Collaborative Activity and Technological Design: Task Coordination in London Underground Control Rooms

Summary:
In those days, people had little understanding of the organisation of collaborative activity in real world, technologically supported, and work environments. In this paper, the authors discuss about the possibility of utilising recent developments within social science. They specially use the analysis of organisational conduct and interpersonal communication, as a basis for the design and development of tools and technologies to support collaborative work. The authors firstly explicate the informal work practices and procedures whereby personnel systematically communicate information, then they coordinate a disparate collection of tasks and activities. To do this, they focus on the Line Control Rooms on London Underground (a complex multimedia environment). This paper describes the details of communicative and collaborative work in a real-world environment which incorporates technology similar to that being developed in the field of CSCW.
Focusing on the social organisation of cooperative work in a control room, the ways in which various personnel coordinate multiple tasks and utilise a complex array of tools and technologies are explored. This begins to reveal the nature of the interaction between the controllers and their work practices. In particular, the ways in which they collaborate and mutually monitor each others work and communication has implications for the design of further developments to the technology in the control room and to the general design and implementation of shared tools.

My Idea:
I believe that its content has not been organized very well. The main parts of the paper is mainly different from the today's paper styles. Moreover, there is no chart, no statistical data and no supporting material to prove the offered solution efficiently. At the end, I think that this paper was worthy in that time and it might be very useful for the future researches done later.