fyi Barry ___________________________________________________________________ Barry Wellman Professor of Sociology NetLab Director wellman@chass.utoronto.ca http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman Centre for Urban & Community Studies University of Toronto 455 Spadina Avenue Toronto Canada M5S 2G8 fax:+1-416-978-7162 ------------------------------------------------------------------- *** Now Out: _The Internet in Everyday Life_ *** Barry Wellman & Caroline Haythornthwaite, editors Oxford: Blackwell, 2002 ___________________________________________________________________ Of possible interest to industry and academia....
International Summer School on
HUMAN CENTERED DESIGN of KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS
August 18-22, 2003, Boussens, France
Organized by The European Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Engineering
eurisco International
http://www-eurisco.onecert.fr/News/hcdkms03.htm (soon)
PURPOSE The aim of the International Summer School on Human-Centered Design of Knowledge Management Systems is to enable participants to learn about work practice and the behavior of people in organizations, usability and usefulness of knowledge management processes and tools, socio-cultural issues in virtual worlds, communication, cooperation and coordination. This will be achieved by teaching the basic concepts and methods of managing human-centered design projects by using knowledge management methods and tools through a five-day international summer school using a mixture of tutorials, lectures, group exercises and discussions.
BACKGROUND The theme for this International Summer School is Human-Centered Design of Knowledge Management Systems (HCDKMS'03). It reflects the growing and universal influence of Information Technology (IT) on the development of systems in industry and the use of these systems in a wide variety of organizations. Among relevant industrial sectors are aerospace, telecommunications, medicine, nuclear energy, transport, chemical and food industries. HCDKMS'03 will develop a system level view of Knowledge Management (KM) in various types of groups ranging from teams to organizations to communities of practice. Various viewpoints will be developed covering safety, security, reliability, comfort, usability, usefulness, and acceptability of KM tools and organizational setups. KM is not simply a property of an individual person, but a relation between a person and task demands set within an organizational context. Organizational context is dynamic since people's skills and knowledge are constantly evolving resulting in the emergence of new practices. The design of increasingly information-intensive systems requires knowledge about the decision-making process itself. Experience feedback permits organizations to learn from operational incidents and accidents. Key issues here include how to understand experience in terms that can be used to change practices, and how to design channels for the communication of representations of operational experience. Taking KM seriously requires understanding, co-designing, and testing integrated KM systems and organizational setups concurrently. The design of KM systems thus requires involvement and knowledge sharing among people with different sorts of expertise. HCDKMS'03 will provide a wide range of expertise including human-computer interaction (HCI), computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW), artificial intelligence (AI), knowledge-based systems (KBS), sociology and human factors. HCDKMS'03 will explore the current solutions and on-going work on the way groups take and should take into account organizational issues of workplace automation, people and organizational models, and the effects of incrementally-intrusive virtual environments on work practices. HCDKMS'03 will leave plenty of time for participants to explore their own work practice using information technology and designing automation. Lecturers will provide state-of-the-art knowledge and know-how on the evolution of technology and the emergence of work practices.
WHO SHOULD PARTICIPATE HCDKMS'03 is aimed at people from industry and academia who in their line of work are involved with or responsible for designing and implementing knowledge management solutions in their everyday environments. This includes system designers, system analysts, technical managers, design team leaders, human factors specialists, etc. Participants should have some experience with at least one of the following topics: human factors; engineering and/or design; information technology; documentation; resource management; organizational issues; database management and/or use; or project management.
LECTURERS HCDKMS'03 will be taught by the following international team of lecturers:
Guy Boy, PhD, President of the European Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Engineering (EURISCO International), France.
Jonathan Grudin, PhD, Senior Researcher in the Adaptive Systems and Interaction Group at Microsoft Research and Affiliate Professor in the University of Washington Information School, USA.
Robert De Hoog, PhD, Professor of Information and Knowledge Management at the University of Twente and Associate Professor of Social Science Informatics (SWI) at the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Kari Kuutti, PhD, Professor in the Department of Information Processing Science at the University of Oulu, Finland.
Dan Shapiro, Professor and Head of the Department of Sociology at Lancaster University, UK.
