Paperwork at 78kph

Abstract

In Finnish paper mills the stream of paper being produced can, and does break. A major concern is when these breaks are recurrent or prolonged. Downtime is expensive. The causes and remedies for problem breaks in a sophisticated and highly automated process can be hard to find. The paper reports on research from a CSCW perspective into the work activities of production crews, the social and information infrastructures that support them. It makes design recommendations for enhanced support for Organisational Memory and ways it might be differentially indexed to suit production crews.