Designing interactions

Traditionally information systems are designed around an idealized model of the task that needs to be accomplished, and failure in system performance is explained away by blaming human social and cultural ‘barriers’ to technology adoption. In this world, the barrier of human frailty always impedes the newly engineered system. The design of the computational machinery is the scientific high ground, and understanding the mess of implementation in the real world is left to ‘soft’ social science and happenstance. But people are part of the system. The web of interactions needed to make anything work in a complex organization always involves humans solving problems with limited resources and working around imperfect processes. Designing the technological tools that humans will use, independent of the way that the tools will impact the organization, only optimizes local task-specific solutions, and ignores global realities. The biggest information repository in most organizations sits within the heads of those who work there, and the largest communication network is the web of conversations that binds them. Together, people, tools and conversations-that is the ‘system’. Consequently, the design of information and communication systems must also include the people who will use them. We must therefore design interactions that reflect the machinery of human thought and communication, sometimes mediated by communication channels, sometimes in partnership with computational agents.