COURSE CONTENT Co-Adaptation of People and Technology - Guy Boy Socio-technical systems of our post-industrial era embed their own internal cognitive mechanisms and behavior. New information technology has induced new practices and human roles. The resulting co-adaptation of people and technology will be analyzed in the light of various theories of human cognition. We will analyze various aspects of human cognition embedded into artifacts. Even if they do not use the same kinds of tools and practices, all civilizations need to manage the knowledge that they produce and use. These tools can be physical or conceptual. For a very long period of time, the Art of Memory was used to manage knowledge. Knowledge transfer was essentially based on oral transmission within small groups. Printing started to extend knowledge transfer to larger groups. Descartes created a method that revolutionized knowledge management reducing most problems to mathematical equations that are possible to solve by definition. The fact that Descartes' method worked successfully in the material world tremendously influenced the twentieth century because it was almost totally technology-oriented. It is amazing to observe that the computer, the ultimate production of Descartes' method, suddenly rehabilitates the Art of Memory because the materialistic approach to the world is no longer sufficient. The Web recreates artificial villages (communities) where people can communicate almost exactly as their ancestors communicated in their small villages. We discuss a dual problem in cognitive science that opposes a classical scientific approach to an experiential one, and some of its potential impacts on life support systems such as human/organizational learning and human-centered design.
Human-Centered Design: Taking Seriously Human Factors in Engineering Requires New Organizational Setups - Guy Boy For the last decade, most organizations developing or using safety-critical systems needed to implement strategies to improve human reliability. Human factors teams were developed. Engineers were trained in human-centered design (HCD). However, without an appropriate organizational setup, HCD is very difficult to achieve properly. In this lecture, we will review the concepts of traceability, experience feedback, articulation work, organizational memory and change management. These concepts will be used to analyze information technology that is currently used in large organizations for knowledge and information exchange. In any organization, human factors are not only a target for improving the use of products, but also for development processes themselves and their too often complex articulations. In particular, engineers produce a large amount of documents and undocumented knowledge-this will be further analyzed for the sake of improving engineering processes. The concept of active documents will be presented together with a methodology grounded in the cognitive function analysis of organizational setups and product requirements. In particular, the concurrent development of artifacts (products) and their documentation (operational support as well as evaluation and design rationales) will be presented as a support to participatory design and traceability. Design support tools will be presented. Guy Boy
Important Emerging Patterns of Technology Use in Organizations - Jonathan Grudin One important change in the use of software in many organizations is that it has spread vertically as well as horizontally. "Managers don't type" was once the rule, but increasingly they do use software. As a result, applications that are widely used in organizations have at least three different patterns of use: one for individual contributors, one for managers, and one for executives. Optimal use within each group is shaped by activity and incentive structures. Within each group, interaction leads to the adoption of the same features and conventions. Some choices are dictated by efficiency and others are arbitrary but better when everyone works the same (it doesn't matter which side of the road we drive on as long as we all drive on the same side). Another consequence of this change is that in the past, managers were trailing adopters-individual contributors adopted hands-on use of email, word, and browsers first. Today managers may be early adopters of some technologies. This has subtle but significant consequences for design and deployment. In general, when designing, acquiring, or supporting such an application, the best approach could be to treat it as three distinct applications. Failure to do so results in problems and lost opportunities. The applications discussed include email, shared calendars, browsers, document databases, application-sharing, desktop videoconferencing, and team workspaces.
Streaming Media Studies of MSR Prototype Systems - Jonathan Grudin The Microsoft Research Collaborative and Multimedia Systems Group focused on making audio and video as versatile as print. Areas of experimentation include low-cost capture of audio and video, multimedia browsing and skimming, tele-presentation, and collaborative annotation of multimedia content. In order to understand the behavioral and social factors that are critical to the success of such technologies, we have conducted numerous experiments with prototype systems. These include detailed analysis of ongoing use of multimedia within our company, experimental use of our technologies in internal training courses, laboratory studies, and trials conducted jointly with university partners. I will review this work, aspects of which have been published in over twenty papers in conferences on multimedia, human-computer interaction, computer supported cooperative work, and the world wide web. I will also describe some work on notification and awareness, technologies that we see interacting with multimedia in future office and mobile settings.
