Abstract

We report on an EM/CA informed ethnographic study of a design team creating information systems used by large-scale, distributed organizations (enterprise) and an entire industry (information security). The study involved training the design team to participate in a detailed analysis of their own work and exploring ways that EM/CA could be applied. Key ideas from Ethnomethodology, such as indexicality, sequencing, and sequential orders were brought to bear on doing, talking about and defending design work. Instead of treating the design problem as involving static fixtures - we examined the ways in which the fluid but ordered properties of interactional sequencing explain the recognizability of objects and information across domains: boundary objects. Meaning treated as a property of situated order - not of semantics or definition in abstraction - offers new insights.