Supporting Appropriation Work -
Approaches for the ‘reflective’ user
Full-Day Workshop at the ECSCW'05
IT University Copenhagen, Denmark
University of California at Irvine, USA
InterMedia, University of Oslo, Norway
International Institute for Socio-Informatics, Bonn, Germany
University of Siegen, Germany
Technical University of Denmark, Lyngby, Denmark
| <…> a CSCW system should provide facilities supporting users in appropriating, exploring, modifying, negotiating etc. - cooperatively and yet distributed - ‘community handbooks’ that are openly incomplete and inconsistent. Providing support for distributed cooperative appropriation, circumvention, modification of the system is, perhaps, the toughest challenge in designing computer systems for cooperative work. (Schmidt 1991) |
Summary: Almost 15 years ago Schmidt formulated the challenge that computer systems for cooperative work should not only be designed to support users in performing work tasks, but also to support users in appropriating the new collaborative technology. CSCW Research regarding that challenge has been either based on the more analytical perspective of describing the dynamics of appropriation (‘evolving use’), or focused on the development of technologies to alter the artifacts (‘Tailoring’, ‘End User Development’). This workshops aims for establishing a broader research focus on technological and non-technological approaches to support users in reflecting and re-designing the use (and non-use) of collaborative technologies and to set out a research agenda for supporting appropriation work in collaborative settings.
We expect participants to submit a position paper of no more than 5 pages in the usual ECSCW Format. Submissions should be sent as a word/pdf-document by email to volkmar.pipek(at)iisi.de. Submissions will receive two reviews, and will be selected based on the quality of work and presentation as well as based on their contribution for an interesting mix of topics for the workshop.
Although key issues have been presented and discussed in the CSCW community for quite some time already, we aim at finding a more a systematic approach to map out the existing research, to identify promising lines of future research, and to build bridges to larger areas such as information systems. With this workshop we intend to bring together an interdisciplinary field of researchers concerned with studying collaborative aspects of appropriation work, with developing and experimenting with concepts that support the critical reflection of technology and its uses in context, and with the design and implementation of architectural and interface concepts to support appropriation activities. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
We welcome technological as well as non-technological concepts. We particularly would welcome studies and concepts for new work environments, or those involving mobile and ‘ambient’ technologies.
The workshop will be a full-day workshop. Depending on the background of the participants we will organize the workshop in themed sections of short presentation and discussion. The goal of the workshop is to work towards a coherent research agenda for the future. We prefer the number of participants not to exceed 20. In case of a greater number of submissions we plan to put together a program committee that reviews and clusters the submissions. The organizers take the responsibility to publish a summary of the contributions and discussions of the workshop.