Knowledge Management and Learning - Robert de Hoog In order to understand the meaning and scope of knowledge management systems, there is a need for a firm grasp of conceptual underpinnings of knowledge management proper. This lecture will start with an interactive session in a game-like format where participants play the knowledge management role. Based on the experiences from this session a conceptual frame for knowledge management will be developed that can act as the basis for human-centered aspects in knowledge management. These aspects are visible in two distinct models: a knowledge management model that can be seen as a procedural model of how to perform knowledge management and a process model of a knowledge intensive organization. Both models rely strongly on human actions, perspectives and values. The process model will show what knowledge processes are important in an organization, how these knowledge processes can influence key performance indicators and which interventions can improve knowledge processes. These interventions are to a large extent non-technical in the sense that they rarely rely on information systems alone. Effective interventions are mainly combinations of human, technological and organizational actions. As both models are incorporated in a simulation environment for learning knowledge management not only the structure but also the behavior of the models will be shown, explored and discussed. Through this discussion the session will refer back to the experiences from the initial activity. Finally attention will be paid to learning knowledge management and the effectiveness of simulation micro-worlds. This will include the benefits and the dangers of exercising in a simplified simulated world. Human factors influencing the design and fielding of this kind of knowledge management learning systems will be presented.
Knowledge Modeling for Knowledge Management - Robert de Hoog As knowledge management is supposed to deal with knowledge, sooner or later it will face in theory as well in practice the question of how to describe knowledge. Before you can manage something you must have an idea what this "something" is. This question can be addressed from an epistemological perspective, but most of the time this will lead to un-decidable definition problems. A more pragmatic approach is to focus on modeling/describing a configuration of competences, information and data that one chooses to call knowledge. These descriptions/models can be built at different levels of generality, depending on the goals one wants to achieve. The range is from rather general knowledge description frames to detailed knowledge models. In this entire range the role of human factors is crucial, the more because most of the time knowledge is strongly tied to human agents. Nevertheless it is possible to "disembody" (parts of) knowledge from the human agent, as has been shown by several developments in Artificial Intelligence. For this a more in-depth modeling of knowledge is needed. This modeling approach will be demonstrated by using elements from the well known CommonKADS methodology. The strength of this methodology is that it not only focuses on the knowledge per se, but also on individual and organizational factors influencing the deployment of automated knowledge (as happens in expert or knowledge based systems). In order to become a bit more acquainted with this methodology participants will have the opportunity to build a set of models for an example domain. These models will be presented and reviewed in order to promote the sharing of modeling experiences and insights
Community Knowledge and Information Technology - Kari Kuutti The notion of "community knowledge" has gained increasing interest during the last years in areas like community computing, knowledge management, organizational memory and various sub-domains of computer-supported cooperative work. What is actually meant by the term "community knowledge" is often not clear at all. The purpose of the talk is to give an overview on the variety of ongoing research and to suggest an orienting framework for the field. The talk will give some reasons why community knowledge may be becoming popular just now, present an overview how widely and under how different headings related issues are discussed (and give some pointers to the relevant literature), suggest a framework to orient in the field and explore what might be the useful relation between community knowledge and information technology. The focus of the talk is not in the technical systems, but in conceptual, psychological, social, and organizational issues related in generating, maintaining and sharing community knowledge.
Knowledge Management, Organizational Innovation and Organizational Inertia - Kari Kuutti The lecture discusses the role of knowledge management in organizational innovation and the problems and obstacles in the practical implementation of such innovations. It emphasizes the importance of knowledge tools in situations where a change of processes, ways of working, is not enough but where the whole object of the work is changing and a more radical reorientation of the work is needed. A knowledge tool does not itself automatically bring such a change, but to be efficient the change must be innovated by the participants themselves. A suitable knowledge tool may help participants to grasp better the changing new object of their work, and thus support efficiently the innovation process. An illustrative example case is reviewed where a new, locally developed knowledge management tool enabled an organizational innovation that solved a severe reorientation problem for one part of an organization. The attempts to spread the innovation further within the organization were, however, not so successful and were further actively resisted and blocked by the parent organization.
