commentary
Analytic and synthetic depictions of human activity
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They are intelligible to collaborators because people readily understand and can share stories, irrespective of their professional backgrounds and jargons. Moreover, doing so enhances common ground among people sharing narratives, easing subsequent interaction and coordination, and thereby enhancing collaboration. Narratives are also highly evocative. They integrate denotative and affective content, involving people not only in the literal content, but in the connotation and the emotion of the content. The human mind has evolved to elaborate narratives; this is how dreams and myth are experienced so richly. Thus, couching issues and positions in narrative instantly creates a brainstorm. They are also flexible. Narratives can be articulated at different levels of detail, from different points of view, with different and varying emphases. The names can be changed to protect the innocent. And when a story doesn't work, it can be massaged and tweaked; often a lot can be discovered through the process of revision and re-experience.
These attributes support synthetic aspects of collaborative problem solving, that is, they support the effective pooling of individual knowledge and talents in the creative generation of solutions. This is particularly valuable for designing new kinds of human work activity and technology to support that activity such as new models for resource allocation on a global scale, or new ways to integrate secondary-school curricula with community service. Better-supporting synthetic aspects of collaborative problem solving is also important because problem-solving methods especially since the 1960s have emphasized analytic aspects, that is, techniques for representing and verifying candidate solutions. See for example Jones (1970) and Cross (1984).
Consider the contrast between narrative and task analytic depictions of human activity. Task analysis refers to a broad collection of techniques to identify and depict the structure of human activity. In general, task analysis treats human behavior linguistically, mapping observable behavioral sequences onto hierarchical structures that describe underlying constituent organization. Task analysis is an essential tool for understanding and designing certain kinds of human work systems. For example, routine, safety critical procedures need to be optimized more for transparency and verifiability than for creativity (Diaper, 2002; Diaper & Stanton, 2003). Increasingly, there is a schism between emerging narrative-oriented approaches to the design of new human activities, and technologies to support them, and task analytic approaches to codifying safety-critical routines (Carroll, 2002; Diaper, 2002).
An important frontier for conceptions of and programs for narrative-based approaches is better understanding the tradeoffs and proper balance between synthetic and analytic aspects of collaborative problem solving (Rosson & Carroll, 2002). One way to think about this is the "baby and bathwater": How far can narrative problem solving methods be systematized to increase their verifiability while retaining their distinctive attributes such as intelligibility, evocativeness, and flexibility?
References Cited
Carroll, J.M. 2000. Making use: Scenario-based design of human-computer interactions. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Carroll, J.M. 2002. Making Use is more than a matter of task analysis. Interacting with Computers, 14/5, 629-637.
Cross, N. (Ed.) Developments in design methodology. New York: John Wiley & Sons,
Diaper, D. 2002. Scenarios and task analysis. Interacting with Computers 14, 379395.
Diaper, D. & Stanton, N. (Eds.) Handbook of task analysis. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Jones, J. C. 1970. Design methods: Seeds of human futures. New York: John Wiley & Sons.
Rosson, M.B. & Carroll, J.M., 2002. Usability engineering: Scenario-Based Development of Human-Computer Interaction. San Francisco: Morgan-Kaufmann.
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