Manual Collaboration Systems: Decision Support or Support for Situated Choices

This paper challenges the idea of calling the activity that occurs in many collaborative systems "decision making". It suggests that the term decision-making implies a level of deliberation which does not appear to reflect the reality of how activity takes place in these systems. To examine this, the paper selects a type of system discussed previously in the CSCW literature, a whiteboard based scheduling system in an intensive care ward. It finds in fact that much of the activity that occurs in this system is reactive and routine. It shows why the design of this system reduces the need for actors to evaluate choices (when choosing is the hallmark of decision making) and instead allows activity to take place routinely through situated choices.