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Almost two decades ago, I published an article entitled ˵From Human Factors to Human Actors″ (Bannon, 1991) in the book ˵Design at Work: Cooperative Design of Computer Systems″ (Greenbaum and Kyng 1991). This short polemical essay on the need to re-formulate our goals in the fields of information systems design and human-computer interaction to take account of people΄s general motivation and abilities, as well as their work setting, seemed to strike a chord. The article was anthologized in the popular HCI collection ˵Readings in Human–Computer Interaction″ (Baecker et al. 1995) and is still, somewhat to my surprise, cited today. (witness the reference in the Chapter by Hovorka and Germonprez, this Section). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the nature of conflict in relation to the environments within which distributed teams cooperate. Effective conflict management can bring great benefits to distributed teams, while inadequate conflict resolution strategies can incur significant personal and resource costs. The increased geographical, cognitive and emotional distances between members can stimulate and amplify conflict. Parties may display disinhibited behaviour (flaming) or may be reluctant to accept reconciliatory overtures (low trust). These factors can be attributed to the impact of communication technology on social structures that underlie interaction. Shifting to face-to-face meetings can be impractical or involve prohibitive cost, so it is important to establish how best to deal with conflict in technologically-mediated settings. Dispute resolution practitioners (conciliators) have evolved strategies and techniques to construct and regulate "safe-spaces"; settings that are conducive to finding creative solutions to entrenched conflicts. Building on interviews with expert conciliators, we discuss the potential for learning from the structure and constraints of conciliation environments in order to improve conflict management through technologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of awareness has come to play a central role in CSCW research. The coordinative practices of displaying and monitoring have received attention and have led to different venues of research, from computational tool support, such as media spaces and event propagation mechanisms, to ethnographic studies of work. However, these studies have overlooked a different aspect of awareness practices: the identification of the social actors who should be monitored and the actors to whom their actions should be displayed. The focus of this paper is on how social actors answer the following questions: to whom should I display my actions? And, whose actions should I monitor? Ethnographic data from two software development teams are used to answer these questions. In addition, we illustrate how software developers' work practices are influenced by three different factors: the organizational setting, the age of the project, and the software architecture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we concentrate on how conventions among practitioners are put at work for the sake of cooperation in those work settings where coordination is mediated at a large extent by complex webs of documental artifacts. Our case study focuses on coordinative conventions exhibited in the hospital domain and mediated by compound patient records. We conceive of the provision of document-mediated awareness information as a "learning device" by which these conventions can be made explicit in all those situations where practitioners need support in coping with and solving cooperative problems in the articulation of their activities. To enable such a context-dependent and usercentered provision of awareness, we also present and outline the WOAD framework that provides users and designers with a conceptual model and language aimed at facilitating the construction of a convention- and collaboration-aware layer on top of traditional architectures of electronic documental systems. To this aim, we take the case of the Electronic Patient Record (EPR) as paradigmatic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present efforts to explore the relatively underdeveloped area of digital photo display. Using examples from two empirical studies with family homes, we develop our results around three broad themes related to the display of photos and their arrangement. The first theme highlights the collaborative as well as individual work that goes into preparing photos for display. The second attends to the obligations families have to put particular photos on display. The third introduces the notion of curatorial control and the tensions that arise from one person controlling a home's photo displays. Drawing on these themes, we go on to describe how we have used a critical design approach to open up the possibilities for future display innovations. Three critical design proposals are presented as sketches to illustrate the development of our ideas to date. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rapidly expanding elderly population in Japan and other industrialized countries has posed an enormous challenge to the systems of healthcare that serve elderly citizens. This study examines naturally occurring interaction within elderly day care in Japan, and discusses the implications for developing robotic systems that can provide service in elderly care contexts. The interaction analysis focuses on prior-to-request and request behaviors involving elderly visitors and caregivers in multiparty settings. In particular, it delineates the ways caregivers' displays of availability affects elderly visitors' behavior prior to initiating a request, revealing that visitors observe caregivers prior to initiating a request, and initiation is contingent upon caregivers' displayed availability. The findings are discussed in relation to our work in designing an autonomous and remote- controlled robotic system that can be employed in elderly day care centers and other service contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We show that asynchronous collaboration can be made more effective by providing cues to common knowledge. We demonstrate this by empirically comparing two user interfaces used to support collaborative work. Our position is that effective collaboration is characterized by more co-ordinated and speculative interaction, and that cues to common knowledge help participants develop common ground for interaction. We also suggest that more effective collaboration is indicated by increased reliance on expectations of others' knowledge which is characterized by implicit references to shared documents and ideas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While ethnography is an established part of CSCW research, teaching and learning ethnography presents unique and distinct challenges. This paper discusses a study of fieldwork and analysis amongst a group of students learning ethnography as part of a CSCW & design course. Studying the students' practices we explore fieldwork as a learning experience, both learning about fieldsites as well as learning the practices of ethnography. During their fieldwork and analysis the students used a wiki to collaborate, sharing their field and analytic notes. From this we draw lessons for how ethnography can be taught as a collaborative analytic process and discuss extensions to the wiki to better support its use for collaborating around fieldnotes. In closing we reflect upon the role of learning ethnography as a practical hands on - rather than theoretical - pursuit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]