Managing User-Designer Relations in e-Research Projects
Alex Voss
National Centre for e-Social Science
University of Manchester, United Kingdom
alex.voss@ncess.ac.uk
Rob Procter
National Centre for e-Social Science
University of Manchester, United Kingdom
rob.procter@manchester.ac.uk
Marina Jirotka
Oxford University Computing Laboratory
Oxford University, United Kingdom
Marina.Jirotka@comlab.ox.ac.uk
Tom Rodden
School of Computer Science and IT
University of Nottingham, United Kingdom
tar@cs.nott.ac.uk
acknowledge the importance of building stable, sustainable
infrastructures.
INTRODUCTION
An important aspect of realising e-Research endeavours is
the management of user-designer relations. This involves
attending to peoples’ interests, commitments, their
contributions and expectations. Traditional systems
development projects have tended to treat users as passive
recipients of technology, as potential sources of resistance
to change or, at best, as sources of information about the
work context. The systems development process has often
been conceptualised as an essentially linear process of
gathering requirements, working up an architecture and
implementing a design.
There is evidence that e-Research communities are dealing
with the challenges of systems development in creative
ways, e.g., by ‘embedding’ application scientists (usually
PhD students) in project teams so that they might serve as
informants, stakeholder representatives or brokers.
However, these practices are opportunistic rather than being
developed into a consistent set of practices and there is little
evidence that experiences are shared. With this position
statement we wish to make a start to remedy this situation
and to ensure that the e-Research communities learn from
each other and from related work done in other areas such
as computer supported cooperative work or participatory
design.
More recently, systems development approaches have
emerged that emphasise the dynamic nature of the
development process and the learning that takes place while
people work up an evolving understanding of just what a
system under development should look like and just how it
will support users in the work they do. In addition, these
methods recognise that systems development often involves
extensive negotiations between multiple stakeholders and a
potentially risky step from current work practice to changed
practices and their support through the system under
development.
PERSPECTIVES ON USER-DESIGNER RELATIONS
The problem of effectively informing design decisions, of
managing changing requirements and of aligning
stakeholder interests has been researched in a number of
communities such as software engineering, computer
supported cooperative work and participatory design. We
would argue that the lessons learned from work in these
areas need to be brought into the development of eInfrastructures and applications. While space does not allow
us to provide a comprehensive review of the methods and
approaches developed over the course of the last decades,
we would like to briefly describe two approaches that seem
to us to hold particular promise in the area of e-Research.
We believe that as e-Research moves from initial projects
aimed at developing and demonstrating the capabilities of
the technology to production systems and working eInfrastructures in routine use, matters of user-designer
relations will be of crucial importance to its success. EResearch projects differ from the average systems
development project in that participants must grapple with a
high degree of uncertainty. For example, projects often
consist of consortia comprised of people and institutions
with only partially overlapping and possibly competing
interests, work in areas that are inherently evolving their
practices and work at the fore-front of technological
development. These matters are often compounded by
funding arrangements that favour novelty while failing to
Workplace studies have been used in order to inform the
design of IT systems but while they have been very useful
in describing how work is done, people have found it
difficult to extrapolate from this description how work
might be done using the system under development.
Therefore, studies of work are often combined with
prototyping approaches that allow the eventual users of the
technology to play an active role in exploring future use
scenarios [e.g., 1,2,11]. Combining the strengths of
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observational methods with active exploration of future use
and prototyping allows the development process to be
responsive to peoples’ evolving understanding of their work
and how it might change and to ensure participation while
at the same time placing no undue demands on participants.
The explicit resourcing of a role that mediates between
design and use can help ensure that issues of usability and
usefulness are not sidelined in the project.
While workplace studies aim to bridge the gap between
design and use by making information about work practice
available to designers and prototyping aims to bring users
into the design process more strongly, a third approach
involves attempting to resolve the distinction between
design and use altogether by locating design activities in the
workplace and making them part and parcel of what work
in the setting involves. Corealisation [4,9] has been
developed as an orientation to design work as an activity
that is located in the unfolding biography of a setting by
making designers normal members of the workplace, thus
allowing design work to be informed by observations made
through everyday contact with the users and their work
environment as well as making design work accountable to
users. An important aspect of corealisation is that it does
not try to bridge the gap between design and use by
introducing an intermediary such as a social science
researcher to inform design but instead calls on the
designers to become familiar with work practices through
their own observations of and interactions with users and
their work.
Although middleware and infrastructure developers are
becoming much more sensitive to users’ needs [cf. 7] and
are actively seeking feedback on usability, one has only to
look at the organisation and technical complexities of
managing digital certificates for eScience to realise just
how much skill and effort is involved in developing and
operating workable and stable applications and work
environments. Design choices are constrained by the
centrally provided services, for example, NGS are currently
using version 2 of the Globus Toolkit middleware stack
while other resources are likely to be provided through web
services based mechanisms using GT version 4 and other
middleware stacks. Having to manage multiple only
partially compatible versions of the middleware makes a
mockery of the vision of grid technologies as a layer that
would allow access to heterogeneous resources to be
provided in a unified way [cf. 8].