Ethnography, Participation and the Co-Realization of Systems - Don Shapiro Although it is still a minority and a specialized approach, ethnographic contributions to systems design have achieved increasing credibility. With them, we learn about the communities of practice through which work is accomplished in ways that are not available through other methods. Similarly, participatory design retains its claim to our attention, through emphasizing that immediate users are the best custodians of their own knowledge practices. Recently, teams of designers that incorporate ethnographic and participatory approaches have turned their attention to much more ambitious systems. In the past, they have focused on making appropriate uses of readily-available technology in particular settings. Now, they are attempting to forge large-scale collaborative environments using-and indeed creating-very advanced technologies. This places different demands on how such design teams work. All of the contributors, participatory designers, ethnographers and user-practitioners-need to embark on a continuing involvement in a journey whose destination is unclear. This may perhaps be better described as a process of 'co-realization' than as participatory or ethnographically-informed design. It may also involve new techniques such as 'future workshops' to cope with the advanced technologies and holistic environments that are involved. This lecture will explore some current examples of this process and its outcomes.
Spatial Computing and the Practice of Real Virtuality - Dan Shapiro Ethnographically informed approaches to knowledge and knowledge management, developed within Sociology and Anthropology, emphasize the generation and deployment of knowledge as a situated and collaborative achievement. They are suspicious of approaches to knowledge that regards it as a 'thing' that can be externalized, stored, assembled and applied independently of the circumstances and practices of its use. Hence they are cautious of attempts to categorize, invoke and manipulate knowledge in terms of its apparent logical or informational properties. This would seem to make systems design for knowledge management impossible, since what systems do is exactly to apply logical and specifiable processes to their objects. This lecture explores some of our recent attempts to finesse this problem. We draw inspiration from the ways in which people arrange and manipulate their working materials in their physical environment, so that the organization and 'flow' of their materials produces a context of 'knowledge' for the tasks to hand, both for themselves, and as a means of communication and collaboration with others. We are developing systems that use advanced technologies to create collaborative environments for digital materials and for mixing and interpenetrating digital and physical materials. The main emphasis is on how multiple environments of this kind are produced by users as a trace of their work itself, rather than on the basis of the properties of the materials. The 'sense-making' is done by users supported by the environment rather than by the system. These mixed spatial environments do not simply mirror physical ones, but have complex properties in use of their own.
LECTURERS GUY BOY is President and Director of the European Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Engineering (EURISCO International). He was a Principal Investigator and Group Leader (Advanced Interaction Media) at NASA Ames Research Center for 5 years. He spent 10 years at the Office National d'Etudes et de Recherches Aérospatiales (French NASA) as a research scientist and principal investigator. His research is in Human-Centered Design (HCD) of safety-critical dynamic systems. He is currently working on the development of methods and techniques that improve traceability of design decisions and participatory design. From 1994 to 1996, he was the Scientific Coordinator of the European Network RoHMI (Robust Human-Machine Interaction) gathering 11 European research laboratories, and sponsored by the CEC DG XII. Since 1995, he has directed a series of industrial summer schools on human-centered automation, human-centered design of organizational memory systems and design for safety. From 1995 to 1999, he served as Executive Vice Chair of the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) SIGCHI Executive Committee. He is currently involved in the scientific coordination of the WISE IST European project (Web-enabled Information Services for Engineering).
JONATHAN GRUDIN has been a Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research since 1998, working in the Collaborative and Multimedia Systems and the Adaptive Systems and Interaction groups. Prior to that he was Professor of Information and Computer Science at University of California, Irvine. He has also taught in Computer Science and Engineering departments at Aarhus University, Keio University, and the University of Oslo, and is now Affiliate Professor in the University of Washington Information School. He previously worked at the MCC consortium in Austin, Texas, at Wang Laboratories, and at the UK Medical Research Council Applied Psychology Unit after receiving his Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology at UC San Diego, working with Donald Norman. He is Editor in Chief of ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction and on the editorial boards of several other journals and book series, including Human-Computer Interaction, Computer Supported Cooperative Work, and Information Systems Research, leading journals in their areas. He co-wrote and edited the widely used Readings in Human-Computer Interaction: Toward the New Millenium. Active in both human-computer interaction and computer supported cooperative work since these fields emerged, he has published over 100 papers on a range of topics. For the past ten years, his two primary research topics have been the adoption and use of technology in organizations, and the design and use of multimedia systems.
