The genre ecology framework is an analytical framework forstudying how people use multiple artifacts – such as
documentation, interfaces, and annotations – to mediate their
work activities. Unlike other analytical frameworks, the genre
ecology framework has been developed particularly for technical
communication research, particularly in its emphasis on
interpretation, contingency, and stability. Although this
framework shows much promise, it is more of a heuristic than a
formal modeling tool; it helps researchers to pull together
impressions, similar to contextual design’s work models, but it
has not been implemented as formally as distributed cognition’s
functional systems.
In this paper, I move toward a formal modeling of genre
ecologies. First, I describe the preliminary results of an
observational study of seven workers in two different functional
teams of a medium-sized telecommunications company (a subset
of a larger, 89-worker study). I use these preliminary results to
develop a model of the genres used by these two teams, how those
genres interconnect to co-mediate the workers’ activities, and the
breakdowns that the workers encounter as genres travel across the
boundaries of the two teams. I conclude by (a) describing how
formal models of genre ecologies can help in planning and
designing computer documentation and (b) discussing how these
models can be further developed.