Towards digital materiality Imbrication of Services and the re-configuration of agencies

1. 18th Panhellenic Conference on Informatics ( PCI 2014) Towards digital materialityImbrication of Services and the re-configuration of agencies George Ktistakis, Demosthenes Akoumianakis Department of Informatics Engineering, Technological Education Institution of Crete, Greece Athens, GreeceOctober 2- 4, 2014

2. Overview and research focus • Ongoing research - broadly relevant to CSCW & SE • State of the art in synchronous groupware technologies • Web standards and interfaces • Motivation– Virtual work is increasingly re-organized around different tools and digital services • Implications on human routines • Novel requirements for tools and services that overcome barriers(tailoring, inter-operability, plasticity) • Challenges • Great amount of digital resources retained across different spaces • Lack of capacity to treat them uniformly • Increased cognitive load that results from the distribution of these services and the requirements they pose to humans

3. Overview and research focus • Approach – Inspired by sociomaterial perspectives on design • The digital medium holds the potential to re-organize both artifacts and practices to facilitate novel virtualities • Re-orient the design of collaborative artifacts to broaden their use and improve their digital materiality • Main Contributions – Imbrication of Services (IoS) • Introduces IoS as an alternative pathway for designing interactive collaborative systems • Adopts an IoS perspective to design a re-constructed calendar with enhanced affordances • Concept validity – Demo • A calendar that inter-operates seamlessly with services such as Disqus, Asana, Google Drive, Flickr and YouTube • Illustration of the above in the context of articulatory work that relates to calendaring practices

4. Digital Materiality(Perspectives) • Software as material • Software is the material for novel virtualities rather than just a tool • Software as both a material and a medium • Digital materiality is determined by the technology`s capacity to retain digital evidence of users` interaction in appropriate form • Specific genres of software appear to be, not only the material which invokes social agency, but also the medium through which material concerns are manifested (become tangible and sensible) • Technology in distributed organizing • Challenge the conventional view of IT as a black box in favor of novel concepts such as ‘sociomaterial entanglements’ • In recent works that explore sociomateriality as a lens design, the perspective of entanglement is critically appraised and compared against the notion of ‘imbrication’.

5. Digital Materiality(Imbrication so far) • In engineering – The notion of Imbrication • In IT – Imbrication of digital representations • The arrangement of distinct elements in overlapping patterns so that they function interdependently

6. Imbrication of Services New digital assemblage Embeddedness of intentionality Embeddedness of intentionality Collective agency Human agency Service 1 Service 2 Human agency Human agency constrains invokes Artifact Representation(s) constrains invokes invokes constrains Artifact Representation(s) Artifact Representation(s) Artifact Representation(s) Artifact Representation(s) Embeddedness of materiality Embeddedness of materiality Virtual referents

7. Use Case: Calendaring • Calendar-oriented work - operations on objects through which people interact with these artifacts • Prospective remembering: Remembering to do things – ( Payne ) • Retrospective remembering: Recalling past events – ( Palen ) • Six types of activities entailed in calendaring Current OCS • Temporal orientation • Scheduling • Tracking • Reminding • Archiving • Retrieval & Recall Temporal orientationReminding Strong SchedulingTracking Archiving Retrieval & Recall Weak

8. Improvement Goals

9. Design – Logical Pattern

10. Implementation – Demo Hosted in Google App Engine

11. Conclusion and future work • Concluding remarks • This application unifies contents across digital spaces • This unification has added value offering new capabilities to users of an OCS • No need for local repositories • Future work • Technological improvements in the re-constructed calendar • Prove that IoS is valid design approach for other application domains • Seek for empirical validity, needed for consolidation of a methodology • Contribution in ongoing research projects (P-nets, BioDrasis)