Interdisciplinarity or Interdisciplinary Theory in CSCW?
Workshop paper for CSCW'92 Workshop on Interdisciplinary Theory for CSCW Design, Oct 1992, Toronto, Canada.
Liam Bannon
Computer Science Dept.
Copenhagen University, Denmark
While debate continues about the core issues in the emergent field of CSCW (Schmidt & Bannon, 1992), few would disagree with the observation that its interdisciplinary nature is a key feature. The attempt to meld viewpoints from such diverse fields as anthropology and software engineering has, however, created some difficulties and confusions. What the product of such melding could or should look like, and indeed, whether the very idea of "melding" different frameworks makes sense, are open to question. At issue is whether CSCW is simply a loose umbrella term which allows for people from a variety of different disciplinary perspectives to put forward their research traditions to a new audience, or whether there is something genuinely new and innovative being achieved through novel "interdisciplinary" research paradigms. If the former, then the best we can hope to achieve is a greater awareness among the CSCW community of the welter of different concepts, terms, and methods of investigation, which exist in the different fields, together with the creation of a forum for discussion concerning how these different disciplinary frameworks might be relevant to the design of computer systems to support cooperative work arrangements. Others are so bold as to believe that there is the genuine possibility for some form of interdisciplinary "wedding" of conceptual frameworks and methodologies that could form a core corpus for researchers who are charting the risky waters of CSCW. Such a vision must be able to answer the persistent criticisms of attempted interdisciplinary endeavours in a number of domains in the past, which point to the incommensurability of perspectives from different fields, and the inevitable dilution of specific conceptual frameworks in the attempt to produce some form of common, unified conceptual framework.
In this position paper, I will briefly explore some of these points and discuss several issues which to my mind are pertinent to the title of our Workshop - Interdisciplinary Theory for CSCW Design - namely, the relation between theory and design practice, the prospects for CSCW as an interdisciplinary enterprise, and the larger issue of whether there can, in general, be such a thing as "interdisciplinary theory". My position on such issues is one that has been influenced by my experience in a related interdisciplinary field, namely human-computer interaction (HCI). While there are differences between HCI and CSCW (Bannon, 1992), there are a number of similarities - a variety of scientific disciplines are involved - both social and technical, there is disagreement about the nature and scope of the field, and the relation between theory and design is problematic. The following discussion picks up on some of these joint concerns. The remainder of this paper thus discusses the following 3 issues in turn:
1) The relation between scientific theory and (design) practice
2) The concept of interdisciplinary theory
3) Prospects for CSCW as an interdisciplinary enterprise
Theory and Practice
A common assumption in science is that the relation between theory and application is linear, namely that theoretical formulations over time give rise to numerous applications in specific domains of endeavour. The problem thus becomes how do we package the science knowledge base appropriately so that it can be useful to people designing applications? Viewing the HCI area, for example, we have recently witnessed much soul-searching among certain researchers due to the paucity of illustrations of this model of innovation, despite a decade of effort. This soul-searching was prompted by the frustration of designers with the lack of useful ideas or concepts emerging from much HCI research work. For example, in a review of Interfacing Thought, (Carroll, 1987) a collection of papers on Cognitive Science and HCI, it was noted that:"....there are no examples of developed systems and no discussion of designing in the "real world" in this collection.......the book will not convince the skeptical designer of the relevance of the cognitive sciences" (Gray & Atwood, 1988). In a more recent collection of papers explicitly focused on this problem of the role of theory in HCI ( Carroll, 1991) researchers take a number of stances. Some attempt to salvage much of the traditional view, but emphasise the need for "bridging" representations between the real world and the extant scientific knowledge base, noting that theory and design are very different activities Barnard (1991) notes that we would need a variety of such bridges, depending on the particular level of theoretical formulation we are dealing with. He notes that currently: "Our ... ability to construct effective bridges across the chasm that separates our scientific understanding and the real world of user behaviour and artifact design clearly falls well short of requirements. " (Barnard, 1991). Pylyshyn (1991) takes this difference to the extreme, noting " practical improvements are rarely related to the scientific theories that the innovators hold - and certainly not to the truth of any such theories".
