Landscapes of practice: bricolage as a method for situated design

This paper contributes to research on Computer Supported Collaborative Working (CSCW) for distributed organisational settings. It presents an ethnographic study of the introduction of computer based tools into an organisation. Traditional methods afford embodied engagement and open spaces of activity that one can overhear, the new software tools partition the environment as individuals focus on their screens. The awareness of such problems and design solutions to overcome or alleviate them is facilitated by combining ethnographic methods with continuous design interventions. This approach can shape the appropriate customisation of technologies for sustaining communities of practice and enabling the survival of organisations.