WJ Clancey — Visualizing Practical Knowledge
consider the photographs from Haughton and how the ethnographic perspective enables
us to gain knowledge from images. Like the biologist examining Haughton’s oases, we
not only describe the patterns we see, but inquire about their developmental formation.
Especially, we see relations between people, tools, and environment and generate a new
understanding from these images.
In considering tools for envisioning knowledge, the Haughton-Mars study suggests that
we develop technologies not just to inform, specify, or regulate human behavior, but that
we provide means for people to visualize and hence create their own future.
Acknowledgments
This research was sponsored in part by the National Geographic Society and the National
Aeronautics and Space Agency. I am especially grateful to the participants in the
Haughton-Mars 1998 expedition, who were all open and enthusiastic about the
investigation reported here. For more information about HMP-98, see the associated sites
on the internet — www.marssociety.org,www.arctic-mars.org,www.arc.NASA.gov. For
more information about work practice analysis see www.IRL.org.
References
Clancey, W. J. 1997. Situated Cognition: On Human Knowledge and Computer
Representations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Clancey, W. J. 1997. 'The conceptual nature of knowledge, situations, and activity' in P.
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Park, CA: The AAAI Press.
Clancey, W., Sachs, P., Sierhuis, M., and van Hoof, R. 1998. Brahms: Simulating
practice for work systems design. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies,
49: 831-865.
Greenbaum, J., and Kyng, M. (eds.) 1991. Design at Work: Cooperative Design of
Computer Systems. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Maue, K. 1979. Water in the Lake: Real Events for the Imagination, Harper and Row.
Resnick, L., Levine, J., and Teasley, S. (eds.) 1991. Perspectives on Socially Shared
Cognition. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
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