ROBERT DE HOOG is Professor of Information and Knowledge Management at Twente University, and Associate Professor of Social Science Informatics at the University of Amsterdam. Since the mid 1980's he has been involved in many projects in the area of artificial intelligence, expert systems, knowledge based information retrieval and knowledge management. His most recent projects are the EU funded KITS projects which has built a comprehensive knowledge management learning simulation game and the METIS project which focuses on knowledge mapping techniques and methods using different ontologies. He has published more than 100 papers on the topics mentioned above and is co-author of the book entitled Knowledge Engineering and Management: the CommonKADS Methodology, published by MIT Press in 2000.
KARI KUUTTI is Professor of Human-Computer Interaction and Group Technology in at the University of Oulu, Finland and leads the INTERACT research group. He was previously a Professor of Human-Computer Interaction and usability at the Helsinki University of Technology. He has published over 90 papers on HCI, Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, product concept development, and organizational learning. Professor Kuutti was the program co-chair of the NordiCHI02 conference and is general co-chair of theECSCW03 conference. He is on the editorial board of the Journal of Cognitive Technology, the Journal of Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, and the forthcoming Journal of Communities and Technologies. He has given tutorials on community knowledge both in CSCW and ECSCW conferences. His central research area is computer support of individual and cooperative sense-making in design processes.
DAN SHAPIRO is Professor of Sociology and currently Head of Department at Lancaster University in the UK. He is co-author of several books on social and spatial restructuring and on the use and design of information systems. He has written and researched widely on ethnography and work practice, on participatory design, on computer-supported cooperative work, and on the politics and theory of interdisciplinary design. His research has been funded by the European Union under Frameworks 4 and 5, by the UK Economic and Social Research Council, and the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. His research projects have included information systems in Air Traffic Control, in the Police Service, in architecture and in landscape architecture. He is currently working on a project on spatial computing for the aesthetic design professions as part of the EU Fututre and Emerging Technologies 'Disappearing Computer' program.
COURSE LOCATION HCDKMS'03 will take place at the Hotel Le Tolosan, Boussens, France, located at 30 minutes from Toulouse. The Hotel Le Tolosan, in the foothills of the Pyrénées, offers a breath-taking setting for all kinds of open-air activities, including a three hole golf course and driving range, squash and tennis courts, gym and sauna.
COURSE FEES AND PAYMENT The fee for Human-Centered Design of Knowledge Management '03 is 2200 Euros. This includes five days of lectures, course material, coffee breaks, full room and board in single accommodation at the Hotel Le Tolosan, from dinner on Sunday evening17/08 to Friday 22/08. Payment may be made by cheque in Euros made out to EURISCO International or by bank transfer mentioning HCDKMS'03 and your name. Please inform your bank that transfer fees are to be paid by the issuer. Due to the nature of this summer school, the number of participants will be limited to 50. Participants will be accepted on a first come, first served basis.
REGISTRATION DEADLINE Application for registration must be received before May 1st, 2003. Full course fees must be paid to the HCDKMS'03 Office by June 30th, 2003.
ACCOMPANYING PERSONS A limited number of accompanying persons can be housed at the course site. There is no charge for accompanying persons, but additional expenses (accommodation and food) must be paid directly to the hotel. Further details can be obtained from the summer school office; early notification is required.
FURTHER INFORMATION For further information check the HCDKMS'03 web site at http://www-eurisco.onecert.fr/News/hcdkms03.htm or contact Helen Wilson at the summer school office:
HCDKMS'03 OFFICE European Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Engineering (EURISCO International) 4 Avenue Edouard Belin 31400 Toulouse, France Tel: +33 (0)5 62 17 38 38Fax: +33 (0)5 62 17 38 39 E-mail: wilson@onecert.fr - http://www-eurisco.onecert.fr/News/hcdkms03.htm
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-- **************************************************************** Prof. Paul Milgram Dept. Mechanical & Industrial Engineering, University of Toronto milgram@mie.utoronto.ca Tel/Fax: 416-978-3662 http://etclab.mie.utoronto.ca