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Heeding calls to generate a creative synthesis between business history and organisation studies, this article analyses the emergence, institutionalisation and digitalisation of record pooling practices through the lens of institutional work. By developing an ‘analytically structured history’, this article contributes to the field of business history by demonstrating the value of practice and boundary work as organising categories. Practice and boundary work capture the continuous, recursive relations between structure and agency when constructing narrative explanations. It also contributes to neo-institutionalist history by demonstrating the embeddedness of institutional work – the everyday motivations and actions to revise practices and boundaries are shown to be intimately shaped by the conditions and affordances of historically-situated technologies.

Situated crowdsourcing has been growing in popularity as an alternative way to collect complex and often creative crowd work. However, previous situated crowdsourcing deployments have not successfully leveraged cooperation possibilities with their audiences, which can improve the data quality of deployed macrotasks. In this chapter, we present three situated crowdsourcing case studies that used different situated technologies and identify the reasons behind their missteps regarding promoting cooperation between workers. Then, based on the identified issues, we propose the design of a novel situated crowdsourcing platform that aims to effectively support cooperation without alienating solo workers. In order to gather insights on our proposed design, we built a prototype platform and evaluated it using a laboratory study with 24 participants. In general, participants were positive about the idea as it provided an easy way to cooperate with friends when completing tasks, while also allowing them to adjust the working environment to their liking. Finally, we conclude by offering insights towards improving cooperation in future situated crowdsourcing deployments and how this can assist in completing macrotasks.

A design team in the Hunts Point neighborhood of the South Bronx used methodologies of performance and collaborative, location-based storytelling to contend with the effects of urban spatial injustice in the community. Ideation via a series of participatory performances led to creation of a mobile cinema application as the starting point for public, location-based cinema walks. The application accepts user-generated content, acting as a new form of generative monument to the neighborhood as it evolves. The project exemplifies how installing situated technologies for an embodied form of participation can help translate local concerns to outside audiences, in this case using a metaphorical, locative media platform to discuss the evolving nature of environmental discrimination, over-incarceration, and urban spatial justice in New York City.

From a research perspective, enhancing our understanding of interactions between people, the contexts in which they are situated, technologies, systems and information is seen as one of the keys to...

Protocell technology has a precedent in the innovative use of plastic in the 1960s, when chemistry first came up with an innovative new material that could be applied to architecture, interiors and product design. Omar Khan describes how at the Center for Architecture and Situated Technologies at the University at Buffalo in New York, he is developing a line of research that builds on the legacy of the 1960s and 1970s for soft materials and the capabilities of an elastic responsive architecture. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Highly diverse settings such as London (with people from ~179 countries speaking ~300 languages) are unique in that ethnic or socio-cultural backgrounds are no longer sufficient to generate a sense of place, belonging and community. Instead, residents actively perform place building activities on an ongoing basis, which we believe is of great importance when deploying interactive situated technologies in public spaces. This paper investigates community and place building within a complex multicultural context. We approached this using ethnography, complemented with workshops in the wild. By studying the relationships arising between different segments of the community and two networked screen nodes, we examine the place building activities of residents, and how screen nodes are incorporated into them. Our research suggests that urban screens will be framed (and eventually used) as part of this continuing process of social, spatial and cultural construction. This highlights the importance of enabling socially meaningful relations between the people mediated by these technologies.

In his essay "Walking in the City," the French scholar Michel de Certeau talks about the "invisible identities of the visible." He is talking specifically about the memories and personal narratives associated with a location. Until recently, this information was only accessible one-to-one-that is, by talking to people who had knowledge of a place. . But what if that data became one-to-many, or even many-to-many, and easily accessible via some sort of street-level interface that could be accessed manually, or wirelessly using a smartphone? This is essentially the idea behind urban computing, where the city itself becomes a kind of distributed computer. The pedestrian is the moving cursor; neighborhoods, buildings, and street objects become the interface; and the smartphone is used to "click" or "tap" that interface. In the same way that a computer, mouse, and interface are required to operate a Web browser to surf sites, the equivalent components of street computing create a reality browser that enables the city dweller to "surf" urban objects. On a broader level, the collection, storage, and distribution of the data related to a city and its objects is known as urban informatics ( described by one technologist as "a city that talks back to you"). . Smartphone in hand, what can the modern-day flaneur expect to find in this newly digitized urban environment? First, thanks to the prevalence of GPS data, wayfinding is giving way (so to speak) to wayshowing, interfaces that provide specific directions from here to there, and to social navigation, getting around with the help of others (avoiding traffic, for example) and then checking in with your friends when you get there. Similarly, our urban gadabout might take advantage of use-someplace technologies such as augmented reality, where physical space is overlaid with virtual data. A good example is Streetmuseum, a Museum of London app that can overlay an archive photo of a street scene onto the same scene as shown through your smartphone's camera. Beyond augmented reality is amplified reality, where extra data is built into an object from the get-go. For example, the embedding of radio-frequency identification or near-field communication technologies in street objects enables the creation of locative media (also called location- based media). These situated technologies contain data about a specific location, which is then beamed to devices as they come within range, an exchange known as a situated interaction. An example is the sound garden, where designers assign sounds to public places, which users can then listen to using Wi-Fi-enabled devices.

With the advent of situated technologies for collaborative interaction that are based around digital tables, understanding the requirements of such digital tabletops in educational settings is a pressing concern. We conducted a study to observe how small-groups of higher education students collaborate in a pen-and-paper based group authoring and annotation task around a traditional table. The study was primarily concerned with issues that can have an impact on digital tabletop design, in particular, factors that contribute or hinder successful collaboration. By analysing the study within a distributed cognition framework we examined the task, the participants, and the tools. The analysis demonstrated that many factors contributed to effective collaboration around the table. These include: elements of participants' actions (conversations, body position, gaze, gestures, and stylised actions), spatial characteristics of the setting and participant behaviour (dividing the workspace, and the position and orientation of artefacts on the workspace), and the artefacts themselves. These characteristics have been used to establish a set of requirements that must be taken into account when designing a computer system to support digital tabletop interfaces for co-located synchronous collaboration in educational settings.