Rethinking affordance

n/a – Critical survey essay retheorising the concept of 'affordance' in digital media context. Lead article in a special issue on the topic, co-edited by the authors for the journal Media Theory

Physicality and Cooperative Design

CSCW researchers have increasingly come to realize that material work setting and its population of artefacts play a crucial part in coordination of distributed or co-located work. This paper uses the notion of physicality as a basis to understand cooperative work. Using examples from an ongoing fieldwork on cooperative design practices, it provides a conceptual understanding of physicality and shows that material settings and co-worker’s working practices play an important role in understanding physicality of cooperative design

Collaborative Practices that Support Creativity in Design

Design is a ubiquitous, collaborative and highly material activity. Because of the embodied nature of the design profession, designers apply certain collaborative practices to enhance creativity in their everyday work. Within the domain of industrial design, we studied two educational design departments over a period of eight months. Using examples from our fieldwork, we develop our results around three broad themes related to collaborative practices that support the creativity of design professionals: 1) externalization, 2) use of physical space, and 3) use of bodies. We believe that these themes of collaborative practices could provide new insights into designing technologies for supporting a varied set of design activities. We describe two conceptual collaborative systems derived from the results of our study

Designing Awareness Support for Distributed Cooperative Design Teams

Motivation – Awareness is an integral part of remote collaborative work and has been an important theme within the CSCW research. Our project aims at understanding and mediating non-verbal cues between remote participants involved in a design project. \ud Research approach – Within the AMIDA1 project we focus on distributed ‘cooperative design’ teams. We especially focus on the 'material' signals – signals in which people communicate through material artefacts, locations and their embodied actions. We apply an ethnographic approach to understand the role of physical artefacts in co-located naturalistic design setting. Based on the results we will generate important implications to support remote design work. We plan to develop a mixed-reality interface supported by a shared awareness display. This awareness display will provide information about the activities happening in the design room to remotely located participants.\ud Findings/Design – Our preliminary investigation with real-world design teams suggests that both the materiality of designers’ work settings and their social practices play an important role in understanding these material signals that are at play. \ud Originality/Value – Most research supporting computer mediated communication have focused on either face-to-face or linguistically oriented communication paradigms. Our research focuses on mediating the non-verbal, material cues for supporting collaborative activities without impoverishing what designers do in their day to day working lives.\ud Take away message – An ethnographic approach allows us to understand the naturalistic practices of design teams, which can lead to designing effective technologies to support group work. In that respect, the findings of our research will have a generic value beyond the application domain chosen (design teams).\u

Seeing the potentialities at the intersection: A reflection on performativity and processuality mindsets

© 2019 M@n@gement. In this paper, we propose to approach performativity and processuality as mindsets. We suggest that researchers interested by or pursuing performative studies should recognize more explicitly the inherent processuality of performativity. After offering broad overviews on performativity and process thinking, we highlight that both mindsets rest on a similar view of reality as processual, and both share a strong commitment to qualitative empirical work. In spite of the differences that exist between the two mindsets-such as their treatment of agency, the place of socio-materiality and their approach to continuity and change-we contend that acknowledging and engaging more directly with processuality benefits performative studies, as it helps these studies to deal with some of the challenges they often face. In doing so, performative studies could refine their analyses of managerial and organizational phenomena and would also increase their contribution to our field

Reactivity to sustainability metrics: A configurational study of motivation and capacity

Previous research on reactivity – defined as changing organisational behaviour to better conform to the criteria of measurement in response to being measured – has found significant variation in company responses towards sustainability metrics. We propose that reactivity is driven by dialogue, motivation and capacity in a configurational way. Empirically, we use fuzzy set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) to analyse company responses to the sustainability index FTSE4Good. We find evidence of complimentary and substitute effects between motivation and capacity. Based on these effects we develop a typology of reactivity to sustainability metrics, which also theorises the use of metrics as tools for performance feedback and the building of calculative capacity. We show that when reactivity is studied configurationally, we can identify previously underacknowledged types of responses. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications for studying and using sustainability metrics as governance tools for responsible behaviour

Syrian Refugees and the Digital Passage to Europe: Smartphone Infrastructures and Affordances

This research examines the role of smartphones in refugees’ journeys. It traces the risks and possibilities afforded by smartphones for facilitating information, communication, and migration flows in the digital passage to Europe. For the Syrian and Iraqi refugee respondents in this France-based qualitative study, smartphones are lifelines, as important as water and food. They afford the planning, navigation, and documentation of journeys, enabling regular contact with family, friends, smugglers, and those who help them. However, refugees are simultaneously exposed to new forms of exploitation and surveillance with smartphones as migrations are financialised by smugglers and criminalized by European policies, and the digital passage is dependent on a contingent range of sociotechnical and material assemblages. Through an infrastructural lens, we capture the dialectical dynamics of opportunity and vulnerability, and the forms of resilience and solidarity, that arise as forced migration and digital connectivity coincide

Review of Multiliteracy Centers: Writing Center Work, New Media, and Multimodal Rhetoric, Edited by David M. Sheridan and James A. Inman

While writing center directors will certainly want to read Multiliteracy Centers: Writing Center Work, New Media, and Multimodal Rhetoric, a new collection edited by David M. Sheridan and James Inman, this book is equally important for writing program administrators, WAC (writing the curriculum) directors, and other academic professionals charged with composition pedagogy.University Writing Cente

Revisiting digital technologies: envisioning biodigital bodies

In this paper the contemporary practices of human genomics in the 21st century are placed alongside the digital bodies of the 1990s. The primary aim is to provide a trajectory of the biodigital as follows: First, digital bodies and biodigital bodies were both part of the spectacular imaginaries of early cybercultures. Second, these spectacular digital bodies were supplemented in the mid-1990s by digital bodywork practices that have become an important dimension of everyday communication. Third, the spectacle of biodigital bodies is in the process of being supplemented by biodigital bodywork practices, through personal or direct-to-consumer genomics. This shift moves a form of biodigital communication into the everyday. Finally, what can be learned from putting the trajectories of digital and biodigital bodies together is that the degree of this communicative shift may be obscured through the doubled attachment of personal genomics to everyday digital culture and high-tech spectacle.Keywords: genomics, biodigital, bodies, spectacle, everyda