Another important aspect of the development of a research
environment is the provision of adequate interfaces to the
basic tools that are currently provided by grid einfrastructures - data management and compute services.
Because of the diverse range of researchers’ backgrounds
and practices these interfaces have to be designed to be
flexible enough to suit different needs. While some
researchers might be familiar with command-line tools and
scripting languages and able to use the native interfaces
provided by the services, others will require a simpler
interface tailored to their specific needs. Finding ways of
providing different kinds of interfaces remains a challenge
in the face of scarce resources.
E-RESEARCH CHALLENGES
We have noted above that e-Research endeavours differ in
significant ways from other IT projects in that they deal
with significant and inherent uncertainties. Issues of trust in
technologies, in collaboration partners, in data collected, its
provenance, the methods used to process it and the
repeatability of findings are of crucial importance if eResearch is to become an accepted part of scientific
practice. It is therefore of crucial importance to engender
mutual understanding about the relationship between the
design of applications and scientific practice and to
establish very clearly what can reasonably be expected of
the technology and of particular projects so as to ensure that
the hype around e-Research does not lead to frustrations on
the side of scientific partners when they confront the
realities of the state of play in technology development[cf.
3,10].
Projects like Integrative Biology (IB) [6] and the Integrative
Biology Virtual Research Environment project (IBVRE)
[ibid.] also highlight important issues about the divisions of
labour amongst the technology developers. The aim of the
IB project, for example, is to develop an infrastructure for
multi-scale modelling of heart function and of cancer using
existing infrastructures such as the National Grid Service.
This means that the IB developers, in many respects, are the
users of a technology that has been imposed upon them.
APPROACHES
We feel that despite the challenges mentioned above, the
underlying infrastructure of basic services and middleware
components is maturing and experience with their use gets
increasingly embedded in research organisations (although
there is still a shortage of skilled developers compounded
by the traditional reliance on fixed-term staff and PhD
students). There is an opportunity to move away from the
‘string and sealing wax’ prototypes of the early days and to
work towards the realisation of working virtual research
environments that are composed of established building
blocks. As the effort involved in making the basic
technological components work is reduced more and more,
there is a chance to invest more effort into understanding
the real-world requirements that application researchers
have and to translate that understanding into VREs that are
uniquely adequate and kept in alignment with evolving
research practices.
Projects such as IBVRE [6] have already made use of the
affordances of Grid services to rapidly assemble working
prototypes on site after an initial short period of observation
of scientific practice. This allowed users to get involved in
the design and development through incremental delivery
and the use of working prototypes early on in the design
process, which increased their sense of ownership of the
system under development. Hosting a pilot at the end user
institution also helped to increase users sense of control
over the system being developed. In addition, where
challenges to usability were foreseen, IB allocated analysts
to shepherd users through the complexities of securing
access. It is likely that for some time yet, such extra support
will be required to get people over the initial hurdles
involved in adopting e-infrastructures.
project. From Grid to Healthgrid - Proceedings of
Healthgrid, IOS Press, 2005, pp. 198-209.
4. Hartswood, M., Procter, R., Slack, R., Voß, A., Buscher,
M., Rouncefield, M., Rouchy, P. Co-realisation:
Towards a Principled Synthesis of Ethnomethodology
and Participatory Design. Scandinavian Journal of
Information Systems, 14(2), 2002. pp. 9-30.
5. Jirotka, M., Procter, R., Hartswood, M., Slack, R.,
Simpson, A., Coopmans, C., Hinds, C. and Voss, A.
Collaboration and Trust in Healthcare Innovation: The
eDiaMoND Case Study. Computer Supported
Cooperative Work 14(4), 2005. pp. 369-398.
CONCLUSIONS
We believe that the approaches outlined above are
particularly useful in an e-Research context which involves
a complex and evolving set of practices that makes it
crucial not only to elicit requirements in a one-off process
but to ensure that infrastructures and applications are kept
in alignment with evolving needs. Depending on the
particular context, ethnographic observation, prototyping,
corealisation and other methods can play a role in realising
e-Research endeavours and managing the user-designer
relationship. While there cannot be a single silber bullet
approach that applies in all situations, existing work
provides a set of tools and orientations that can be applied
in combination to help delivering support for e-Research in
a more routine way satisfying the needs of researchers and
their projects.
6. Lloyd, S. et al. Integrative Biology – the challenges of
developing a collaborative research environment for
heart and cancer modelling. Future Generation
Computer Systems 23, 2007. pp. 457-465.
7. Newhouse, S., Schopf, J., Richards, A. and Atkinson,
M. Study of User Priorities for e-Research (SUPER).
Draft report, 13th January 2007.
8. Sloot, P. et al. White paper on Computational e-Science:
Studying complex systems in silico. A National Research
Initiative. December 2006.
9. Voss, A. Corealisation: A Radical Respecification of the
Working Division of Labour in Systems Development.
PhD Thesis, School of Informatics, University of
Edinburgh, 2007.
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