… an actor, or a group of actors, already works with many tools, accounts and agents, and the artifact being made will join that set rather than replace it.

Problem

Work usually runs across several tools, and moving it between them is left to the actors: exporting, copying, retyping. Each transfer can lose information and leaves copies that diverge. Particular people usually do this work, and it often carries checks and agreements that are not visible in the data being moved.

Solution

Design the artifact as one member of the set of tools its actors already use. Let work move in and out by reference where possible, let a group act as a group, and let an agent the actor brings work with the artifact.

Resources & references

• Jung, Stolterman, Ryan, Thompson & Siegel (2008) Toward a framework for ecologies of artifacts: a person’s ecology as every artifact they own, have access to and use
• Bødker & Klokmose (2012) Dynamics in artifact ecologies: how an ecology moves between unsatisfactory, excited and stable states, and how the artifact in focus changes with purpose
• Lyle, Korsgaard & Bødker (2020) What’s in an ecology? A review of artifact, communicative, device and information ecologies: ecologies bounded by a person or by a community
• Nouwens & Klokmose (2018) The application and its consequences for non-standard knowledge work: export as flattening, documents diverging across tools, and who pays to adopt a tool
• Bødker, Lyle & Saad-Sulonen (2017) Untangling the mess of technological artifacts: shared accounts and relayed use in a community’s ecology
• Korsgaard et al. (2022) Collectives and their artifact ecologies: people who introduce and maintain a group’s tools, and accounts that fit neither personal nor organisational use
• Cormi et al. (2022) Considering the artifact ecology when supporting the evolution of practices: two hospital systems that ignore the existing ecology in opposite ways