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Call for journal articles (long)
> 
> Special issue of AI and Society: communicating across boundaries in
> software design
> 
> The development and installation of a software system impacts on a
> multitude of interested parties. In a commercial product for use in a
> business environment, for instance, we could immediately identify at
> least the following groups or individuals, on the software production
> side alone, with interests in different aspects of the system:
> 
> software project manager
> software analysts 
> software functionality designers
> functionality programmers
> software interface designers 
> interface programmers
> human factors specialists
> documentation experts
> on-line help designers
> trainers
> localisers
> marketing
> packagers
> graphic designers...
> 
> On the user side, we should distinguish at least the hands-on end
> user, the purchaser, the manager of the end user and the local IT
> department amongst others. Different contexts will breed new
> configurations of interested parties: off the shelf software designers
> will have a different relationship to representatives of the user side
> than those engaged in turnkey development, and in-house development
> teams will have yet other links and relationships. Some special users
> may need one-off solutions, creating a need for close
> user-helper-designer links. Software type or  genre will also have an
> impact.  Multimedia system development will involve the integration of
> relatively independent media production units, teams developing domain
> specific software, e.g. for education, engineering manufacture,
> finance and so on will need to involve the corresponding domain
> experts and groupware will create a need for very widespread
> consultation, possibly in far-flung locations. 
> 
> All these stakeholders will have different backgrounds, goals,
> training, expertise, experience, reference points and terminologies.
> Creating common ground, so that an end user can communicate
> effectively with an analyst or an educational researcher with an
> interface designer, is far from easy.  
> 
> A number of approaches to the problem of communication between roles
> and disciplines have been proposed. Formalisms such as dataflow
> diagrams, object models and rich pictures are used to bridge the gaps
> between practitioners responsible for different stages of the
> development process, while guidelines, design patterns and articles go
> some way to allowing communication between practitioners and
> researchers. Various flavours of participatory design have been
> developed to make for more effective end-user involvement in design
> via techniques such as collaborative creation and evaluation of paper
> prototypes.  These are probably not in widespread practice, but they
> do highlight the complex negotiation of meaning and authority which
> cross-interest communication entails. 
> 
> However, communication gaps in software development projects remain a
> problem, as in any complex collaborative design situation.   Solutions
> are more and more urgently needed in software development in
> particular due to some specifically local factors.  Firstly, as
> usability increasingly becomes a commercially important factor,
> communicating with potential users becomes a "must have" rather than a
> "nice to have" if sales are to meet expectations.  Secondly, academic
> reseachers feel thay have contributions to make to system development.
> The increased use of methods from social sciences means that
> researchers with backgrounds in ethnography, conversation analysis and
> the like need to present their studies of the workplace in a form
> usable by practitioners, while in another part of the academic edifice
> HCI researchers are distilling the results of their studies into text
> books and guidelines for current and future practitioners. A third
> factor is the growth in software for remote distributed groups,
> together with the increased need for internationalised software, both
> of which put extra geographic and/or cultural space between user and
> designer  and therefore increase the need for effective communication.
> 
> 
> The journal AI and Society plans to publish a special issue on
> communicating across boundaries in software design. Boundaries here
> might be those of role (e.g. between interface designer and
> programmer), discipline (e.g. between ethnographers and system
> designers), status (e.g. between individual end user and managers),
> national culture (e.g. between English, Japanese and US participants)
> and so on. 
> 
> We would welcome the following categories of submissions:
> 
> - success stories, where effective communcation contributed to the
> success of a real world project
> - failure stories, where lack of communication clearly led to
> problems in the project or the software
> - empirical studies of design discussions and communication
> patterns
> - descriptions of methods for encouraging cross-interest
> communication in system design
> - discussions of representations which facilitate or prevent
> communication
> - lessons from other, longer-established, design disciplines
> - the potential of computer mediated communication in software
> development
> 
> Authors will need to identify and discuss the nature of the boundaries
> that are (or are not) being crossed.This is only an indicative list
> and other perspectives and topics will be welcome. 
> 
> For information on Ai and Society see:
> 
> http://www.it.bton.ac.uk/research/seake/ai_soc.html
> 
> Procedures
> 
> We invite the submission of papers of approximately 4000 words by the
> date shown below. Submission of a paper will be taken to mean authors
> will also act as peer reviewers for a maximum of two other papers.
> 
> Important dates:
> 
> Jan 8 1998:   intention to submit
> March 31 1999:  full paper submitted
> 
> Autumn 1999: planned publication date
> 
> Email submission is strongly encouraged. Address for submissions and
> inquiries:
> 
> [log in to unmask]
> Tel: 01273 642476
> Lyn Pemberton
> School of Information Management
> University of Brighton BN2 4GJ
> East Sussex, UK
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