Systems and Users

Spinuzzi (2003) strongly makes the argument that there is a division between system-designed and user-designed environments. Drawing from Johnson () on articulating three main points of difference between them, he makes note of the “formalist . . . [and ]determinist” nature of designing from the system-level outwards. For the user-designed environment, on the other hand, Spinuzzi (2003) links into the “social constructionist . . . [and] postmodernist” constructions of environments that are build, as he later explains, from the usage and not dictated from external pressures and forces  (p.141-143).

Speaking to this worker- or user-created series of solutions, he writes:

Workers produce solutions that are devious, wily, and cunning, but often these solutions do not involve a deep understanding of the system, and sometimes they even run to superstition. Workers produce solutions that work-but often they do not produce solutions that work well by their own criteria, and often those solutions are not promulgated so that other workers can take advantage of them. (p. 290-292)

As as much as Spinuzzi (2003) might suggest that user-centered design is a better choice, he also warns of the solutions that users create: ones that are “wily” and usually in such a way that the work gets done faster but not necessarily more efficiently for the greater ecology. It is these forces, Spinuzzi (2003) explains, that work toward genres as well. They are not the most efficient means of informational exchanges; however, they are often the “wily” solutions to problems that caused them to be generated in the first place and stick around not because they are prized but because they work most of time.

Genre Construction

Early in the book, Spinuzzi (2003) uses this same metaphor, writing:

Genre tracing is concerned with examining the ways that workers rescue themselves . . . by developing unofficial, frequently unarticulated work practices and genres, by adapting old genres to new uses, and by linking their innovations to established, official genres. (p. 327-328)

Genre tracing, as the process through which genres are explored, is rooted in the searching of the ways that “workers save themselves” through, again, the “wily” solutions they find and use for information exchanges. Spinuzzi (2003), recording the terms of others, lists genres as “tools-in-use” (Russell 1997); “typified rhetorical response to a recurring social situation (Miller 1984)”; “‘socially recognized types of communicative actions used by organizational members for particularlar communicative and collaborative purposes’ (Yates and Orlikowski 2002, 14)”; “tradition” (Bakhtin); and ‘seeing and conceptualizing conceptualizing reality’ (Medvedev and Bakhtin 1978, 134).”

Yet, in recalling the work of Barton and Barton (1993), Spinuzzi (2003) connects the way that maps make us over and change our way of thinking. For Barton and Barton (1993), as it comes to maps, they dictate not the space but the metaphorical control of the space. In this same way, Spinuzzi (2003) writes of “crystallization” of practices that come to control our articulations of how the space could be instead of what it really is. For Spinuzzi (2003), a genre is a major controlling force of thought; in the same way that it is constructed through what we might think of as traditional forces, it is shaped through its usages and refined through its ability to transfer information, not any efficiently that might make the entire process faster overall.

Application

As I’ve mentioned on Facebook recently, I flew on an airplane this past Tuesday for the first time in twenty years. And the experience, having been thinking about Tracing Genres some during different flight segments, was that flight attendants safety speech is a strong genre. Through expectations and the materiality of the process, there has been this crystallization of practices that Spinuzzi discusses. Most people, as I noticed, either ignore it or give over vague attention to it, but there is a ritualism to the delivery, the audience, and the components that speaks to a usage that has codified through time into what it is now. Perhaps, at one time, it was more efficient. But now, it’s just the way things are done.

References:

Clay Spinuzzi. Tracing Genres through Organizations: A Sociocultural Approach to Information Design (Acting with Technology). Kindle Edition.