Wow, that's been quite a break.

I'm going to call this Season 2 of 1992. Thanks to those of you who stuck around, and welcome to those of you who signed up since the last issue.

Remember the huge craze for design thinking a few years ago? It was everywhere, initially driven by Tim Brown of IDEO and his TED talk and book.

I was an academic when "design thinking" began to break out into the mainstream. Design academics were a bit mystified by it because while it was gratifying for people to be talking about design it all seemed a bit divorced from how designers understand what they do. The ways that design academics talk about design thinking is not the way that Tim Brown does.

Everyone wants best practice. It’s in the name: it’s the best. Who would want second-best practice?

I think uncritical and unexamined acceptance of the idea of “best practice” causes people in organisations to make bad decisions. In this issue, I'm not going to look at decision-making. I'm going to look at the idea of "best practice" through the lens of a very strange book chapter about simple chores assigned to scientists in genetic engineering labs.

The problematic concept of “best practice”

Kathleen Jordan and Michael Lynch wrote about the problems with “best practice” in a book chapter called “The sociology of a genetic engineering technique: Ritual and rationality in the performance of the plasmid prep”. Jordan and Lynch are sociologists of science and technology. They use concepts from sociology to try to understand how science gets done and how technology has a place in the world.

Digital Transformation! It’s been a thing for ages in big legacy enterprises and government. (Universities — it’s coming for you, too.) And yet, it feels new. Consultants are probably in your organisation right now, creating digital transformation strategies.

But computers have been in the enterprise for a long time. For almost as long, people have been asking what it means to have computers in the workplace. Shortly after that we started to ask how computers will change how we work. One of the people who wrote about that in 1992 was Wanda J Orlikowski (who is one of my research heroes).

In the early 90s, Orlikowski conducted an ethnography at a management consulting firm. In this paper Orlikowski calls the firm “Alpha”. At the time of her research, Alpha was about to buy Lotus Notes. Notes is a bit like , except Lotus Notes came out in 1989 and Sharepoint was new in 2001. Some of you are probably aware that Notes is still in use today.

Hello, 1992 readers. Sorry for the drop off in frequency. I my kids got sick, then my wife, then me. Not Covid, just a cold, but it knocked us all around for a while.

Here’s something that I wrote ages ago, when this newsletter was just a twinkle in my eye. You may have seen it on LinkedIn in late 2018.

The next fresh newsletter will be on Lotus Notes, which means it'll really be about digital transformation.

So far, the papers I’ve looked at have been from 1992 but not of 1992. The topics and outcomes could have been from today. Air Traffic Control is still a thing people do, and it’s still a highly collaborative activity. Software can schedule operating rooms but last minute changes still happen. Software support for collaborative work is still frustratingly bad. And most organisations still have an overly rational view of how work gets done.

Today, if you want to speak to someone, you can call their mobile. But who even does that? Text them. Message them in Slack. In the unlikely event you need voice, you’ll arrange a time for a Zoom call. These days, someone’s location doesn’t matter.

In 1992, if you wanted to speak to someone who wasn’t in the same room, you called their fixed line phone from yours. If they worked in a big office and they had lots of meetings, they probably weren’t at their desk. Maybe you left them a voicemail. More likely you left a message with the receptionist. If it was urgent and you asked nicely, the receptionist would go for a walk and see if they could find the person you wanted.

At Olivetti Research in Cambridge, England, Roy Want, Andy Hopper (the lab director at the time), Veronica Felcão and Jonathan Gibbons developed the Active Badge to solve the problem of finding people in indoor spaces like offices.

Why is it so hard to translate research into useful input for product, system or service creation?

This issue we’re looking at two related papers written by a team of researchers from Lancaster University in the UK. Richard Bentley, Tom Rodden, Pete Sawyer and Ian Sommerville were in computing. John Hughes, David Randall and Dan Shapiro were in sociology. One paper has Bentley as the first author and the other has Hughes. For my own convenience and to avoid subjecting you to academic referencing, I’m going to use “Bentley and Hughes” to refer toboth papers.

In 1992, Bentley and Hughes (and their collaborators) were researching how air traffic controllers worked. Controllers use three technologies. First, radar for tracking planes. Second, telephone and radio contact with pilots. And finally, “flight strips” which contain information from the flight database. Each strip represents a flight. Strips get printed out when a plane enters controlled airspace. Controllers work in a team and each one monitors a specific part of the airspace. Each controller has a tray of strips in front of them, representing the planes in their part of the controlled airspace. The work of air traffic control (ATC) involves monitoring the radar for each aeroplane’s dynamic position, using telephone and radio to tell pilots what to do, and using the strips to keep a record of instructions. Controllers talk to many flights so this external and persistent record is crucial. Controllers write on the strips as they issue instructions. As planes move around the airspace, controllers pass strips among the team.

What’s a better chair: this one? Or this one?

What’s a better font: this one? Or this one?

How do you know? Are you so confident in your answer that you’d have no hesitation to impose your taste on other people?

Most of the time, the choices we face as designers aren’t simple selection problems, but are far more complex. They often aren't problems of taste but of practice -- how we perform activities.

Taking CSCW Seriously, by Kjeld Schmidt and Liam Bannon

Working in an office is hard. (Remember working in an office?)

Wait, I'll try again. Working in a team requires dealing with many people. Each person in the team has to understand the project and its priorities. But they also have to understand how everyone else understands the project and priorities.

Thanks to the wonder of the computer age we can now keep all this information organised so everyone is always on the same page for every project.

The Trojan Door, by Susan Leigh Star

What if… computers are bad?

Not in the “are we the baddies” sense. (Though that’s possible, too…)

In the “not always good” sense. Not always useful, sensible, rational.