CLIC Speaker Abstracts

Jack Whalen (PARC),November 15, 2002 (Haines 352 - 10AM-12PM).

"Working for design/designing for work: the role of naturalistic research"

This talk will focus on the question, How can naturalistic research on human behavior contribute to the practice of design? I will discuss three projects undertaken in recent years by my colleagues and I, and argue that social scientists interested in 'design' have for the most part limited their attention to problems and issues in technology design (particularly for the workplace), when we need to be concerned instead with the design and deployment of entire socio-technical systems. This requires a different approach to 'the design problem'. I will also discuss the issues that researchers in the human sciences, especially those committed to naturalistic studies, regularly face when working in a technology design center like PARC.