The Locales Framework: Understanding and Designing for Wicked Problems

So much technology works, not by good design or by being a good fit to purpose, but because people make it work because they have to for some reason. We humans are incredibly creative and resourceful when it comes to getting something done. There are numerous stories we could all tell of the ingenious work-arounds we've developed to make something do what we want it to; or the enormous amount of time we've spent trying to find out how to make some technology work as we want, e.g., trying to find out how to turn off auto-editing commands in a word processing package when all we want is for it to 'do what we tell it'. A good example of this principle was what motivated me to switch from neural networks to the area of Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) for my PhD research. I had undertaken a case study looking at the deployment of a multi-million dollar health information system throughout a hospital network.