Abstract
After a 1 year long preparation, at April 1st 2008, we had the kickoff meeting of itsme, a project with the ambition of designing and building an innovative front end of Linux for workstations (De Michelis et al. 2009). The idea behind our project was to go beyond the desktop metaphor shaping all existing operating systems for workstations (Windows, MAC OS, Linux versions like Ubuntu, etc.) to create a new system able to support the context awareness of its users.
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Notes
- 1.
In the next pages, we will come back to knowledge workers.
- 2.
Knowledge workers (Blackler et al. 1993) have emerged as the most important category of workers within offices in the last 30 years. In the preface to Knowledge workers in the Information Society, Mosco and McKercher (2007) recall three main definitions of knowledge work. The first one, and most narrow, considers knowledge work any practice involving “the direct manipulation of symbols to create an original knowledge product or to add obvious value to an existing one.” The second that extends sensibly the previous one considers knowledge work any practice involving the management and distribution of information. The third that is the broadest one considers knowledge work any practice involved in “the chain of producing and distributing knowledge products.” People doing knowledge work under the broadest of these definitions correspond to our profile of PC users.
- 3.
- 4.
After the coordinator, presented by Fernando Flores and Terry Winograd in 1986 (Winograd and Flores 1986), there has been a rich debate in the CSCW community following two different directions: on the one side, Lucy Suchman (1993) discussed it for its unnatural forcing human conversations within formalized patterns, allowing hierarchical control on it; on the other side, several authors paid a growing attention to conversations as threads of communication events underlining their switching among different media (Reder and Schwab 1988, 1990) and showing their relevance, beyond their reduction to illocutionary acts (Bullen and Bennett 1990; Winograd 1994; De Michelis and Grasso 1994). After a period where attention on them declined, threads have gained again attention with the Google Wave and Google+.
- 5.
We will give more details on the features of itsme in the next section.
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Acknowledgments
The “stories and venues” metaphor and the itsme workstation project are indebted with many persons, even if the responsibility of what I have written is only mine, and it is not possible to list all of them. Let us recall at least, on the one hand, the itsme team (from the people who participated in the design of the prototype to the business angels that gave us the means for doing it and to the numerous people who expressed interest in what we are doing), who shared with me this unique experience and, on the other, the community of CSCW (computer-supported cooperative work) whose ideas and discussions constituted the basis of our work.
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De Michelis, G. (2015). Interaction Design at Itsme. In: Wulf, V., Schmidt, K., Randall, D. (eds) Designing Socially Embedded Technologies in the Real-World. Computer Supported Cooperative Work. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-6720-4_10
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