Using actor network to enhance maritime system design

Abstract

Designing a cooperative system in Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) is a description-oriented approach. Maritime engineer emphasizes that such an approach is inadequate to convey ‘how to solve problems’ although it can describe ‘what the problems are’. An approach called the Knowledge Transfer Technique (KTT) has recently been developed with the purpose of bridging the distance between the ‘how’ and the ‘what’ for the maritime engineering community. This article applies KTT to a maritime example in which a CSCW researcher and a maritime engineer cooperate to produce a system framework involving humans and their activities in machinery processes for designing cooperative systems. It highlights the CSCW designer to communicate better with the engineer. In turn, KTT has the potential to aid engineers in understanding how they can effectively implement engineering design in creating products to be used in cooperative material environments.