Balancing Practice Centered Research and Design
David D. Woods, Klaus Ctiristoffersen · PsycEXTRA Dataset · 2001
Many are interested in Research and Development (R&D) at the intersection of people, technology and work. R&D is a world divided and hobbled. Innovation is tantalizing yet elusive. In a rush, we achieve only a cumbersome process of trial and error (publicizing the extent of design errors and failures would be bad for investment). The standard metaphor and organizational con-struct of the pipeline has failed given the possibilities for change and the predilection for new technology to demand connections across disciplinary boundaries. R&D in this area is a world too often without effective intercon-nections and cross-stimulation. This piece provides an alternative model at two levels. First, it presents complementarity as a strategy for practice-centered research and design. The strategy is foundational for the intent behind the label cognitive systems engineering (and related labels like distributed cognition, nat-uralistic decision making, and on and on) as an alternative to traditional disci-plinary approaches. Second, it replaces the shopworn cliché of an R&D pipeline (a metaphor that may never have had substance) with synchronization of multiple parallel cycles of learning and development that operate at differ-ent time scales. Interlocking these cycles is a difficult challenge—a challenge in producing an organizational framework and supporting mechanisms to create and extend distributed innovation.