PHDDS91923 Co-designing IT for Cooperation (Spring 2025)

The course is connected to the following study programs

Elective course in the PhD programme Digitalisation and Society.

PhD-candidates from other institutions are welcome to apply, but students from this PhD programme will be prioritised.

Lecture Semester

4th semester (spring)

The student's learning outcomes after completing the course

Knowledge

The student has

• advanced knowledge of theories and concepts for understanding how people cooperate in workplaces or in everyday life

• state of the art knowledge of methods, tools and techniques for designing IT solutions in support of cooperative work practices

• advanced knowledge of the principles of how to secure accountability and participation in designing IT solutions

Skills

The student can

• demonstrate and critically discuss methods, tools, and techniques for designing IT solutions in support of cooperative practices

General competence

The student can

• conduct methodologically and ethically sound research according to high scientific standards in the research fields of CSCW and PD

Content

The course introduces the students to Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), an interdisciplinary research field concerned with understanding how to support cooperative work practices by technology design. The course gives the student an overview of central theories and concepts for understanding how people cooperate in organisations and workplaces, and how to design IT solutions to support this cooperation.

CSCW as a field of research was established in the 80s, to solve problems with early online transaction processing systems, which often hid the presence of other users and broke down in view of the ‘situated’ nature of cooperative work ie. did not support users in what they needed to do together. To be able to improve such systems, systematic studies of actual cooperative work practices in real-world settings were conducted to design better tools for coordination. In this, researchers from the social sciences and HCI fields collaborated tightly and established CSCW as an interdisciplinary field from the start.

CSCW implies an active and forward-looking approach to technology design in which ethnographic and other forms of in-depth workplace studies play an essential and proactive role, with a keen attention to the moment-by-moment flow of cooperative work, how people coordinate and manage tasks together – the situated and cooperative integration of tools, documents, actions, and interactions.

A broad selection of methods, tools and techniques have been applied in CSCW research, but the course have a special focus on techniques to secure and configure participation in Co-designing IT for cooperation. The candidate will be introduced to the principles of participatory design (PD), emphasizing democratic processes, user empowerment and mutual learning. The students will get practical experience with how these principles matter for designing IT in support of cooperative work. In this they will work with tools and techniques to prototype IT solutions with users without the need for advanced programming skills.

The lectures and plenary discussions will focus on:

• classical case studies in CSCW

• central theories and concepts in CSCW

• methods, tools and techniques for designing support for cooperative practices as developed in CSCW

• the principles of PD and how they matter in designing IT solutions

Forms of teaching and learning

Lectures, seminars and individual presentations, peer review of fellow student’s paper, and discussions.

The duration of the course is six days, distributed over two or more sessions.

Workload

The workload is estimated to 130 hours.

Coursework requirements - conditions for taking the exam

• Project work in groups.

Examination

Individual oral exam. Approximately 30 minutes duration.

Some supporting material will be allowed, specified by the lecturer.

Grading scale: pass/fail.

Examiners

One external and one internal examiner, or two internal examiners.

Conditions for resit/rescheduled exams

Same requirements as the main exam.

Course evaluation

Feedback from our students is vital in order to develop and offer high quality courses. The course is evaluated using an oral evaluation conducted at the end of the course.

Literature

Barley, Stephen R. 1986. ‘Technology as an Occasion for Structuring: Evidence from Observations of CT Scanners and the Social Order of Radiology Departments’. Administrative Science Quarterly 31 (1): 78–108.

 

Bødker, Susanne. 2006. ‘When Second Wave HCI Meets Third Wave Challenges’. In Proceedings of the 4th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction: Changing Roles, 1–8. NordiCHI ’06. New York, NY, USA: ACM.

 

Bødker, Susanne, Christian Dindler, and Ole Sejer Iversen. 2017. ‘Tying Knots: Participatory Infrastructuring at Work’. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) 26 (1–2): 245–73.

 

Bowers, John, Graham Button, and Wes Sharrock. 1995. ‘Workflow From Within and Without: Technology and Cooperative Work on the Print Industry Shopfloor’, 51–66.

 

Brandt, Eva, Thomas Binder, and Elizabeth B.-N. Sanders. 2013. ‘Tools and Techniques: Ways to Engage Telling, Making and Enacting’. In Routledge International Handbook of Participatory Design, edited by Jesper Simonsen and Toni Robertson, 145–81. London: Routledge.

 

Bratteteig, Tone, and Ina Wagner. 2013. ‘Moving Healthcare to the Home: The Work to Make Homecare Work’. In ECSCW 2013: Proceedings of the 13th European Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 21-25 September 2013, Paphos, Cyprus, edited by Olav W. Bertelsen, Luigina Ciolfi, Maria Antonietta Grasso, and George Angelos Papadopoulos, 143–62. London: Springer.

 

———. 2016. ‘Unpacking the Notion of Participation in Participatory Design’. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) 25 (6): 425–75.

 

Çarçani, Klaudia, and Harald Holone. 2019. ‘Boundary Objects or Coordination Mechanisms?’ Selected Papers of the IRIS, Issue Nr 9 (2018), June.

 

Carstensen, Peter H., and Carsten Sørensen. 1996. ‘From the Social to the Systematic’. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) 5 (4): 387–413.

