Configuring Places for Learning — Participatory Development of Learning Practices at Work

Participatory approaches to the development of new practices at work have been widespread in Scandinavia, due largely to the tradition of collaboration and collective agreements on the labour market. Since the late 1980s, participation and change have increasingly been coupled to various notions of learning and learning organizations (for an overview, see Sandberg, 1992). Similarly, technological change became increasingly addressed as an issue of design rather than as a given precondition for changes in working life (Bjerknes et al., 1987). In the so-called Scandinavian tradition of systems design, IT systems for a particular customer organization are developed through a process of participatory design (Greenbaum & Kyng, 1991). Existing work practices are studied in a mixture of ethnographically inspired fieldwork, interviews and dialogue sessions. New IT systems are developed in iterative design cycles involving representative users in drafting and evaluating system prototypes. And a final system is typically put in place with the involved users acting as strong proponents for the chosen design. This tradition of user-oriented design of IT systems has shed new light on the relation between participation, learning and change and in particular the literature on computer supported cooperative work has contributed to the study of how practices at work evolve around communication artefacts.