Leveraging underspecification in knowledge artifacts to foster collaborative activities in professional communities Federico Cabitza, Gianluca Colombo, Carla Simone Dipartimento di Informatica, Sistemistica e Comunicazione, Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca, Viale Sarca 336, 20126 Milano, Italy Abstract Collaborative problem solving often involves actors with heterogeneous competences or that see a common problem from different perspectives: this can make mutual understanding difficult. The paper presents case studies in different domains where collaboration leverages shared representations, and discusses the main reasons why these represen- tations succeeded in fostering mutual understanding. We observed how the technologies proposed to manage those representations were successful only to the extent they were made able to adapt to the dynamic and open conventions that actors adopted during their activities. The point of the paper is that locality, openness and underspecification are key factors in this process, for their capability to promote tacit knowledge and to let competent actors reach a sufficient level of mutual understanding towards some common goal. The paper proposes a conceptual framework to charac- terize the notion of knowledge artifact interpreted as a semiotic system where actors can make sense of shared and underspecified representations, and derives from this notion implications for the design of a supportive technology. Keywords: underspecification, knowledge artifact, clinical pathway, software integration, chemical design Vagueness is at times an indication of near- ness to a perfect truth 1 1. Introduction In the last years we have been involved in three projects whose aim was to analyze work practices in or- der to support them with a suitable technology. These projects were in three different domains (chemical engi- neering, software engineering and healthcare) and had to face different knowledge-related problems (knowl- edge retention in highly competitive markets character- ized by high turnover rates; software reuse and cost- quality optimization; continuous improvement of clin- ical processes and procedures). However the outcomes of the analysis showed a common aspect: all the three communities involved in our studies systematically used some physical artifacts that they had autonomously con- structed to make their job easier. As such, there is little wonder in this phenomenon, as it is a common practice in many work domains for 1 Charles Ives, Essays Before a Sonata, The Majority, and Other Writings. W. W. Norton & Company. p. 22 sake of problem solving and coordination of activi- ties (e.g. (Carroll, 1989; Button, 1993; Suchman, 1996; Hutchins, 1996; Suchman, 2000)). But looking at those artifacts from the representational point of view, that is considering how they played the role of shared repre- sentation of some relevant aspects of the related work domain, these artifacts showed some deeper similarities, irrespectively of the different contexts and situations in which their were built and used. This consideration led us to an a posteriori reading of these three experiences to try to understand what these similarities were based on, the nature of the three kinds of representations used therein and their role in the collaborative practices of the related communities. The paper reports on the outcomes of this second reading of the three experiences described in (Bandini et al., 2003b; Bandini and Simone, 2006a; Cabitza et al., 2007, 2009a), in the aim to identify some design prin- ciples that could inspire the digitization of artifacts that play a similar role to that of the artifacts we observed. These outcomes have to be taken as a preliminary re- sult that is not aimed at defining or proposing any uni- versal approach, neither from the theoretical nor from the design point of view. However, these studies offer conceptual tools and a design-oriented approach to sim- Preprint submitted to International Journal of Human-Computer Studies September 30, 2011