Resources, Co-Evolution and Artifacts: Theory in CSCW

ISBN-13: 9781849966719 / Angielski / Miękka / 2010 / 332 str.

Mark S. Ackerman; Christine A. Halverson; Thomas Erickson

Opis

A topic of significant interest to the CSCW, IT and IS communities is the issue of how software and other technical systems come to be adopted and used. We know from considerable research that people use systems in many ways, and that the process of incorporating them in their everyday activities can require a great deal of effort. One way of understanding adoption and use is by considering artifacts as resources in people's environments. "Resources, Co-Evolution and Artifacts: Theory in CSCW" looks at how resources get created, adopted, modified, and die, by using a number of theoretical and empirical studies to carefully examine and chart resources over time. It examines issues such as: how resources are tailored or otherwise changed as the situations and purposes for which they are used change; how a resource is maintained and reused within an organisation; the ways in which the value of a resource comes to be recognised and portrayed; the ways in which an artifact is transformed to enable it to function more effectively as a resource; the ways in which an artifact's usage practices evolve as it becomes recognized as a resource; how one might approach the problem of designing a resource de novo; the ways in which opportunistic use of an artifact transforms it into a new kind of resource.

Spis treści

Section 1. Artifacts and their Development 1. The Birth of an Organizational Resource: The Surprising Life of a Cheat Sheet. Christine Halverson and Mark Ackerman 2.The Zephyr Help Instance as a CSCW Resource. Mark Ackerman and Leysia Palen 3. Co-realisation: Towards a Principled Synthesis of Ethnomethodology and Participatory Design. Mark Hartswood, Rob Procter, Roger Slack, Alex Voß, Monika Büscher, Mark Rouncefiled, Philippe Rouchy 4. Figuring Out How to Figure Out: Supporting Expertise Sharing in Online Systems. Thomas Erickson, Christine Halverson, Wendy Kellogg Section 2 - Contextualizing Influences: Language, Trust and Time 5. Representational Gestures as Cognitive Artifacts for Developing Theories in a Scientific Laboratory. L. Amaya Becvar, James Hollan, Edwin Hutchins 6. Distributed Cognition and Joint activity in Computer-System Administration. Paul Maglio, Eser Kandogan, Eben Haber 7. Representation, Coordination, and Information Artifacts in Medical Work. Madhu Reddy and Paul Dourish Section 3 - Theorizing: Coordination, Co-realization and Structuration 8. Reach, Bracket, and the Limits of Rationalized Coordination: Some Challenges for CSCW. Elihu Gerson 9. Down in the (Data)base(ment): Supporting Configuration in Organisational Information Systems. Stuart Anderson, Gillian Hardstone, Rob Procter, Robin Williams 10. Using Technology and Constituting Structures: A Practice Lens for Studying Technology in Organisations. Wanda Orlikowski 11. Reflections andConclusions.

O autorze

Written by senior researchers in CSCW. Wendy Kellogg is one of the founders of Human-Computer Interaction and CSCW.

Blurb

How do software and other technical systems come to be adopted and used?

People use software and other technical systems in many ways, and a considerable amount of time and energy may be spent integrating the functionality of the system with the everyday activities it is intended to support. Understanding how this comes about, and understanding how to design systems so that it happens more easily, is a topic of great interest to the CSCW, IT and IS communities.

Resources, Co-Evolution and Artifacts: Theory in CSCW approaches this problem by looking at resources - artifacts that have come to be used in a particular manner in a given situation - and examining how they get created, adopted, modified, and abandoned. The theoretical and empirical studies in this volume examine issues such as:

- how resources are tailored or otherwise changed as situations change;

- how a resource is maintained and reused within an organization;

- the ways in which the value of a resource comes to be understood;

- the ways in which an artifact is transformed to function more effectively;

- how one might approach the problem of designing a resource de novo.