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Building bridges: negotiating the gap between work practice and technology design

The underlying premise of this paper is that the defining constraint in the design of technology to enable people in different physical spaces to work together is the essential corporeality of human cognition. Its empirical basis is a long-term field study of cooperative design in a small distributed company. The paper is not a descriptive account of the work practices of the designers but instead structures the results of a field study in such a way that they might bridge, or reduce, the gap between the description of the work and the design of technology to support that work. The central conclusion from the field study was that the cooperative design of a software product was enabled and achieved by the work the designers did communicating with each other. The basic argument of this paper is that what needs to be supported, mediated and enabled by CSCW technology used to support cooperative design over distance is the mutual perception, for the actor and others, of the embodied actions of the participants in the process. These actions are considered as classes of cognitive practices that are simultaneously available to perceptions of the actor and others in a shared physical workspace. The public availability of these actions to the perceptions of the participants in a cooperative process enables their communicative functions. A taxonomy of embodied actions is defined that identifies and describes the embodied actions of the designers that enabled a cooperative design process. It is presented as a bridging structure between the field study of cooperative work and the design of technology that might support that work over distance.