What this indicates is how far one can go in improving designs with a deep appreciation of the context of use of a system and the tasks users wish to perform (see Bannon & Bødker, 1991). There has coincidentally been an increase of interest in the craft skills and practices of people in work settings, including design practice, in recent years. These detailed observational studies of practice have contributed to our understanding of "theory-in-practice", i.e. how specific theoretical formulations are appropriated and used in particular circumstances, and are important in the long term as they may help us in to design tools or packages for designers that more effectively "package" aspects of the scientific knowledge base that does exist, thus bridging the gap between the worlds of the designers and researchers.
Another who has given up on the role of theory is Landauer (1991). He notes: "For the most part, useful theory is impossible, because the behaviour of human-computer systems is chaotic or worse, highly complex, dependent on many unpredictable variables, or just too hard to understand." Carroll and his colleagues (Carroll, Kellogg, and Rosson, 1991) take a different tack, by arguing that historically our assumption about the role of theory in design can be shown to be incorrect, and exemplify this in HCI with a discussion of the initial emergence of direct manipulation interfaces and their subsequent "explanation" in terms of scientific theory. Rather, the evolution of the HCI field can be seen as a coevolution of tasks and artifacts, with initial analysis of tasks leading to requirements for new artifacts, and subsequent use of these artifacts providing new possibilities and thus new tasks, and so the cycle repeats. By focusing on this task-artifact cycle of development, they develop a framework that interprets artifacts as embodiments of theories, which can be subjected to analysis. In this way, there is still a role for theory, but not in the deductive way described earlier. By focusing in this way on the particulars of a specific artifact and/or setting, we may gain insights which can even lead to revisions of our theoretical frameworks.
A number of authors in the Carroll (1991) collection point to the importance of having an adequate descriptive base for HCI as a prerequisite for more formal theory development. This need for a better descriptive and taxonomic base is also true for CSCW. Work such as Schmidt (1990) is thus an important aspect in the development of CSCW. There is a need for higher-level descriptions and representations of cooperative work forms and settings, so that comparisons can be made between different situations, as a step in the process of abstraction and generalisation. I believe this whole discussion is very relevant to CSCW, as once again, practitioners in CSCW are seeking for insight into how to design new applications, and the old assumption about theory-driven application is still around. The above discussion should at the very least open our eyes to the dubious nature of any such enterprise. Indeed, maybe the very idea of having a theory that directly informs CSCW design practice needs to be questioned. Perhaps a more fruitful approach for the field would be to concentrate on generating and evaluating more adequate descriptions of our domain of interest and subsequent abstractions over these descriptions, as a prelude to the development of manipulable formalisms and theories.
Interdisciplinary Theory - an (un)Holy Grail?
While both HCI and CSCW are touted as interdisciplinary research areas, exactly what this means is often unclear. Certainly, a variety of different disciplines can contribute to these areas, utilising different conceptual frameworks, methods, etc., but the sense in which this multidisciplinary research can be said to be truly interdisciplinary is open to question. Some have attempted to construct a hierarchical or levels framework that allows for a family of theories - with different concepts - to deal with different aspects of a common object of research. Indeed, we have attempted to use such frameworks in order to structure some of the discussion within the HCI field (Kuutti& Bannon, 1992). While such frameworks can allow one to work with different conceptual frameworks on the same object, I believe that it still requires adherence to some minimal shared perspective on how one perceives or constructs the world. A more radical approach to the concept of interdisciplinary theory has been the attempt to "wed" different disciplines together - for instance, by constructing common dictionaries of terms and concepts which the different disciplines are supposed to utilise, or making mappings across conceptual frameworks, thus attempting to ensure some "shared understanding" among researchers. I have yet to see any exemplary projects that have both argued for this approach and - more importantly - have produced worthwhile results, when viewed from each of the participating disciplines.
