AP UX Week '07: Communities of Practice
[Live Blogged Notes from Adaptive Path UX Week 2007. Communities of Practice by Andrew Hinton of Vanguard]
User Experience Design as Communities of Practice
Slides will be available at http://www.inkblurt.com/presentations
- Communities of practice
- Practice, discipline, and identity
What do you mean by communities of practice
Top-down hierarchy v Emergent organic networks
Hierarchy v. Web
Instruction v. Conversation
We learn through mutual engagement, through conversations.
Both of these models are valid but there is something interesting happening in the conversation model.
In the old days, if you wanted to start a group you had to go find people. Then listserves came on the scene but this was still slow. You had to go through a sysadmin for approval. But in the last five or six years there has been an explosion. Things are now growing exponentially. You can now create a group anywhere about anything through hundreds of systems that exist to enable this.
Forrester had a report about how networks erode traditional power and what to do about it. There are lots of research and reports relating to this cultural shifts.
One more quick point: It is hip to want strategy and hip to want innovation. But let's be careful. Strategy can be very top-down, based on the old model. This works in many situations but the problem is that innovation is very different, it is emergent. It happens between the interactions of peers. Strategy and innovation are not the same thing, an innovation strategy presents large issues.
Communities of Practice are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly. ?? Etienne Wenger ??
Practice is a shared history of learning ?? Etienne Wenger ??
So on our spectrum between top-down and emergent, they fall just past halfway to emergent.
A work team is involuntary. You don't get to choose. A community is totally voluntary. A work team is about product delivery. A communities product is their own betterment, this happens external to products or timelines. A work team is defined by management. A community is defined by the group.
A community of practice is a hybrid pattern but has a center of gravity. It has a boundary but entry and exit is free. Involvement shifts over time. This is called legitimate peripheral participation.
Sometimes communities attract outsiders. This can be scary to people who see things in buckets but remember that communities are about interest.
All of the sharing and overlap between practices is essential. It is about interplay.
This that will now work:
- Creating, designing, optimizing a community
- Appropriating a CoP to management structure
- Treating CoP as a utopian love-fest
Practice, discipline, and identity
Let's say you are in a practice. We talk about disciplines. UX v. interaction v. IA and so on and so forth.
This is important so let's think about this identity question.
People come from graphic design, HCI, library science, etc.
Practice: Socially shared domain.
A practice has many tools. We are members of communities who use certain tools. As a practice sticks around, it seeks professional legitimacy.
Disciplines start out this way and yearn for more structure. Disciplines establish standards, definitions, curricula, etc. Licensing is established. The problem is that we forget that inside a hardened discipline is a living CoP.
Let's dig into participation.
Wenger says that we get meaning from mutual engagement, from participation in the world around us.
An individual exists in a social context. We construct layers of meaning for ourselves. As meaning builds it informs the way we view the world. Through participating in a CoP we learn the language and values of that community, it defined what it means to do what we do.
Reification is when I project that meaning into the world and perceive it as a real thing.
We project our meanings into the world and then we perceive them as existing in the world as having [an independent] reality of their own. ?? Etienne Wenger ??
When CoPs bump against eachother, we, as individuals, are confronted with the limitation of our perspective. If I'm a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Our frames are useful but are not the only way to see the universe. These frames are important, they are a function of being human.
Think about what "the economy," or "Hollywood," or "the flag." These concepts exist as frameworks that we all seem to share. They come to mean more through our exploration of them.
So you have participation and reification. As we participate in a community we think of ourselves as part of that community. But when someone else says "I'm a designer," we wonder how that overlaps with what we do. Who does the wireframe? Putting lines and shapes on 2D surfaces has meaning. We own that and get jingoistic about who gets to do what.
The interplay between participation and reification is part of the churn that makes this work. Without this, we wouldn't be able to collaborate at all.
Our identities as designers come from this interplay.
Part of working better together is understanding that our methods and tools don't belong exclusively to our practice.
Think about a shovel and the many different people who use a shovel in many different ways.
The skills and the focus we bring to our tools matter far more than the tools themselves. We identify ourselves with a particular practice to reify but that thing wouldn't be there without a million other things. CoPs are connected and dependent on thousand os others.
So why does this matter so much to UX practitioners?
For a long time the world was structured enough to not have to worry about this. The institutions that we were a part of were highly regulated. The industrial model claims that this is more efficient.
But something has happened. Thing of UX as a meta-practice. You can be a UX designer and an information architect. UX is great but we still need the granularity of other practices. We can't forget that disciplines are getting messier and this shift is very exciting.
Q: Xerox case study
A: Xerox used to have a manual of everything... But it wasn't everything. They did an ethnographic study (in the 80s!) and discovered that an underground culture existed where staff supported eachother. They decided to foster this, not with "you must put ten things into the knowledge base" rules and other garbage like that but by encouraging and fostering the organically developed community.
At Vanguard, the company is trying to get used to the fact that the majority of trades take place on the web site. This makes the company into as much as a software company as a mutual fund company.
0 TrackBacks
Listed below are links to blogs that reference this entry: AP UX Week '07: Communities of Practice.
TrackBack URL for this entry: http://www.samfelder.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi/301
Who is this guy?
Leave a comment