ABSTRACT
Formative contexts and dynamic artifacts share a double nature. Knowledge and experience sealed in formative contexts are expression of what may be called the rationality of the obvious: they are, in a way, ready-at-hand cognitive resources that need not be questioned or tested every time one uses them. This chapter sketches the main implications for a new vision of design based on intervention and online practical experiments. The outcome of such "designing-in-action" could be artifacts and routines that help organizational actors perform a perpetual activity of reflection and self-questioning while they are engaged in action. Indeed, formative contexts mold information systems. The formative context is the set of the pre-existing institutional arrangements, cognitive frames, and imageries that actors bring and routinely enact in a situation of action. Information systems, then, should always be treated and designed at two distinct levels: the one of the formed routines and the one of the formative contexts.
