Time: 4pm, November 7th
Place: Room 110, South Hall


The Tale of the Curious Little Washing Rat In Which Raton Laveur Discovered that
Personal Information Management is an Embedded Activity

            A Design Oriented Field Study of PIM by
                   Victoria Bellotti & Ian Smith
                           Xerox PARC

Once upon a time a systems designer decided to build an innovative system (Raton 
Laveur) which would support the use of paper as a PDA (personal digital assistant).
He decided that he needed to know how people use existing PDAs such as Pilots and
Sharps, so he went and asked a social scientist to help him design a study. This
talk shows how the subsequent fieldwork enlightened that system designer and social
scientist about how people do personal information management and, despite being
about an apparently familiar activity, led to many surprises (and disappointments).
What was learned in the process radically altered the direction of the system
design, so that the system that was ultimately prototyped bore no resemblance to
what was originally envisaged.