WJ Clancey — Visualizing Practical Knowledge
interactions and context that determine who does the work, including the broader
conceptualization of identity and participation in a community, and how these influence
the creation of information and the quality of the work.
Going to Mars requires a paradigm shift in how we think about knowledge, work, and
plans. Knowledge is more then technical; it includes how we structure and use our
environment, our activities, and our relations to each other. An ethnographic analysis
emphasizes:
• Social-psychological view of work: Activities/identities versus tasks/functions
• Local knowledge: the worker as a generator of concepts, notational languages, and
presentations versus a “tool user”
• Learning strategy: a self-organizing crew with emergent roles and practices versus
fixed, “optimal,” predefined roles and procedures
In three years, a crew of four or six on a Mars expedition may change their roles relative
to each other. They will learn each other’s skills, becoming assistants and then
colleagues. This is positive aspect of human interaction. Study of small, isolated groups
indicates that individuals may also stop talking to each other; we must plan our missions
for that possibility as well.
The ethnographic study of HMP-98 illustrates the broad ways in which we conceptually
coordinate our interactions—activities, identities, and genres. These are socially
constructed forms that constrain how and where we look, what we see, our
interpretations, our ways of talking and conversing, our dress and posture, our interests
and values. All provide meaning to our life by setting boundaries, ways of aligning
ourselves, ways of being. In our actions, we give meaning to the forms themselves by
realizing them, making them visible, such that our conceptions of what we are doing
(these identities, activities, and genres) are manifest in our behavior, and thus what they
mean and how they are defined is changed.
The study of scientists pretending to be on Mars reveals that knowledge is not just about
past experience, codified as facts and theories, but includes future-oriented imagination
and prototypic skills and methods. The common interpretation of “envisioning
knowledge” assumes that knowledge is somehow captured in images or graphics. But
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