Coherence: An approach to representing ethnographic analyses in systems design

This article is concerned with how to represent in system design the kinds of features of work settings as reported by ethnographic studies of work. V arious researchers and practitioners have found that ethnomethodological an alyses of work settings can provide useful insights to the work processes a nd settings in which system design is interested. Previously at Lancaster U niversity, we examined ways in which ethnography can be used in the design process and how the results of ethnographic analyses can be presented in su ch a way as to be useful components of the design process. This article ref lects an effort to approach these methodological issues from a different pe rspective. It examines how the lessons learned from ethnographic studies ca n be reflected in the design process itself and in particular how standardi zed design artifacts (e.g., models, documents) can express the type of info rmation that ethnographic studies produce. The article focuses on how ethnographic analyses can influence the main rep resentational artifact in systems design-the model of the system being deve loped. We examine how the Unified Modeling Language for object-oriented des ign can be used to express information about awareness in cooperative syste ms.