March 18, 1990

FOR AS long as there’s been software running on computers, workers have complained about it. The biggest problem, they say, is that it’s designed by programmers who don’t understand the tasks at hand or how those tasks are performed in the real world.

In the late ’60s and early ’70s, Scandinavian researchers, scientists and developers got involved with white- and blue-collar trade unions in Norway, Sweden and Denmark, setting up collaborative projects where technology was co-designed by the people who understood technology and the people who understood the job it was to do.

Citizens successfully lobbied for legislation — called “co-determination” laws — to cement these collaborative projects and insure that workers would continue to have input about how technology was implemented in the workplace.

The discipline that sprang from this research is now called “participatory design,” and it’s gaining cachet in the United States. On March 30 and 31, the Palo Alto-based non-profit Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility is sponsoring a conference on participatory design in Seattle, specifically to explore the use of such techniques here in the States.

The conference is sponsored by CPSR’s Computers in the Workplace Project. Researchers from Palo Alto-based Xerox PARC, Institute for Research on Learning, Hewlett-Packard’s Human-Computer Interaction Department, Mattel Toys, and the University of Colorado will make presentations, as will some of the best-known Scandinavian experts on the topic.
One is Pelle Ehn, associate professor at the Department of Information and Media Science at Denmark’s University of Aarhus, who has done practical research in co-designing systems since the mid-’70s.

“Participatory design concerns questions of democracy, power and control at the workplace,” Ehn says. “In this sense, it is a deeply controversial issue from a management point of view.”

Ellen Bravo, assistant director of 9to5, the National Association of Working Women, will also present at the conference. She says it’s too easy for technology to become counterproductive, especially in cases like the computerized monitoring of employees. But she says not consulting users about software they’ll be using every day can be equally damaging.

“Obviously our members are among the users who aren’t consulted (on product design),” says Bravo. “I don’t have to tell you how much people work on software internal to a company who were never consulted about what they needed. They may not have the know-how to program, but they certainly know how to make it most effective.”

Most co-design projects do involve such custom systems for specific work sites. Though this is a vital area, some researchers are also looking at off-the-shelf software and computer-based appliances sold in the consumer marketplace.

For example, Bonnie Nardi — an anthropologist in Hewlett-Packard’s Human-Computer Interaction Department — is studying spreadsheet users to find out why such products have been so successful with non-programmers.

But the most work to date has been done for specific applications. One of the best ways to see how participatory design happens in practice is to watch a video by San Francisco-based California Newsreel called “Computers in Context,” which details the experiences of Scandinavian co-designers.

One notable example in the film is the Scandinavian airline SAS, which had implemented an “expert system” for its mechanics. Management knew something was wrong when the quality of the work started decreasing. It found the system was so highly mechanized that mechanics never questioned its judgment.

So the mechanics got involved in its re-design. They made more decisions on the shop floor and used the computer to augment those decisions, increasing productivity and cutting down on errors. “A computer can never take over everything,” said one mechanic. “Now that there are greater demands on my judgment, (my job) is more interesting.”

Indeed, the most welcome aspect of participatory design is its practice of “democratizing” work life. In Scandinavia, this is a deliberate social strategy where human resources, not computers, provide the competitive edge in industry.

Such an attitude eliminates one of the most insidious side effects of technology — turning skilled workers into button-pushers. The thought of employees participating in the design of work systems may not be a happy one for a certain strain of manager that’s epidemic in U.S. industry, who prefers to think of workers as expensive and expendable inventory items in the production system. But it does give great hope that skill and pride in one’s work doesn’t have to become extinct.