Organisational Prototyping: Adopting CSCW Applications in Organisations

The usefulness of applications which support cooperative work depends in its very nature on the way the cooperative work practice is organised. At the same time, the adoption of new technology is difficult and complex because of the amount of people involved and their distribution in time and space. This paper explores the possibilities of addressing this adoption process in a more simplified, yet systematic way without losing the focus on the interdependencies which characterise cooperative work. The notion of adoption is discussed as a dual process of adapting both the computer support to the work and adapting the work to the computer. A method called organisational prototyping is presented which aims at facilitating this adoption process. A case illustrates how organisational prototyping was used in the adoption of a cooperative tool for managing projects within a large engineering company in Denmark

Mutual Learning or Mutual Disappointment

Abstract not available

Activity-Centric Computing Systems

• Activity-Centric Computing (ACC) addresses deep-rooted information management problems in traditional application centric computing by providing a unifying computational model for human goal-oriented ‘activity,’ cutting across system boundaries. • We provide a historical review of the motivation for and development of ACC systems, and highlight the need for broadening up this research topic to also include low-level system research and development. • ACC concepts and technology relate to many facets of computing; they are relevant for researchers working on new computing models and operating systems, as well as for application designers seeking to incorporate these technologies in domain-specific applications

Applications of Context-aware Computing in Hospital Work: Examples and Design Principles

ABSTRACT Context-awareness is a key concept in ubiquitous computing, which sometimes seems to be a technology looking for a purpose. In this paper we report on the application of context-aware computing for medical work in hospitals, which has appeared to be a strong case for applying context-aware computing. We present the design of a context-aware pill container and a context-aware hospital bed, both of which reacts and adapts according to what is happening in their context. The applications have been evaluated in a number of workshop with clinicians and patients. Based on this empirical work of designing, developing, and evaluating context-aware clinical applications, the paper outlines some key design principles for a context-awareness framework, supporting the development and deployment of context-aware clinical computer applications

Activity-based computing: computational management of activities reflecting human intention

An important research topic in artificial intelligence is automatic sensing and inferencing of contextual information, which is used to build computer models of the user’s activity. One approach to build such activity-aware systems is the notion of activity-based computing (ABC). ABC is a computing paradigm that has been applied in personal information management applications as well as in ubiquitous, multidevice, and interactive surface computing. ABC has emerged as a response to the traditional application- and file-centered computing paradigm, which is oblivious to a notion of a user’s activity context spanning heterogeneous devices, multiple applications, services, and information sources. In this article, we present ABC as an approach to contextualize information, and present our research into designing activity-centric computing technologies

Context-Based Workplace Awareness: Concepts and Technologies for Supporting Distributed Awareness in a Hospital Environment

Abstract. Maintaining an awareness of the working context of fellow co-workers is crucial to successful cooperation in a workplace. For mobile, non co-located workers, however, such workplace awareness is hard to maintain. This paper investigates how context-aware computing can be used to facilitate workplace awareness. In particular, we present the concept of Context-Based Workplace Awareness, which is derived from years of in-depth studies of hospital work and the design of computer supported cooperative work technologies to support the distributed collaboration and coordination of clinical work within large hospitals. This empirical background has revealed that an awareness especially of the social, spatial, temporal, and activity context plays a crucial role in the coordination of work in hospitals. The paper then presents and discusses technologies designed to support context-based workplace awareness, namely the AWARE architecture, and the AwarePhone and AwareMedia applications. Based on almost 2 year' deployment of the technologies in a large hospital, the paper discuss how the four dimension of context-based workplace awareness play out in the coordination of clinical work