Design of information systems: things versus people
Susanne Bødker, Joan Greenbaum · 1993
Information Technology is usually designed using traditional system development techniques and emphasizing conventional management objectives that focus on the information rather than the people in a workplace. This chapter uses research from a gender perspective that highlights the ways that office systems can be designed with people in mind. It then applies the gender perspective to explain why Cooperative or Participatory Design can be used to enable system developers and office workers to work together to design applications that better support working practices. The terms Information Technology and Office Systems are heavily balanced in the direction of focusing on things, instead of looking at people at work. Both the methods used to produce these systems and the actual computer systems in use, reflect a strong bias towards looking at offices as if they were collections of systems that could somehow be solidified into a concrete object called information technology. In fact infor...