ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a view of designing complex information systems within a broader context, which encompasses the collaborative and political nature of information design. It explores part of what that means both in principle and practice. The chapter deals with two political issues: representing unrepresented constituencies, and shifting problem boundaries. It then explores what is often called collaborative design methods or, recently, user-focused design methods where the collaborative design methods that involve the active participation of the eventual users of a design are not new. In collaborative work, the challenge is to integrate the prototyping stage of design properly into an overall process. It is at this stage that the value of benchmarking becomes obvious; the criteria that we use in benchmarks are used here. It is possible to look at the stages of collaborative information design from the point of view of the tasks that are completed at each stage and skills that are needed to complete those tasks.
