ALCHEMIST: support for emergent models of work practices in collaborative systems

The study of work practices engaged in by human members of complex sociotechnical systems and the development of tools and environments to support those workers can be facilitated by common methodological and technological infrastructure. The goal of the ALCHEMIST project is to develop an integrated computer-based environment that embodies this approach and that rests upon a diverse theoretical foundation that blends grounded, cognitive, and coordination theories into a framework for pervasively intelligent, collaborative, and adaptive support. Thus, ALCHEMIST is intended to support ethnographic work upon field data (transcripts, videotapes, etc.) and provide tools for researchers to articulate relevant constructs for data analysis and requirements generation for end-user applications. Furthermore, these applications themselves are developed from and are instances or ALCHEMIST. The “conceptual primitives” embodied in ALCHEMIST thus provide the basis for models of work practices; and the nature of these models emerges from the analysis and development process. This paper describes the theoretical underpinnings of ALCHEMIST, the ALCHEMIST architecture, and a domain of work practices currently under investigation