Sara Eriksén
Globalization and Genius Loci
From Intentional Spaces to Purposeful Places

"Don’t lose sight of the desk-top", my supervisor told me, as I struggled to finish my doctoral thesis in Informatics last fall. My desktop had, by then, been literally out of sight beneath heaps of books and piles of papers for more than a year. What he meant, however, was that the focus in my writing should stay where it had been in my research work from the start: on the evolving work practices in front offices of public service one-stop shops.

Thus I come to this meeting with a very near-sighted view of ITC in use. I’ve looked at screens and keyboards and telephones on people’s desks, and how they’re being used in the daily work that goes into getting the daily work done. In more workplaces than my own, I’ve seen heaps of books and piles of papers, walls speckled with collages of Post-It notes and Xerox copies of important timetables etc, and seemingly endless shelves full of loose-leaf binders. And I’ve listened to informal talk at work.

In my case studies, I’ve mainly relied on ethnographic fieldstudies. These have included work place observations, interviews, workshops with people who work in front offices, and video-recordings of front office work, which have been used for interaction analysis. What I expected to see, when I started, was the rapid development of computer support for front office work. One-stop shops, or citizens’ offices, as they are called in Sweden, were a novelty here in 1992. There was much talk of integrating specialized administrative systems used in different parts of public administration and successively developing a new generation of customer/client-friendly applications which everyone in the organization, as well as its clients, could benefit from.

While waiting for the rapid worldwide ICT development to materialize via the computers on the desktops I was focusing, I studied front office work practices. Remarkably slowly, it dawned on me that much of the work being done was done around, rather than through, the computers.

What was wrong? What was I actually seeing, and why did it take me so long to see it? As I moved closer and closer to the desk-top, peering near-sightedly at what was going on in front of my very nose, it seemed as though the work tasks I was trying to focus got fuzzier and fuzzier, and finally dissolved into work practices – a constantly on-going construction of the organization of every-day work. At this level, the computer software was not very supportive. It was designed to support work tasks, not work practices. Once this was caught sight of, it became obvious, too, that there was a much-felt want of local resources for continual tuning and design of ICT in use.

New information technology is developing faster than the models, metaphors and methods in use for conceptualizing the sharing and managing of information in organizations, in communities and in society in general. The way we utilize information technology today does not seem to succeed in supporting the everyday work practices through which organizations accomplish their work. Based on the results of a research project about skill, cooperation and computer support in public service one-stop shops, I have tried to find alternative metaphors for understanding the constructive aspects of front office work practices. One hypothesis is, that it is valuable not only to be aware of multiperspectivity as an issue, but also to make use of it in design. A problem here is that many traditional research methods, as well as most methods for systems development, are designed to diminish rather than make use of ambiguity and diversity. I have found it useful to introduce the metaphor of inverted indexicality of language, in order to conceptualize the construction of meaning in action. New ways of conceptualizing IT management ‘on the shop floor’ – including design issues – are much needed. Metaphors like ‘the art of IT management’, ‘gardening’ and ‘caring for’ are indicative of the issues at stake.

Of course, for a while, I lost sight of the desktop. There, after all, among the piles of books, were Wittgenstein, von Wright, Anscombe. Going way back, there was Aristotle’s practical syllogism, showing how being aware of the interrelatedness of the choice of general premise and the choice of action – including the action itself – means taking responsibility for the intentionality of your own actions. It is this interrelatedness, once caught sight of, which offers us the possibility of moving from intentional spaces – representations of plans, whether daydreams budgets, or shopping-lists – to purposeful places, where those representations become a part of our 'inner picture’ (metaphorically speaking) and we can recognize, and realize in action, what they are meant for, and how they are meant to be used.

There is a connection, here, with desktops and computers, IT management and developing on-line information systems for public service. Through continued research work in various projects such as ATTACH (Advanced Trans-European Telematics Applications for Community Help, a three-year EC-project concerning the development of multi-media applications for information kiosks which ended in December 1998) and One-stop Service, an on-going regional project here in the county of Blekinge, I have come to see how central genius loci - the spirit of the place, the meaningful, lived-in world – is to design for actual use.

Today, we design technology to support intentional spaces. But it’s in purposeful places that things get done.