Concerns at work: Designing useful procedures

The conceptual basis for designing procedures is confused by the problemati cs of characterizing a relation between procedures and work practices. As t hey emerge from scientific management theory, procedures connote a means of rationalizing and controlling work. However, interpretations of the use of procedures reveal differences in emphasis on the work required to relate p rocedures to practice, from comprehending to evaluating appropriateness or reasonableness. These evaluations point to a moral character in this work, which we characterize in terms of workers' concerns. Moreover, as conceptua l differences in emphasis such as these can prove intractable, we argue tha t a more productive approach to resolving the problematics would be to eval uate the usefulness of a sensitivity to concerns in designing procedures. Three brief case studies of the use of procedures in safety-critical settin gs point to workers making judgments when relating procedures to their prac tice, including judgments of the value of the procedures they were using. T hese cases also demonstrated the complexity of concerns that were multiple and interacting and that had spatial and temporal characteristics. A review of approaches to work that inform HCI design suggests that activity-based approaches, which contextualize goals and actions in terms of both origins and personal investment, provide the minimum meaningful context required to accommodate concerns. Finally, we present an analysis of the implementation of medical guidelines in Britain that exemplifies the transformation in thinking required to des ign practically useful procedures: from models of work that emphasize contr ol to those that emphasize commitment, and from conceptualizations of proce dures as rationalizing and controlling to conceptualizations of procedures as educational. This analysis features the sensitivity to concerns in this particular case and draws some suggestive lines from what this case reveals about concerns to the kind of contributions a sensitivity to concerns woul d make to a contextual design process.