The paper explores the question why a design process ends up with a particular result. We analyze a collaborative design process where different stakeholders design an urban site using a participatory design tool. Our analysis is based on Schön’s view of design as a process of ‘seeing-moving-seeing’ combined with the concept of choice from Schütz. Analyzing the case provides an understanding of the ways in which ideas ‘move’ a design. We describe the dynamics of collaborative design work where design ideas are moved forward or deliberately blocked from being pursued further. We point to how design decisions are interlinked, making it possible to see how some design decisions are more important than others. Our analysis is narrative in character, but we also present a technique for visualizing the ‘life and death’ of design ideas.
Building on data from fieldwork at a medical department, this paper focuses on the varied nature of computational artifacts in practice. It shows that medical practice relies on multiple heterogeneous computational artifacts that form complex constellations. In the hospital studied the computational artifacts are both coordinative, image-generating, and intended for the control of nuclear-physical and chemical processes. Furthermore, the paper entails a critique of the notion of ‘computer support’, for not capturing the diverse constitutive powers of computer technology; its types if you will. The paper is a step towards establishing a lexicon of computational artifacts in practice. It is a call for a wider effort to systematically conceptualise the multiple and specifiable ways in which computational artifacts may be part of work activities. This is for the benefit of design and our understanding of work practice.
This paper reports on observations and interviews conducted through fieldwork at an offshore supply vessel to investigate offshore operational systems in use. The intention with the fieldwork was to get a better understanding of the knowledge and relationship that operators living in workspaces to use modern digital technologies. The findings are presented and analyzed through the lens of actor-network theory (ANT). The analysis shows that systems are involved in three main networks during different operations which I call host actor-network, parallel actor network and reconfigured host actor network. It also shows that these relationships contribute to dynamically changing safety issues on board, such as risky operations during tasks between the offshore support vessel and the oil platform. This paper addresses the critical issues of how different social, digital technologies and workspaces connected as networks affect the character of safety operations and the implications for the design of marine technology in workspaces and systems in a digital environment on a ship’s bridge.
This paper describes the creation, experience and assessment of a soundscape installation, conceived and undertaken as a contribution to the research project “Hong Kong Stair Archive: Documenting the Walkable City”. It examines the use of audio recordings and their presentation in a three-dimensional sound-field installation to provide an additional layer of data, analysis and interactivity to the investigation of pedestrian urban environments. This installation combines culturally and socially definitive sounds, photographs, architectural drawings and introductory texts to draw attention to the unique qualities of walking spaces and their use context, participatory nature and importance to life in the modern city.
Public design can be understood as a perspective that follows democratic approaches to design, addresses collective conditions, and supports the formation of publics. In this paper, we present our efforts to engage with a public design perspective in a case study addressing the topic of dyslexia. The paper contributes to the understanding of the process of articulation of matters of concern in public design. In addition, the results can be considered as opportunities for design that can serve as inspiration for other projects addressing the topic of dyslexia.
The key concern of CSCW research is that of understanding computing technologies in the social context of their use, that is, as integral features of our practices and our lives, and to think of their design and implementation under that perspective. However, the question of the nature of that which is actually integrated in our practices is often discussed in confusing ways, if at all. The article aims to try to clarify the issue and in doing so revisits and reconsiders the notion of ‘computational artifact’.
The paper illustrates the adoption of an Enterprise Social Media in a multinational corporation: the primary goal was to support the sharing of experiences among its members and to facilitate their collaboration. The paper highlights the outcomes and the problems that have been encountered in the effort to link this initiative to the achievement of the goals mentioned above, and tries to summarize the main reasons of these problems. The study adopted a research design in which an online questionnaire was administered to the corporation employee. By analysing the responses, we distilled the major points raised by the employees, among which lack of interest and use. The discussion focuses on the lessons that we drew from this experience on how an Enterprise Social Media should be introduced within organizations, e.g., by considering integration with other systems and the inadequacies emerged during the pilot experience.
We analyze the cooperative work involved in creating the architectural design of a hospital based upon digital technologies of the future, before we know whether future digital technologies will be mature and reliable enough for use. The entire process, from initial architectural design until opening of the hospital for patients, takes approximately 10 years, which is a significant amount of time considering the hitherto pace of digital technology development. Therefore, due time decision-making is essential. We conceptualize due time in cooperative design work as a quality measurement of whether “the right path” is followed when alternative future paths are available, without reducing the space for design maneuverability prematurely. But how do we determine the “right path” in due time? By exploring the ways in which artefacts are used to achieve due time decision-making on future digital technologies in hospital design, we find that artefacts are used to assess the relationship between dependencies and sequences of activities with the aim of pushing all irreversible decisions for design as far as possible. Thus, we argue that the practices of handling due time decision-making in complex cooperative activities are characterized as the practices of handling the relationships between dependencies, sequentiality, and irreversibility of the material matter (in our case the future hospital) shaping the course of action.
This paper advances the idea of gamified probes for scaffolding children’s computational thinking, and specifically algorithmic thinking. The paper presents the making of such a probe for a sorting algorithm. The making of the probe was alternated with its evaluation, and realized in the MakerSpace of the University of Bozen-Bolzano through a collaborative interdisciplinary effort of computer-science students and researchers from different research areas.
This paper presents Beatfield, a musical installation that allows players to explore an audiovisual landscape by positioning tangible objects on an augmented game board. The underlying idea of the installation was the proposition of an artefact that could encourage heterogeneous interpretations. Beatfield had to offer a multitude of interpretations and ways of appropriating the system; there would be not a right or wrong way to play with it. To this end, the design of the installation integrated related work on open-ended interaction, ambiguity, and appropriation with enigmatic aesthetics, ambiguous interaction strategies, and unpredictable mapping between user input and audiovisual output. The results collected from a user study confirmed the potential of the installation to stimulate a variety of different experiences and interaction strategies.
