Ordering systems

A salient feature of cooperative work in modern work settings is that multiple actors so to speak interact ‘through’ a large collection of artifacts of various kinds. An actor may for example place a document in a location where others can see it and use it. The actor may place it there for his or her own later use, but at the same time others may access it too, or the actor may place it there deliberately for the benefit of others. Perhaps the identity of the others cannot be known in advance, perhaps it can. Anyway, whatever the reason for putting it there, since other actors have access to the document, those others may retrieve and use it at some point in time, perhaps for purposes or in contexts that are quite different from those of its origination. It may also be the case that another actor may change the content of the document, change its location, rename it, delete it, etc. Such practices are ubiquitous in cooperative work. The location of the collection may be a particular shelf, rack, room, or building, or the collection may be distributed over a number of shelves, racks, rooms, and buildings. The collection may comprise digital artifacts as well as paper and other physical artifacts. The items in the collection may be documents such as books, reprints of scientific papers, technical reports, invoices, design specifications, software code, blueprints, etc. Or the collection may contain parts and sub-assemblies, zoological or geological samples, forensic evidence, etc. Or the collection may be a heterogeneous assembly of such artifacts. However distributed and heterogeneous the collection may be, in their cooperative activities actors will (in some ways) interact and coordinate their activities through this collection, by changing its state.1