Introduction

The title was eye opening. Mutual learning process between user and designer is one of those principles which I truly believe. In the beginning, the theoretical framework that Beguin (2003) built seemed promising. Beguin (2003), with the help of several prominent thinkers, proposed that the instrument is never complete until became an artifact. And artifact was created based on both external and internal factors on the part of its users. He also claimed that this transformation has no “real beginning and end; it is more a cyclical and never-ending process.” Each users and designers learn, within their own activities. Such ideal reflects the importance of development, not in just the product, but the users, who internalizes knowledge embedded within the product, and transforms with it.

High Ideals, Narrowness of Actions

The example given by Beguin (2003) was the introduction of an instrumented safety system in a chemical plant. There was an inherent limit within the control process which threshold was hard to determine. To resolve this issue, the safety instrument showed an alarm when the process reached a dangerous limit. This was installed, together with a temperature indicator. After a period of time, operators were seen to make use of the instrument as a temperature indicator, rather than a safety device. They were operating, based on their own heuristic, by controlling the process at a much lower limit. This does not please the designers, who intended them to operate at higher limit and rely on the instrument to avoid dangers. The two parties subsequently discussed and developed a newer prototype based on mutual objectives,

While Beguin (2003) talked about a grand vision of designing beyond the frontend of a product development, it fall short. First, many of the circumstances and contradictions inherent in the scenario were not discussed. For example, it was clear of a contradiction between the designer and the operators. The former wanted efficiency and productivity, while the latter were recovering from the shock of a colleague’s death and wanted safety. Also it was unclear why the accident actually happens. Is it really due to the lack of information on limits? Or is it because of pressure from engineers and management to be productive?

Second, the designers not being the ones operating the controls, had a different mental models of the operators, who used heuristics to guide their work. It was clear that the designers were unclear of the operator’s intent in operating near crystallization point. It was a safety feature imbued into their knowledge of control. Given this operating scheme, it was unclear then why the incident happens. Was there an abnormally of operation, or perhaps process optimization instructed by the engineers priori to incident? How does their mental scheme reconcile in the new instrument?

Third, while speaking of mutual learning as a cyclical and never-ending process, and knowledge as the core of social organization, the study never leave the control room, designers, and operators. How was knowledge constructed and restructure within the conflicting goals and fundamental understanding remain unclear.

Fourth, the example never reaches a satisfying conclusion to the result of learning. It was unclear if the operators were forced to adopt the designer’s intent or otherwise. It was also unclear if the instrument was implemented.

Design as a Mutual Development

There is a necessity to rethink about Beguin’s (2003) original intent in the article. Is it to instruct a mutual learning process as part of the original design process? How is using a real prototype during design phase so different from participatory design? This framework as to extend to a longer term perspective. There is a need to look at the impact of such a small instrument on what Beguin (2003) seems to have hinted – cyclical, never-ending, and organizational knowledge. Organizational knowledge were both extrinsic and intrinsic. They also consist of the artifacts, which are instruments merged with a development users cognitive model. Beyond knowledge of the actors, another transformation which artifacts bring about are changes to the way an organization works, or its ‘intelligence’ (Lilley, 2004). Thus learning within an organization, is a reshaping of its shared information, processes, and artifacts, into more relevant forms. This should be the most important aspect of mutual learning.

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References
Beguin P (2003). Design as a Mutual Learning Process between Users and Designers. Interacting with Computers, 15, 709-30.

Lilley S and Lightfoot G (2004). Representing Organization: Knowledge, Management, and the Information Age. Oxford University Press.

Feb 2008