Activity System Design Tools (ASDT)
Activity System Design Tools are tools to help the participants in making their practices and activity dynamics visible. The idea of Activity System Design Tools is to enable users to analyze the history, present and future of their work activity in a way that helps address issues critical for deliberate transformation of prevailing practices.
Description of the tool
Activity System Design Tool (ASDT) is designed to be used as a support for intervention methods for exploring and systematically developing work practices by the practitioners together with the interventionist-researchers.
The ASDT is targeted for developmental work research. Current variations of developmental work research, a well established work development practice, involve handling of video-tapings or textual and other material for conducting analysis of the work practices. ASDT is envisioned to ease the managing the large amount of material produced before and during the process as well as the distribution, search and re-use of the documents.
ASDT is a plug-in to Knowledge Practices Environment, utilizing its views and functionalities. In addition, ASDT has a specific view, Virtual whiteboard, that is designed based on the key elements of a developmental work research process and its conceptual tools. It supports the organization of the process and produced documents as well as facilitates the construction of new models and solutions. In order to help the long-term development of ideas, activity in ASDT is organized around shared objects of reflection, analysis, and discussions. The inclusion of analytical tools and ontologies created in the KP-Lab project, will enable new dynamic ways of representing and reproducing the material. In addition, the use of ASDT can be supported by Semantic Multimedia Annotation Tool for analyzing video, audio, graphical and textual data.
Prospective users
The possible users of the ASDT are in the first stage: workplace researchers, developers, and in-house developers/innovators. At a later stage, it is expected to be expanded to be used as a common tool in the workplaces exploitation of best practices.
The tool and knowledge creation
Developmental work research and ASDT's background theories of Activity Theory and Expansive Learning are closely related to Trialogical learning. Therefore, many trialogical features can be identified in the method.
Development through transformation and reflection. Main goal of using ASDT is organizational development through reflection and deliberate transformation of working practices.
Long-term working with objects. Further, ASDT supports long-term processes where the analysis and implementation of new practices takes several months and, if adopted as a continuous method within the organization, supports sustained work with knowledge objects for considerably long periods.
Cross-fertilization. Another central aspect in ASDT is that it requires the participation of all practitioners representing various practices in the organization (e.g. production, designers, management, sales etc.). This provides a forum for cross-fertilization across the different practices.
Interactions between personal and social levels of activity. Collaborative analysis in ASDT functions as a forum for representing different personal views, and acts as a link between personal and social level of shared new working practices.
Contact details
- Technical contact person: Ali Rantakari (Pöyry Industry Oy)
