A Drifting Service Development

Drift is one of the visible phenomena observed in an ambient assisted living project. In this project, services for elderly people were developed that would be ordered using a digital pen technology. In this project, the method of the Sociotechnical Walkthrough (STWT) for an integrated development was applied to clarify technology usage, technical aspects, and the work processes. This approach was combined with several other methods to form a multi-facetted sociotechnical design approach. During the course of the project several shifts in perspectives, breakdowns of understanding, and negotiations could be observed. This chapter describes how using this approach of sociotechnical design facilitated the identification of drift phenomena and its processing in service design. The authors observations also clearly show the limitations of up-front process planning for complex environments such as service processes.