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234 Lorna Heaton

New uses and new cultural meanings can only be developed after
the fact. It is too early to tell whether or not CSCW designers are
justified in their attention to non-verbal, contextual support. Japan-
ese CSCW has been criticized for simply trying to simulate face-to-
face reality as closely as possible and for neglecting to exploit some
of the transformative potential of computer mediated communica-
tion. We would like to suggest that, rather than abdicating responsi-
bility for the consequences of their designs, Japanese designers have
adopted a pragmatic approach: designing for use as they understand
it now, and leaving these uses to develop as they will.
The explicit cultural sensitivity of Japanese CSCW work also
point to a need for cultural sensitivity in the design of technological
artifacts, and at a level that goes beyond ergonomics or changing
surface details on an interface. In the case of Japan, the need for
contextual information suggests that the use of language-based en-
vironments, even in Japanese, may be problematic. This difficulty
goes far beyond the physical difficulty of inputting on a keyboard (al-
though this is also a definite concern, as reflected in the extensive
research on pen-based computing, speech synthesis and multimodal
interfaces in Japan). There appears to be a demand for virtual real-
ity interfaces, and initial experiments have demonstrated that VR-
based interfaces to applications such as internet relay chat (IRC) are
indeed very popular. Secondly, the assumed difficulty of fitting into a
framework, or set way of doing things, suggests that organizing co-
operative work as a series of procedures to be followed or channels to
be taken may be inappropriate in Japan. In fact, this is confirmed by
the choice of Japan’s leading workflow expert to focus on the use of
resources rather than the paths they follow.
We are only beginning to appreciate the complexity of the rela-
tionship between technology and its context and how changes in one
inevitably affect the other. It is important to remember that techno-
logical artifacts are being designed by someone and that there is
nothing inevitable about how they turn out. Design choices circum-
scribe a field of potential uses: some are built in, others are pro-
scribed. Consequently, it is essential to consider design in studies of
the implementation and use of technology.

Conclusion

This paper has outlined how designers’ views on Japanese culture
find their way into the design rationale for CSCW systems: Japanese