Practice-Based Computing: Empirically Grounded Conceptualizations Derived from Design Case Studies

Abstract

The introduction of IT has changed the way we live in many ways. Historically, it can even be argued that socially embedded applications of information technology challenge and change practices to an extent rarely seen before with any other type of technological artefacts. If these IT artefacts have strong and recurrent impacts on people’s lives, we need to reconsider design practice artefacts which allow for anticipating use practices and bring together inspirational creativity with evaluative methods. Approaches such as Participatory Design (Greenbaum and Kyng 1991) and User‐Driven Innovation (von Hippel 2005) have already significantly increased the level of involvement of users and their fields of practice into IT development and have strengthened the role of ethnographic methods as well as the importance of methods providing direct user feedback. But even a strong component of domain analysis or user participation does not warrant an accurate anticipation of the changes in social practices resulting from new technological artefacts or infrastructures. Moreover, the immaterial nature of software contributes to its application beyond the originally intended context. The material and social foundations of IT usage have significantly changed over the past two decades. Technologically, the standardization of communication interfaces, the increase of bandwidth and speed of internet connections and their ubiquitous availability have connected more and more devices with each other. At a social level this has also created stronger connections between professional and private domains and practices, offering new room to adapt these practices and re‐negotiate their relations and compositions. These developments have made us now look at ecosystems (Draxler et al. 2015) or infrastructures (Star and Ruhleder 1996) of technology‐based practices. With regard to methods, EUSSET’s research agenda would benefit from a convergence of a broadly defined research program which looks at technology development as well as scenarios of usage and accumulates results in various ways, bridging the gap between a simple ‘technology‐in‐practice’ perspective and a ‘technology‐based practice change’ perspective. We need to consider how to carefully transfer emerging design concepts, IT artefacts, and pattern of appropriation derived in a specific context to other fields of application. We also need to better understand how to transfer findings gained with the design and appropriation of one artefact towards that of another, related one. In this paper we will outline a research program, called practice‐based computing, which suggests collecting a corpus of highly contextualized design case studies and supports the transferability of insights by comparative concept building on top of these cases.