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This article seeks to inform the development of computing for the home environment by unpacking the notion of domestic routines as coordinational features of domestic life. In particular, the paper focuses on the routine nature of communication and use ethnographic study to explicate a discrete organization of coordination whereby household members routinely manage communications coming into and going out of the home. The coordinate ways in which members routinely organize communication are made visible through sequences of practical action, which articulate domestic routines and key properties of communication. These include ecological habitats, activity centers, and coordinate displays where technology is at the core. These organizational features combine to form a locally produced system of communication and open up the play of possibilities for designing information technology systems for the home, articulating the distinct needs of particular settings and prime sites for the deployment of new computing devices and applications in the home. This paper will argue for the need for new conceptual and analytic tools to inform technological development as design moves out of the workplace and into the home.

Communication between different members of a design team often poses difficulties. This paper reports on the results of a detailed empirical study of communication in over twenty British, German and Italian knitwear companies. The knitwear design process is shared by the designers, who plan the visual and tactile appearance of the garments, and the technicians, who have to realise the garment on a knitting machine. They comprise a typical but small design team whose members have different backgrounds and expertise. Knitwear design allows a detailed analysis of the causes and effects of communication breakdown. Designers specify their designs inaccurately, incompletely and inconsistently; technicians interpret these specifications according to their previous experience of similar designs, and produce garments very different from the designers' original intentions. Knitwear is inherently difficult to describe, as no simple and complete notation exists; and the relationship between visual appearance and structure and technical properties of knitted fabric is subtle and complex. Designers and technicians have different cognitive approaches and are very different people. At the same time the interaction between designers and technicians is badly managed in many companies. This paper argues that improving the accuracy and reliability of designers' specifications would significantly enhance the design process. It concludes with a description of the architecture of an intelligent automatic design system that generates technically correct designs from the designers' customary notations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study analyses a series of emergency calls related to the same event: an accident in a factory. The aim of the analysis is to show how a lack of information hinders operator’s diagnostic work. The paper shows the effects of communication problems on operator’s decision making, that is, how the operator’s diagnostic work is actively resisted by callers, and therefore, how disaligment in relation to the activity at hand influences operator’s decision making and the actual organisation of the rescue activities. I argue that CSCW technologies need to enable negotiation of potentially conflicting social practices and organizational protocols around diagnostic work and should not just support remote collaboration between professionals, but also with the public. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]