Notes

  1. I here especially refer to preliminary design within systems development: requirement analysis (in Danish: "Forundersøgelse").
  2. One classic work initiating this debate is the book The Idea of a Social Science, by Peter Winch, (Winch, 1958).
  3. E.g. by using techniques as unstructured in depth interviews, observation, etc. (Schmidt and Carstensen, 1990 pp. 121 ff.).
  4. The MUST-project is carried out by Finn Kensing and Keld Bødker, with me and Lars Bogetoft as research fellows and Ph.D. students. The project started in autumn 1991. It is a project with an approach to the design of computer support for cooperative work guided by a combination of two perspectives - a language action and a cultural perspective. The purpose of the MUST-project is to examine and clarify requirement analysis as it is carried out by practitioners, and to develop and test a theory of - and a method for - requirement analysis, partly based upon the above mentioned perspectives. The "MUST-approach" is intended to support the process of designing computer support for cooperative work. We are currently doing requirement analysis in two industrial settings, one funded by the government, the other privately. The two organizations wanted to investigate needs for computer support. Our purpose was to get realistic settings for developing and testing methods and techniques. The two cases begun in the autumn of 1991 and will continue for 1 - 1,5 year.
  5. We are currently reporting the results from the first year of the project.
  6. Part of this project is reported in (Bødker and Pedersen,1991). A paper on the results is expected to be published by Bødker and Kensing later this year.