Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In this paper we present a framework for describing cooperative work in informal domains such as an office. We argue that standard models of such work are inadequate for describing the adaptibility and variability that is observed in offices, and are fundamentally misleading as metaphors for understanding the skills and knowledge needed by computers or people to do the work. The basic claim in our alternative framework is that an agent's work is defined in terms of making and fulfilling commiunents to other agents. The tasks described in those commitments are merely agreed upon means for fulfilling the commitments, and the agents involved in the agreement decide in any given situation how and whether a given commitment has been fullfilled. We also claim that in informal domains, descriptions of tasks, functions, and procedures are necessarily incomplete and imprecise. They result from negotiations among the agents and serve as agreed upon specifications of what is to be done. The descriptions evolve during their use in continuing negotiations as situations and questions arise in which their meaning is unclear. These claims imply that for a given situation an agent using such descriptions must be capable of interpreting imprecise descriptions, dctcmiining effective methods for performing tasks, and negotiating with other agents to determine task requirements.