Showing papers by "Lucy Suchman published in 2011"

Anthropological Relocations and the Limits of Design

Abstract: This article takes as a touchstone the concept of location as it has been articulated through anthropology’s reflections on its history and positioning as a field, and in relation to shifting engagements with contemporary technoscientific, political, and ethical problems. A second touchstone is one specific anthropological relocation—that is, into worlds of professional technology design. With figures of location and design in play, I describe some perspicuous moments that proved both generative and problematic in my own experience of establishing terms of engagement between anthropology and design. Though design has been considered recently as a model for anthropology’s future, I argue instead that it is best positioned as a problematic object for an anthropology of the contemporary. In writing about design’s limits, my argument is that, like anthropology, design needs to acknowledge the specificities of its place, to locate itself as one (albeit multiple) figure and practice of transformation.

Practice and its Overflows: Reflections on Order and Mess

Abstract: The starting point of this paper is the problem of how STS researchers make the objects of their research, considering that researchers are an integral part of the practices through which their research objects are made A “center of coordination” in an airport is used as an example to show how a schedule, used as an ordering device within the ongoing work, operates at the same time as a form of normative prescription for what the work should come to The schedule demonstrates how prescriptive representations presuppose the work of their enactment, in ways that differ from representations used to describe “natural” events, insofar as the former are constitutive of the processes and practices to which the artifacts are accountable Finally the paper draws on the work of John Law (2004) to show how consistent relations, ie orderings, are maintained through routines that, in producing other relations, constitute mess In this respect, the order created by the researcher in analyzing the situated use of the schedule is not different in kind from the order created by the members’ practices to manage the traffic of planes Keywords Apparatus; center of coordination; normative prescriptions; order/mess; practice

Work practice and technology:A retrospective

Abstract: Preface During the decade from 1989 to 1999, workplace research at PARC was based in the Work Practice and Technology research area. In anticipation of the group's disbanding in 2000, its members organized a symposium under the heading “Work Practice and Technology: The next twenty years of research.” Over one hundred participants attended from North America, Western Europe, Scandinavia, Japan, and Australia. The symposium consisted of one day of panels at Xerox PARC, followed by two days of working groups and celebrations at Half Moon Bay, California. The text that follows is my opening address for the symposium, aimed at providing context for the gathering as well as a brief, retrospective summary of some of the work practice research accomplished during the preceding twenty years at PARC. While references to publications that provide further detail on the studies mentioned have been added, the text has otherwise been left unedited to give a sense for the spirit of the occasion. One inspiration for us in organizing this gathering was the prospect of bringing our various, partially overlapping networks of friends and colleagues interested in work and technology together in one place. So in discussing how best to welcome you all we decided that we had better begin by introducing you to each other. Rather than have you turn to your neighbor and shake hands, or go around the room and have each of you tell your story (though that would be a fascinating event in its own right!), we decided that I should adopt the Danish practice at a large celebratory gathering, wherein the host explains to their guests who don't all know each other how they all came to be there.