Taking CSCW Seriously: Supporting Articulation Work

1. Taking CSCW Seriously: Supporting Articulation Work By Kjeld Schmidt and Liam Bannon, 1992

2. Content The authors’ conceptualization of CSCW Focus and direction of CSCW Important questions in the field Important research issues

3. Computer support • “An endeavor to understand the nature and requirements of cooperative work with the objective of designing computer-based technologies for cooperative work arrangements” • Interaction between • multiple individuals • in multiple work settings and situations • with different responsibilities, perspectives and propensities • Design oriented research area, but one also needs to understand the nature of cooperative work practices

4. Cooperative work Rampant confusion! Cooperative, collaborative, collective… Marx (1867): “multiple individuals working together in a conscious way in the same production process or in different but connected production processes” Actors rely positively on the quality and timeliness of each others work. There is an overhead cost connected to mediating and controlling the cooperative relationships

5. Cooperative work • 1) A large part of the CSCW field defines CW as “group work”. The term “group” is quite blurred. • 2) “Multiple persons working together to produce a product or service” • 3) The authors proposes a wide definition of CSCW. • wherever • does not have to be a clearly allocated task • large or indeterminate number of participants • incompatible strategies, conflicting goals etc.

6. Articulation work • Integral part of CW as a set of activities to manage the distributed nature of CW. • “Supporting the articulation of distributed activities” • CW in response to different requirements: • - augment the mechanical and information processing capacities • combine specialized activities • facilitate and balance multiple problem solving strategies and heuristics • multiple perspectives and conceptions

7. Overhead cost of articulation work • Organizational structures (allocation, responsibilities) • Plans, schedules etc • Standard operating procedures • Conceptual schemes (indexations, classifications) • Further explanation of articulation work by Gerson & Star at the bottom of page 13.

8. Why CSCW now? Many cooperative efforts takes place outside or around the computer system instead of through it. The full resources of cooperative work must be unleashed: horizontal coordination, local control, mutual adjustment, critique and debate, self-organization.

9. Supporting articulation work • Management of workflow • Management of common information space

10. Management of workflow procedural

11. Management of common information space Interact freely Joint construction Manipulate the same set of information Require active construction by the participants

12. Common information space A common information space encompasses both the common artifacts and the meaning attributed to these artifacts by the actors. It is negotiated and established by the actors involved. Shared view: multiple actors perceive the same object in the same state and changes in the state concurrently. Cooperating at arm’s length: adding to, modifying, linking, searching and retrieving items from a common set of information objects

13. The distributed nature of cooperative work 1) Identifying the originator of the information 2) Identifying the context of the information 3) Identifying the context of the information

14. Conclusion • The paper has: • outlined important issues in the field of CSCW • discussed the distributed nature of CSCW • broadened the scope of CSCW • discussed the term ‘articulation work’ • attempted to outline problems and opportunities springing from this re-orientation of the field.