designing. The other shift is from heroic designers and objects to artful integration or crafting together practices and technology where not one specific technology will be flashy or innovative.

Suchman concluded by noting that changing design practices is not a matter of retraining, but rather a matter of social change.

Some attendees may have found Suchman's examples dated (the work was done in the mid-1990s). But because Suchman selected these specific studies to share with the group, I felt that there must have been a compelling reason for her to do so. Given that she had only 30 minutes to share her thoughts and ideas, which was unfortunate, the result was a cursory overview that felt incomplete. I'm certain, given more time, she would have been able to flesh out some of the concepts that were merely touched upon (e.g., the naming portion of the talk). While I like the idea of experimenting with conference and presentation sessions/styles, doing so with a known speaker such as Lucy Suchman was unfortunate.