Topics — What a work is about. Nucleation holds whatever reading the owner files here, whether or not an Anthology of the SOTA topic could also hold it; instruction for ML practice belongs to the anthology (ADR-048). The words are seeded from the clusters the reading-time triage of 2026-09-25 found, and grow by decision.
Design rationale — recording the reasoning behind a design or decision as it is made — issues, positions and arguments, options and criteria (IBIS, gIBIS, QOC and their successors) — and why such capture systems are or are not used: who bears the cost of capture and who gets the benefit, premature formalization, cognitive overhead, and the groupware adoption problems behind them (ADR-030).
10 of 2004 LIT documents. Back to the full index.
| # | Title | Summary | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| LIT-755 v2 | A Process-Oriented Approach to Design Rationale | Conklin & Burgess Yakemovic (1991), Human–Computer Interaction 6(3–4):357–391. Rationale captured with little disruption of the design process: in an industrial field trial a low-tech indented-text IBIS recorded more than 2,300 requirements and design decisions. Unread. | Unavailable — searched 2026-10-14 for a lawful full text, none reached, so it is not read and no NOTE is filed. OpenAlex lists only the publisher DOI, closed; Unpaywall finds no open copy; the Taylor & Francis PDF (tandfonline.com) returned a 403 bot check; a web search for an author-posted copy found none, and Conklin’s CogNexus site posts no papers of this kind; Internet Archive Scholar was rate-limited and the fatcat API reset the connection. The paper was reprinted in Moran & Carroll (eds.), Design Rationale (Erlbaum 1996), which is not open. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-756 v4 | Formality Considered Harmful: Experiences, Emerging Themes, and Directions on the Use of Formal Representations in Interactive Systems | Shipman & Marshall (1999), Computer Supported Cooperative Work 8(4):333–352. Users’ unwillingness or inability to make structure, content or procedures explicit is the cause of unexpected difficulty with formal representations in hypermedia, argumentation and design rationale, knowledge-based systems and groupware, and users are often right to resist: formalisms cost overhead, demand tacit knowledge be stated, commit early, fit one person or task, and leave information “between the cracks”. Designers should formalize only what the task needs, infer structure from informal material, and formalize incrementally. Read in the authors’ earlier web version. | Active — read 2026-10-30 (NOTE-1446) in full, in the authors’ web version from Xerox PARC on Frank Shipman’s Texas A&M pages (https://people.engr.tamu.edu/shipman/formality-paper/harmful.html), a text of about 1993–94, not the 1999 journal article; worth reading as the standard statement of the premature-formalization failure: across hypermedia, design-rationale, knowledge-based and groupware systems, users would not or could not make structure explicit, for reasons of cognitive overhead, tacit knowledge, premature commitment and structure that differs by person and task, and they were often right. Read it knowing that its evidence is the authors’ experience and others’ reports, and that what the 1999 text adds was not checked. |
| LIT-757 v3 | Groupware and social dynamics: eight challenges for developers | Grudin (1994), CACM 37(1):92–105. Groupware failures come less from technical problems than from eight challenges that groups pose: disparity in work and benefit, critical mass and the prisoner’s dilemma, disruption of social processes, exception handling, unobtrusive access to rarely used features, difficulty of evaluation, failure of intuition, and adoption. Argued from cases and the literature, with email as the success; no new data. | Active — read 2026-10-14 (NOTE-835) in full; worth reading as the fullest statement of why groupware goes unused: eight challenges, first among them that it asks extra work of members who get no direct benefit, with email as the success in which the one who does the work also wants it done. Read it knowing that it is an argued review of cases, not a study, that Grudin says removing the disparity does not guarantee use, and that its one issue-based system was abandoned for a political reason, not for the disparity. |
| LIT-758 v2 | Issues as Elements of Information Systems | Kunz & Rittel (1970), IURD Working Paper 131, UC Berkeley. Introduces Issue-Based Information Systems: planning treated as an argumentative process whose atoms are issues, questions raised because positions differ, with positions, arguments, questions of fact, topics and model problems around them. Every item is numbered for reference; issues are living, settled or latent; three manual systems are reported in use. A design statement without data. | Active — read 2026-10-14 (NOTE-811) in full; worth reading as the source of IBIS and of the argument-record design this record descends from: issues as the atoms of a planning discourse, positions and arguments on them, a challenge to a supporting statement filed as a new issue, every item numbered for reference, and issues kept as living, settled or latent. Read it knowing that it is a seven-page design statement with no data, that its field report is one sentence of “eager acceptance”, and that it says nothing about what keeping an IBIS costs. |
