The politics of design

The three feature articles in this section provide an opening into an important and increasingly contentious area in computer systems development, namely, the methods used in understanding, representing and modeling work processes and practices. Suchman describes part of the problem as the "relation between normative accounts of how work gets done and actual practice." The arguments raised are of a fundamental and radical character, as they do not involve simple debate about the adequacy of any particular representational formalism, but call into question the perspectives underlying particular methods and techniques of making work visible, as a prelude to designing computerbased systems to support the work.