The organization, findings and outcomes of a joint industrial/academic project are described. The principal goal of the project was to develop and test some tools through which people involved in system development can incorporate explicit consideration of certain key psychological and organizational issues. Five tools developed for this purpose are outlined. These are concerned with the design of work organization, job design, the allocation of tasks between humans and computers, usability and task analysis. The use of the tools is described in a 'live' system development project in a large company. The authors briefly review the extent to which these tools meet a set of pre-specified requirements, compare their approach with those of Mumford (1986) and Lim et al. (1992), and make explicit what claims they are making of these tools.

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This article attempts to reconfigure hegemonic framings of “the academic conference” and thereby offer a means to (re-)encounter the spatial, temporal, and affective forces that conferences generate, differently. We are a geographically dispersed but multiply entangled group of academic researchers united by theoretical fault lines within our work that seek to ask what if and what else. This “what if” and “what else” thinking has manifested in experimental and subversive doings otherwise at a series of academic conferences. The storying practices presented in this article were made possible by the vital materialism of a shared google.doc. It was within this virtual environment that we attempted to weave diffractive accounts of what conferencing otherwise produces. This writing experiment offers a series of speculative provocations and counter-provocations to ask what else does conferencing make possible. This article is an invitation to the reader to plunge in and wallow within the speculative accounts which ensue and to contemplate the possibilities of breaking free from sedimented ways of neoliberal conferencing.