Leveraging underspecification in knowledge artifacts to foster collaborative activities in professional communities

Abstract

Collaborative problem solving often involves actors with heterogeneous competences or that see a common problem from different perspectives: this can make mutual understanding difficult. The paper presents case studies in different domains where collaboration leverages shared representations, and discusses the main reasons why these representations succeeded in fostering mutual understanding. We observed how the technologies proposed to manage those representations were successful only to the extent they were made able to adapt to the dynamic and open conventions that actors adopted during their activities. The point of the paper is that locality, openness and underspecification are key factors in this process, for their capability to promote tacit knowledge and to let competent actors reach a sufficient level of mutual understanding towards some common goal. The paper proposes a conceptual framework to characterize the notion of knowledge artifact interpreted as a semiotic system where actors can make sense of shared and underspecified representations, and derives from this notion implications for the design of a supportive technology.

Introduction

In the last years we have been involved in three projects whose aim was to analyze work practices in order to support them with a suitable technology. These projects were in three different domains (chemical engineering, software engineering and healthcare) and had to face different knowledge-related problems (knowledge retention in highly competitive markets characterized by high turnover rates; software re-use and cost-quality optimization; continuous improvement of clinical processes and procedures). However the outcomes of the analysis showed a common aspect: all the three communities involved in our studies systematically used some physical artifacts that they had autonomously constructed to make their job easier.

As such, there is little wonder in this phenomenon, as it is a common practice in many work domains for sake of problem solving and coordination of activities (e.g. Carroll, 1989, Button, 1993, Suchman, 1996, Hutchins, 1996, Suchman, 2000). But looking at those artifacts from the representational point of view, that is considering how they played the role of shared representation of some relevant aspects of the related work domain, these artifacts showed some deeper similarities, irrespectively of the different contexts and situations in which their were built and used. This consideration led us to an a posteriori reading of these three experiences to try to understand what these similarities were based on, the nature of the three kinds of representations used therein and their role in the collaborative practices of the related communities.

The paper reports on the outcomes of this second reading of the three experiences described in Bandini et al. (2003b), Bandini and Simone (2006a), and Cabitza et al., 2007, Cabitza et al., 2009a in the aim to identify some design principles that could inspire the digitization of artifacts that play a similar role to that of the artifacts we observed. These outcomes have to be taken as a preliminary result that is not aimed at defining or proposing any universal approach, neither from the theoretical nor from the design point of view. However, these studies offer conceptual tools and a design-oriented approach to similar settings that, we submit, could be profitably used to better understand the nature of user-defined representations for the sake of artifact-based collaboration; in so doing, we believe it could be possible to avoid some mistakes in conceiving technologies that support collaboration just because the phenomenon around their use is not yet deeply understood.

The paper is organized as follows. The next three sections present the case studies with the aim to illustrate the settings and contexts where our observations took place and their elaboration within the main tenets of qualitative research (Miles, 1994) started. To this aim the description of the cases is mainly focused on the uncovered representations and on their usage that was observed during the projects. More details on how the studies have been conducted and on other kinds of considerations (e.g., concerning coordination and knowledge management) can be found in the previous publications mentioned above. On the basis of the presented data the following section characterizes the concept of knowledge artifact capturing the common features of the considered representations: this concept is confronted with other notions proposed in literature to capture the role of artifacts in knowledge work (Kelloway and Barling, 2000). To better understand the nature of the underspecification characterizing representations and its role in collaboration, knowledge artifacts are then interpreted as semiotic systems and underspecification characterized in terms of the basic concepts of such systems. Finally, the concluding sections draw some implication for design and highlight the open issues that will be faced in our future research.