The construction of usefulness: How users and context create meaning with a social networking system.

摘要

The foundation of an effective design methodology of groupware technologies traditionally hinges on the collection of the “correct” requirements at the early stages of the development life cycle in order to inform their design. By collecting the “correct” requirements, the design and implementation of these technologies are deemed to more adequately support the needs of their target users' everyday work practices. Being able to reveal such needs is contingent on a theory's capability to “model” users' contexts at design time and thereby predict possible outcomes of the design at use time. The meaning of these technologies' usefulness is defined at the design and implementation stages. Although the research and system development undertaken here initially followed a traditional design approach, the system's eventual deployment revealed that a set of more complex issues affects how users judge “usefulness.”;This dissertation work addresses this issue by proposing an alternative perspective in which various possible meanings of the usefulness of a technology co-exist and are constantly being negotiated and co-constructed by the groups involved in the design, implementation, deployment, and use of a technology. Because usefulness is subject to different interpretations, the acceptance of the technology by a particular group will depend on the extent that the sociotechnical structures embedded in technology and those that are part of the use context can be integrated into one another. In other words, this work is not simply about “the impact of ” a technology on a particular use context or by, the same matter, “the impact of” of a context on a particular technology, but how they constitute one another. It thus proposes this alternative framework for understanding and analyzing the usefulness of a technology, which rests on the accounts of the different social groups who participate in the design and use of the technology, the various sociohistorical contexts in which the technology is employed, and the different attributes of the technology.;To this end, this dissertation research studied the design and deployment of a social network based system, Web2gether. This system was intended to support the development of social networks among caregivers in special education while simultaneously utilizing these social networks to make recommendations for educational resources and information that users seek. Web2gether is a web-based hybrid recommender and collaborative system. This research employed the sociotechnical design circle as its design method, and has analytically integrated three major theoretical constructs—namely, social construction of technology, theory of structuration, and sociohistorical activity theory—in a coherent framework for the examination of technology design and deployment processes.