Main idea

Questioning the concepts of a method keeps the search inside the field that named them. Questioning the problems they answer changes worlds immediately.

"How do you pick up work again after an interruption?" "How do you hand a case over well enough for someone else to carry on?" "How do you keep several competing explanations without artificially picking one?" These are not software questions. They lead to intelligence analysis, law, medicine, incident management, cognitive science, archival science, scientific research — and each of those disciplines has already answered, in its own words.

Pirolli and Card's sensemaking model thus describes an analyst who starts from external sources, selects, builds up evidence, constructs schemas and hypotheses, then produces the analysis. Bardram's Activity-Based Computing, in 2005, takes human activity rather than the application as its unit, in order to hold the continuity of work across environments. Neither is the system being looked for; both occupy its territory.

Why it matters

This turns a prior-art search into a change of discipline rather than a deeper dig into your own. Digging into your own literature gives you neighbours; changing function gives you ancestors.

And it reveals what a search by concept cannot reveal: that a problem you thought was born with your technology is an old human problem, treated elsewhere long before, and that the new part is only the medium.

Nuances and limits

The operation requires being able to state the problem without its technical context, which is already a piece of reformulation work — and a clumsy formulation brings you straight back into your own discipline.

And kinship of problem does not guarantee kinship of solution: two fields can treat the same question under constraints so different that the mechanism does not transpose.

Open questions

• Once outside your own discipline, how do you judge the quality of a source whose authors, journals and debates you know nothing about?