The Form of HWID Theory

The aim of activities within the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) area named Human Work Interaction Design (HWID) is to establish relationships between empirical work-domain studies and recent developments in interaction design. Recent areas of research within HWID include design sketches for work, usability in context, work analysis for HCI, and integration of work analysis and interaction design methods for pervasive and smart workplaces. Across these areas, the question emerges what form of theory may HWID research produce? The aim with this paper is to investigate the requirements of different research purposes to a common framework. We take the position that we should approach HWID with a lightweight, medium-level framework that is useful to guide the application of other theories to study the relation between work analysis and interaction design. We analyse the requirements to theory found in research presented at a recent working conference, and find that a frequent form of HWID theory may be a combination of a
HCI theory, domain-specific theory and theorizing on the relation between empirical work analysis and interaction design. At the end of the paper, we propose some constraints for further development of a HWID framework.