Achieving Safety: A Field Study of Boundary Objects in Aircraft Technical Support
Publication Type:
Conference PaperSource:
ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW'02), p.266-275 (2002)URL:
http://www.eecs.umich.edu/~ackerm/pub/02b32/cscw02-lutters.final.pdfKeywords:
information reuse, knowledge management, organizational memory, safety, technical supportAbstract:
The 2007 journal version adds additional material; however, this paper has a different theoretical framing.
Boundary objects are a critical, but understudied, theoretical
construct in CSCW. Through a field study of aircraft
technical support, we examined the role of boundary objects
in the “achievement of safety†by service engineers.
The resolution process of repair requests was captured in
two compound boundary objects. These crystallizations did
not manifest a static interpretation, but instead were continually
re-interpreted in light of meta-negotiations. This
suggests design implications for organizational memory
systems which can more fluidly represent the metanegotiations
surrounding boundary objects.