[DRAFT] Making Tea : : Analogies for Design in e-Science
September 26th, 2005Making Tea is a design method for eliciting descriptions of how tasks are carried out. These descriptions can then be used to model the task, to look at how that model can be supported with software and/or hardware.
There are a variety of design elicitation models already. These include cultural probes, scenario based design, artifact walkthroughs, apprenticeships, ethnography among others. Most of these methods have been developed to capture practices that are knowable by an observer: the artefacts used may be largely familiar (see artifact walkthroughs) or learnable within a reasonable period of time (see scenario based design or apprenticeships).
The type of task Making Tea has been designed to support has several components that are not well adapted to these other design methods. The processes are
- highly expert
- potentially long duration (months/years)
- loosely structured
- potentially highly parallel
Such highly expert, long lasting tasks make it challenging for a designer to understand not just what’s going on in a task, but why it’s happening when it is. This was the problem we faced in designing an all-digital lab book for synthetic (wet lab) chemists: we needed to understand the chemits’s process as well as how, when and why they recorded something in their lab books, so that we could develop software that would best enable this process for the chemists, and support flexible reusable knowledge capture for sharing that information with the rest of the scientific community, on demand. The onerousness of this task was daunting. Our response: let’s make tea. And that was that.