 

Dourish, Paul, and Victoria Bellotti. 1992. ‘Awareness and Coordination in Shared Workspaces’. In Proceedings of the 1992 ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work - CSCW ’92, 107–14. Toronto, Ontario, Canada: ACM Press.

 

Fitzpatrick, Geraldine, and Gunnar Ellingsen. 2013. ‘A Review of 25 Years of CSCW Research in Healthcare: Contributions, Challenges and Future Agendas’. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) 22 (4): 609–65.

 

Flügge, Asbjørn William Ammitzbøll, Thomas Hildebrandt, and Naja Holten Møller. 2020. ‘Algorithmic Decision Making in Public Services: A CSCW-Perspective’. In Companion of the 2020 ACM International Conference on Supporting Group Work, 111–14. GROUP ’20. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery.

 

Gasser, Les. 1986. ‘The Integration of Computing and Routine Work’. ACM Transactions on Information Systems 4 (3): 205–25.

 

Gross, Tom. 2013. ‘Supporting Effortless Coordination: 25 Years of Awareness Research’. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) 22 (4–6): 425–74.

 

Harrison, Steve, and Paul Dourish. 1996. ‘Re-Place-Ing Space: The Roles of Place and Space in Collaborative Systems’. In Proceedings of the 1996 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 67–76. CSCW ’96. New York, NY, USA: ACM.

 

Heath, Christian, and Paul Luff. 1992. ‘Collaboration and ControlCrisis Management and Multimedia Technology in London Underground Line Control Rooms’. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) 1 (1): 69–94.

 

Holone, Harald, Gunnar Misund, Haakon Tolsby, and Steinar Kristoffersen. 2008. ‘Aspects of Personal Navigation with Collaborative User Feedback’. In Proceedings of the 5th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction: Building Bridges, 182–91. NordiCHI ’08. New York, NY, USA: ACM.

 

Kensing, Finn, and Jeanette Blomberg. 1998. ‘Participatory Design: Issues and Concerns’. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) 7 (3–4): 167–85.

 

Kensing, Finn, and Joan Greenbaum. 2013. ‘Heritage:Having a Say’. In Routledge International Handbook of Participatory Design, edited by Jesper Simonsen and Toni Robertson, 21–37. London: Routledge.

 

Luff, Paul, and Christian Heath. 1998. ‘Mobility in Collaboration’. In Proceedings of the 1998 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 305–14. CSCW ’98. New York, NY, USA: ACM.

 

Mutlu, Bilge, and Jodi Forlizzi. 2008. ‘Robots in Organizations: The Role of Workflow, Social, and Environmental Factors in Human-Robot Interaction’. In 2008 3rd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), 287–94.

 

Niklasson, Axel. 2020. ‘AI for Teams: The Future of Assisted Collaborative Work’.

Orlikowski, Wanda J., and C. Suzanne Iacono. 2001. ‘Research Commentary: Desperately Seeking the “IT” in IT Research—A Call to Theorizing the IT Artifact’. Information Systems Research 12 (2): 121–34.

 

Pipek, Volkmar, and Volker Wulf. 2009. ‘Infrastructuring: Toward an Integrated Perspective on the Design and Use of Information Technology’. Journal of the Association for Information Systems 10 (5): 447.

 

Prilla, Michael, Oliver Blunk, and Irene-Angelica Chounta. 2020. ‘How Does Collaborative Reflection Unfold in Online Communities? An Analysis of Two Data Sets’. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) 29 (6): 697–741.

 

Saatçi, Banu, Kaya Akyüz, Sean Rintel, and Clemens Nylandsted Klokmose. 2020. ‘(Re)Configuring Hybrid Meetings: Moving from User-Centered Design to Meeting-Centered Design’. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) 29 (6): 769–94.

Schmidt, Kjeld. 2011. ‘The Concept of “Work” in CSCW’. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) 20 (4–5): 341–401.

 

Schmidt, Kjeld, and Liam Bannon. 1992. ‘Taking CSCW Seriously’. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) 1 (1–2): 7–40.

 

Schmidt, Kjeld, and Jørgen Bansler. 2016. ‘Computational Artifacts: Interactive and Collaborative Computing as an Integral Feature of Work Practice’. In COOP 2016: Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on the Design of Cooperative Systems, 23-27 May 2016, Trento, Italy, 21–38. Springer International Publishing.

 

Schmidt, Kjeld, and Carla Simonee. 1996. ‘Coordination Mechanisms: Towards a Conceptual Foundation of CSCW Systems Design’. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) 5 (2–3): 155–200.

 

Simonsen, Jesper, Helena Karasti, and Morten Hertzum. 2020. ‘Infrastructuring and Participatory Design: Exploring Infrastructural Inversion as Analytic, Empirical and Generative’. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) 29 (1): 115–51.

 

Star, Susan Leigh, and James R. Griesemer. 1989. ‘Institutional Ecology, `Translations’ and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907-39’. Social Studies of Science 19 (3): 387–420.

 

Suchman, Lucy. 2002. ‘Located Accountabilities in Technology Production’. Scandinavian Journal of Information Systems 14 (2).

 

Verne, Guri, and Tone Bratteteig. 2016. ‘Do-It-Yourself Services and Work-like Chores: On Civic Duties and Digital Public Services’. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing 20 (4): 517–32.