At times, it appears that discussions of the need for interdisciplinarity revolves around the utility of a variety of different instruments or methods for gathering data, but it is important to note that a disciplinary perspective is not defined simply by the methods used. The recent interest in ethnographic field studies in CSCW is a case in point. While anyone can rather quickly become proficient at interviewing or taking notes, the essence of this approach lies in the perspective one adopts in framing the research, the way one chooses to interpret the findings, the authorities one invokes to support a particular interpretation, etc. - in sum, the whole conceptual framework within which one's approach to the world is framed. Note that the argument here is not that different disciplines are unable to contribute to a joint project, but that the aim of building some form of theoretical base to subsume a variety of conceptual frameworks from different disciplines implies a fundamental misunderstanding of different disciplinary perspectives. These different positions emerge out of different backgrounds, research traditions, perspectives, etc. which are not commensurable. For example, attempting to build some form of hybrid unified framework to encompass an empirical functionalist systems approach with an interpretivist constructivist approach seems doomed to failure, as the issue is not simply over different meanings to terms, but relates to fundamentally different World views. Certainly, theories can be broadened to include factors or circumstances previously omitted --we can already see how CSCW concerns have prompted cognitive scientists to pay more attention to how artifacts change tasks (Norman, 1991) and to the distributed nature of cognition, across people and tasks -- but such extensions do not thereby subsume other theoretical frameworks.
The main point I wish to make here is that interdisciplinarity should nor be conflated with interdisciplinary theory. The latter concept is, to my mind, fundamentally flawed and posits a Holy Grail that is inherently unattainable.
Prospects for interdisciplinarity in CSCW
Despite the pessimism expressed above concerning both the utility of theory, and the (im)possibility of interdisciplinary theory per se, this does not therefore imply a pessimism concerning prospects for interdisciplinary studies in CSCW. One of the hallmarks of good CSCW work is how it attempts to bridge the gap between social science and computer science issues. The argument is not that one should leave behind one's particular disciplinary concepts and methods, indeed, it is important that work is concretely anchored within a well-defined framework, but that if, for example, ethnographic work is to count as CSCW it must at least attempt to address software design issues, e.g. to the extent of focusing attention on crucial aspects of human interaction that need to be supported via any technology. Likewise, computer science work should be informed by what is known of how people actually work together, and show how the technology in fact supports features of this work. This is the challenge facing people from a variety of different backgrounds who wish to be active in CSCW. Of course, such work cannot be accomplished overnight. A certain amount of mutual learning between people working on common projects who bring their different perspectives and skills to the table is required. This process of learning is currently underway in CSCW. Simplified views of human work activity and the potential for automating it have been replaced by an understanding on the part of information systems developers of the need to explore the social world of work. This "turn to the social" has lead to a process of mutual learning between computer and social scientists (Sommerville et al., 1992). In turn, certain social scientists in CSCW, for example those involved in detailed ethnographic studies in a particular setting, are having to take seriously issues concerning the generalizability of their findings, and their implications for technology support.
I believe that we are currently at a cross-roads in the CSCW field. On the one hand, there is a danger of once again splitting into 2 camps, those interested primarily in the technology issues, and those primarily interested in the social world in which people use computer systems. This defaults to the status quo as regards existing disciplinary boundaries. In essence, it signals the failure of the very enterprise of CSCW. On the other hand, there is the prospect of defining a new common object of research, that of those interested in understanding the computer support requirements of cooperative work (Schmidt & Bannon, 1992). Such a focus of research allows for a multiplicity of conceptual frameworks and methods to be employed, but they must be shown to address this central issue. It is within this "shared" framework that we can attempt to resolve local conflicts that may arise concerning usage of terms, etc., between different disciplines, rather than attempting to do so in general. Thus, while we may not be able to construct an interdisciplinary theory out of this work, the fruits of such interdisciplinary collaboration in CSCW, in the form of greater understanding of alternative conceptual frameworks, and insight into the worlds of work and of software support for the researchers, seems worth the effort.
References
Norman, D. (1991) Cognitive Artifacts. In In J.M. Carroll (Ed.) (1991) op cit.
Pylyshyn, Z. (1991) Some remarks on the theory practice gap. In J.M. Carroll (Ed.) (1991) op cit.