Global software development (GSD) outsourcing setups are assumed to allow IT developers to work anywhere and anytime, removing the contextual contingencies of physical location. However, we challenge this assumed flexibility in our ethnographic study on GSD work as we unpack the nature of the collaborative work through the experiences and the concerns of the collaborators in Denmark and in India. We explore the difficulties in global work to understand how the everyday work practices in the global collaboration are enacted locally. The study shows how the dissimilarities in the local conditions for work are distinctly tied to the societal infrastructures outside the office, which also shape the work within the office. Reflecting on our analytical approach, we propose three analytical moves to investigate the nature of local contextual contingencies posed by the local infrastructures and impacting global work conditions. We argue that CSCW research on global work should include analytical considerations for how societal infrastructures at the different sites impact how work is accomplished locally in transnational encounters.
Dependency research in informal care has a long history. Studies within this area usually focus on the dependencies that care receivers have in relation to those providing the care: the informal carers. They usually take for granted the dependencies that informal care brings upon the carers. This paper draws attention to these important (unpaid) workers of our current society and discusses how engaging in caring can constrain one of their most valued personal attribute: their independency. Not only that, the paper discusses how coordinated care can come to the rescue of some of this independency, introducing a few simple but yet effective ICT solutions that can create opportunities for it. The findings presented in this paper come from rich ethnographic data collected within TOPIC, a European AAL joint project conducted across Austria, France and Germany. Finally, we show our research framework in the setting of informal care with the complexity and dimensions in human and non-human supported caring activities.
In this paper we present a pilot study of the Print Awareness Tool (PAT). We initially designed PAT as an eco-feedback tool for paper waste reduction, but in our pilot study, it proved additionally even more valuable as an organizational probe providing the opportunity to question organizational paper-based workflows in general. Our findings illustrate that this is particularly true for administrative work where individuals have little agency, i.e. control over the printing tasks and processes they are involved in. We saw, however, that to capitalize on this effect, and to gather and benefit from the knowledge coming to the surface, the tool has to be enriched and managed accordingly. In addition, our study also showed evidence of paper affordances for administrative work that go beyond those discussed in the literature so far. From our findings we finally derive design requirements to digitally support such affordances and to extend PAT from a paper waste reduction tool into an infrastructure that would support organizations with a paper to digital transition.
Computer-Supported Collaborative Work (CSCW) has become increasingly positioned as a subfield of human-computer interaction (HCI). Earlier, CSCW has had a closer connection to the Information Systems (IS) field, but this relationship has seemed to become more distant. In this paper we reflect on the distinct characteristics of the research communities of CSCW and IS. We identify similarities, but also stark differences between the two. The six identified issues of difference are the roles of theory, context, methodology, organizational layer, socio-technicality, and power-alignment. Our contribution is in making these differences visible. We hope this paper will promote diplomacy and understanding between these research communities, so that scholars may consider cross-disciplinary IS-CSCW publication strategies.
Introduction of healthcare infrastructures is often accompanied by workarounds, persistence of paper-based documents and of technologies that the innovation was intended to replace, raising the question as to whether they are by-products or intrinsic to infrastructure innovation processes. This work, through a longitudinal case study of a hospital information system long in use, investigates their origin, their role in enabling the system’s affirmation, and the difficulty of eliminating them. Through a qualitative methodology, semi-structured interviews and ethnography, we reconstruct the history of the system and the information management practices around it. Our analysis reveals that the effectiveness of the tool implemented derived largely from ‘junction work’ performed by the nurses, which ensured the flow of data among different electronic and paper-based information systems. Moreover, in carrying out their junction work the nurses intervened to modify, enrich and complete the information contained in the different systems.
In this paper we present the history and declining participation in Danish residents’ democracy, and we discuss the possibilities for ICT based solutions exemplified in three design interventions in a housing organization. In particular we discuss the relation between computerized democracy, ICT supported access to democratic processes, and ITC support for community building and inclusion.
The project “Audio Satellites – overhearing everyday life” consists of a number of mobile listening devices (audio satellites) from which sound is distributed in real time to a server and made available for listening and mixing through a web interface. The audio satellites can either be carried around or displaced arbitrarily in a given landscape. In the web interface, the different sound streams from the individual satellites can be mixed together to form a cooperative soundscape. The project thus allows people to tune into and explore the overheard soundscape of everyday life in a collaborative and creative process of active listening.
FeltRadio is a portable technology for sensing WiFi through sensorial augmentation and Electric Muscle Stimulation (EMS). The technology enables its wearer to sensorially engage with the radio waves and WiFi activities that have become an integrated part of our everyday lives. The sensorial engagement changes people’s experience of WiFi activities, and allows them to participate in wireless communication infrastructures in novel ways. This is both an immediately embodied activity as it is a new form of social awareness. In this paper, we briefly present the FeltRadio technology and show how it facilitates new forms of critical reflection through sensorial participation in our contemporary experience of wireless traffic.
In this paper, we describe and analyze the work practices of an association of self-employed health and care professionals promoting a collaborative approach to home care in France. Our study shows (1) that coordinative artifacts (e.g. a liaison notebook) are central for sharing information and coordinating the work, (2) that focusing on patients’ quality of life leads care actors to address issues beyond the medical scope, and (3) that team members experience different rhythms of collaboration depending on the patient’s situation. We use the concept of knotworking proposed by Engeström [16] to better understand the challenges faced by people involved in this innovative way of organizing work, and suggest some guidelines when designing a system to support this type of work.
