Managing the Ecology of Interaction

Real work is complex and rich, involving other people, physical artefacts and constant re-planning of tasks to accommodate the contingencies of the situation. This rich ecology of work is often seen as opposed to more structured and formal methods of task analysis and interface design. This paper discusses a range of phenomena related to ecological settings and show how they can be incorporated within formal models. It also discusses several paradigms of interaction that take this into account including the socio-organisational Church–Turing hypothesis and incidental interaction. In conclusion, models can be both rich and also open to unintended uses.