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hope) used to thinking in this fashion in science or technology.
47 As information systems grow in scale and scope, however, the need for such complex analyses grows as well. In opposition to the old hierarchical databases, where relations between classes had to be decided once and for all at the time of original creation, many databases today incorporate object-oriented views of data whereby different attributes can be selected and combined on the fly for different purposes. The tailorability of software applications similarly becomes very important for customizing use in different settings (Trigg and Bødker 1994). |
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If we look at these activities in the context of practice, we see what Suchman and Trigg (1993) call the "artful integration" of local constraints, received standardized applications, and the re-representation of information. The tension between locales remains, and this tension it is not something to be avoided or deleted. When the sort of artful integration discussed by Suchman and Trigg becomes (a) an ongoing, stable relationship between different social worlds, and (b) shared objects are built across community boundaries, then boundary objects arise. |
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Boundary objects are one way that the tension between divergent viewpoints may be managed. There are of course many other ways. All of them involve accommodations, work-arounds, and in some sense, a higher level of artful integration. It too is managed by people's artful juggling, gestalt switching, and on the spot translating. |
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Too often, this sort of work remains invisible to traditional science and technology, or to rational analyses of process. This tension is itself collective, historical, and partially institutionalized. The medium of an information system is not just wires and plugs, bits and bytes, but also conventions of representation, information both formal and empirical. A system becomes a system in design and use, not the one without the other. The medium is the message, certainly, and it is also the case that both are political creations (Taylor and Van Every 1993). In Donna Haraway's words, "No layer of the onion of practice that is technoscience is outside the reach of technology of critical interpretation and critical inquiry about positioning and location; that is the condition of embodiment and mortality. The technical and the political are like the abstract and the concrete, the foreground and the background, the text and the context, the subject and the object" (Haraway 1997, 10). A fully developed method of multiplicity-heterogeneity for information systems must draw on many sources and make many unexpected alliances (Star 1989a, chapter 1, Star 1989b, Hewitt 1986, Goguen |
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