| LIT-759 v3 | Why CSCW applications fail: problems in the design and evaluation of organizational interfaces | Grudin (1988), CSCW ‘88, pp. 85–93. Cooperative applications fail when those who must do additional work to support them are not those who benefit, when decision-makers’ intuitions about them fail, and because they are very hard to evaluate. Unread. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-06 from Crossref and secondary descriptions of its abstract, not read: the ACM Digital Library refused this client. Filed as the source of the argument that a cooperative application fails when those who must do the extra work are not those who benefit, the failure an argument-development scheme here would most likely meet. It stays Unavailable until somebody reads it, not on merit. |
| LIT-760 v3 | Design rationale systems: understanding the issues | Lee (1997), IEEE Expert 12(3):78–85. Most design rationale systems ignore practical concerns such as cost-effective use and smooth integration; seven technical and business issues, and their implications. Unread. | Unavailable — searched 2026-10-14 for a lawful full text, none reached, so it is not read and no NOTE is filed. OpenAlex lists the IEEE DOI, closed, and a CiteSeerX cache, which redirected to the Wayback Machine and failed, and which is a crawl cache rather than an author posting; Unpaywall finds no open copy; IEEE Xplore returned an empty bot-check response; the University of Colorado research profile marks the article closed; a web search found no author-posted copy, only Lee’s 1992 working papers on other topics. What the seven issues are, which CLAIM-179 cites it for, remains unknown here. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-761 v3 | Argumentation-based design rationale: what use at what cost? | Buckingham Shum & Hammond (1994), IJHCS 40(4):603–652. A review of the evidence on when constructing explicit design argumentation is productive, and of the cognitive, organizational and technological factors that bear on whether rationale systems are taken up. Unread. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-06 from Crossref and secondary descriptions, not read: the publisher’s page refused this client, and no abstract was available to it. Filed as the review that asks of argumentation-based rationale the question the owner is asking. It stays Unavailable until somebody reads it, not on merit. |
| LIT-762 v3 | gIBIS: a hypertext tool for exploratory policy discussion | Conklin & Begeman (1988), ACM TOIS 6(4):303–331. gIBIS, a graphical hypertext tool for building and browsing typed IBIS networks collaboratively, meant to capture early design deliberation. Unread. | Unfetched — searched 2026-10-14 for a lawful full text; one exists but this client could not fetch it, so it is not read and no NOTE is filed. OpenAlex and Unpaywall list a bronze copy in the ACM Digital Library (dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/58566.59297); it returned a Cloudflare 403 challenge to curl and to WebFetch, so the failure is on access, not availability. No author-posted copy was found on the web or on Conklin’s CogNexus site; the fatcat API reset the connection. A browser fetch of the ACM copy is the cheapest way to read it. It stays Unfetched until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-763 v2 | Questions, Options, and Criteria: Elements of Design Space Analysis | MacLean, Young, Bellotti & Moran (1991), Human–Computer Interaction 6(3–4):201–250. QOC, a semiformal notation for the design space around an artifact, built alongside the design rather than as a record of the process; its payoff is stated as a goal, not shown. Unread. | Unavailable — searched 2026-10-14 for a lawful full text, none reached, so it is not read and no NOTE is filed. OpenAlex and Unpaywall find no open copy; the Taylor & Francis PDF returned a 403 bot check; the Design Space Analysis page of NAVER LABS Europe (successor to Xerox’s European research centre, where the work was done) describes the project but posts no paper; a web search found no author-posted copy; Internet Archive Scholar was rate-limited. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-1631 v2 | Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences | Bowker & Star (1999). Classification systems are infrastructure: once routine they become invisible, and what they make visible, actionable and countable, and what they leave residual, has material and moral consequences for the people and things classified; cases include the ICD, nursing classifications and racial classification under apartheid. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-27, not read. A close reading was attempted on 2026-10-27 and no lawful full text was reached: the book is closed on Unpaywall (MIT Press), with no open copy listed. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |