How can we develop usable and work process-oriented ICT systems for shared homecare? Shared homecare involves different professionals, consists of mobile work and requires immediate and ubiquitous access to patient-oriented information, supporting an integrated view on the care process. This thesis presents a new collaborative design method for user needs analysis and requirements specification in the context of health information systems development; the Multi-disciplinary Thematic Seminar (MdTS) method. The thesis also describes the MdTS method’s application and two different usability evaluations of the developed system. The MdTS addresses a significant problem with health information technologies; they tend to support collaborative work of healthcare professionals poorly, sometimes leading to a fragmentation of workflow and disruption of healthcare processes. Based on human-computer interaction methods, MdTS implies a multiple-user needs analysis by thorough investigation of the entire interdisciplinary cooperative work and its transformation into technical specifications in order to develop appropriate information and communication technology (ICT) for the users’ differing work situations. Application of the MdTS resulted in a prototype, the OLD@HOME Virtual Health Record (VHR), adapted to the specific demands in shared homecare. Through mobile devices each care professional accessed patient information in profession-specific views from an integrated platform. This thesis provides an interesting case, illustrating how mobile ICT can support shared homecare, thereby bridging health and social care activities and improving knowledge about joint work processes. Results from the usability evaluations were overall positive. Information needed at point of care was available on mobile devices and presented in an understandable manner. However, the evaluations also indicated that it is difficult to transfer results from one homecare setting to another due to differences in operational routines. In conclusion, application of the MdTS method, in this study, succeeded in elicitation of correct user needs and in transferring correct requirements specifications to system developers for implementation.

This thesis is a collection of six papers and a cover paper reporting an exploration of how to strike a balance between individual task execution and work articulation in Computer-supported Cooperative Work (CSCW). The interest in this theme is motivated by an increased reliance of IT-supported cooperative work arrangements in modern organizations, the fragmented layout of work for multitasking individuals and reports on various forms of overload, increased level of stress and anxiety experienced by workers active in these organizations. Modern organizations are increasingly reliant on IT-supported cooperative work arrangements for doing work. Cooperators are not only expected to execute assigned tasks, but also to engage in work articulation. This is a term used to describe the process of rich and frequent interaction needed for securing that the contributions of cooperators are executed in such a way that the overall goal is reached. As cooperators typically are involved in several work formations in parallel, they need to find a balance between individual work and work articulation in relation to several work formations. The challenge of finding a balance in cooperative work has only to a limited extent been addressed in CSCW and there are few successful designs available for this purpose. The scope of this thesis is to develop an understanding of the challenges faced and strategies deployed by cooperators and work formations for striking a balance in work. The purpose is therefore to explore how multitasking individuals manage to find a balance between task execution and articulation work in computer-supported cooperative work, what challenges they face in the process, and how IT should be designed to support them. To reach this purpose several instances of cooperative work in different contexts have been closely studied. The main conclusions of this thesis are that cooperators are constantly struggling for a balance in work through making frequent switches between work formations, individual task execution and work articulation, sometimes through making switches in the technology that is used. Strategies for finding this balance are developed in relation to the specific context of a cooperative activity as cooperators ‘design’ their use of IT, structures, procedures and norms. It is further concluded that for avoiding overloads of interaction, cooperators show and estimate availability through reliance on various sources of shared information, that social (e.g. interpersonal relation) and contextual factors (e.g. location) are considered when establishing interaction, that cooperators when searching for interaction with others are influenced by their estimated availability, competence and willingness to assist, but also by network maintenance efforts (i.e. an ambition to avoid overloading and underutilizing other cooperators). Finally, it is concluded that norms are important for finding a balance in work as they reduce the interaction needed for work articulation. The main contributions of this thesis are rich descriptions of four cooperative work formations, the challenges they face and the strategies they apply, redefined theoretical concepts (i.e. availability management, interruption, multitasking) and extended understanding of interaction search behavior and ways to achieve high levels of informal interaction across distance. This work also provides some practical contributions in the form of implications for designers of supportive IT and implications for cooperators active in modern organizations.

Within Swedish universities students are often required to work in groups to collaborate on projects or to write essays. A salient feature characterizing this type of work is the lack of a stable and fixed location wherein project- related activities can be carried out and accomplished. Thus, by regarding students as instances of nomadic workers, this thesis investigates the nomadic practices in the context of their group work, with particular attention to issues related to collaborative and coordinative aspects. Although the lack of a stable office has, somehow, always characterized students’ activities, the spread of mobile technologies raises relevant analytical issues concerning the relationships between individuals’ practices, the use of particular technologies and the physical environments in which interactions may occur. In this regard, this thesis provides an example of how a philosophical conceptualization of place as the product of human experience can assist in exploring: (a) the relationships between students’ activities, the locales they work at, and the situated use of specific technological artifacts; (b) how students occupy and experience places, by investing them with activities, meanings and values; (c) how different physical environments constrain and shape the way activities are performed. The data were collected by means of ethnographically-informed methods during two different field studies for which two design courses, held at a technical university, had been chosen as settings. Within both of them, the participants were to develop a prototype of novel IT technologies, and to account for the evolution of their projects by means of a report. The two studies aimed at understanding: (a) how students organize their activities at a number of locations, and how it reflects on the activities they engage with; (b) the strategies they adopt and the technologies they use to overcome problems deriving from the lack of a stable workplace, (c) the different ways a workplace is practically created, how it emerges from students’ interactions with the environment they inhabit, and how it is mediated by the technology they use (place-making). Observations, field-notes, video-recordings, semi-structured interviews were used during the phase of data collection. Some participants were also asked to fill in a diary and to take pictures of the different sites used for their project activities. In addition, a workshop, organized as a focus group, was arranged in order to unpack issues concerning students’ usage of various technologies, with respect to number of people involved, ongoing activities and the related chosen locations. The data analysis suggests that taking into account the way a place is disassembled and the way nomadic workers manage to move out of it is central to an understanding of their work practices. Moreover, it shows that the participants experienced planning the division of work as essential in order to manage coordination and collaboration within the groups, to organize collaborative and individual activities, and to allocate them to differing physical places. Furthermore, this thesis outlines in what way a focus on place may assist designers in reflecting on the design of educational environments, and of technological artifacts enabling students to share and integrate heterogeneous sources of information. / QC 20100806

Dagens teknik erbjuder en mängd olika sätt för människor att kommunicera och interagera med varandra. Denna uppsats är en studie i bilddelning på sociala medier med fokus på amatörfotografers användande av tekniken i syfte för att nå ut med sina fotografier. Huvudfokus lades på vad för strategier de använde sig av, men även på användarnas olika målsättningar. Med hjälp av tidigare forskningsarbeten och djupgående intervjuer har vi lyckats återkoppla den egna empirin med våra teoretiska utgångspunkter och dragit slutsatsen att användandet av sociala medier i syftet för att nå ut med sina bilder till andra människor varierar väldigt stort från person till person. Hur tekniken används för detta syfte är därmed unikt för den individuelle användaren, dock har vi lyckats identifiera vissa likheter i användandet av sociala medier i dessa syften. / Today’s technology offers a variety of ways for people to communicate and interact with each other. This paper is a study of photo sharing through social media networks with a focus on the amateur photographers’ usage of this technology in order to widen the spread of their pictures. A key focus was placed on what kinds of strategies were used, but also on what kind of motivations the photographers had. Using previous research and in depth interviews we’ve managed to combine our own empirical data with our theoretical interpretations and have come to the conclusion that the use of social media in the purpose of reaching out with photos to other people varies greatly depending on the person being asked. Thus, how this technology is used depends wholly on the individual user. However, we have managed to identify some similarities in the usage social media for these purposes.

In our complex world of today we see that the leader- and followership is getting harder and harder to “command and control” our organizations and our society. The awareness of the decision makers are often too fragmented in relation to the often complex real situations out there. The information is only flowing in organizational stovepipes and not across boundaries as it should today. The patterns of mutual complex dependencies have taken over and we have difficulties in controlling the consequences of our decisions. The relations over organizational borders are often weak and fragmented and the mutual trust is low. Technology has always been a driver for the society to evolve and our idea is that technology can be the main driver for evolving cross boundary collaboration in order to meet the demands of the world. Technology can be the main driver but only if we consider all of the important dimensions when implementing Information and communication technologies (ICT) In order to find the right method of using technology and scientific methods for achieving better cross boundary collaboration a number of data collection activities has been performed, described and analyzed in the work with this thesis. The activities has been diverse in its nature, brainstorming activities, qualitative interviews and a small case study has been combined in order to derive the result – a path forward against further research for a better cross boundary collaboration in our western community. The thesis now have identified a path forward and a scientific framework for taking all of our experiences, existing capabilities, earlier performed research one step further and lift it up to the cross boundary level in organizations and in our society. We have the chance of cultivating all of the properties, relations, amounts of information, and evolve our technology. This may be all that we need in order to achieve a more socially sustainable climate in leader- and followership in our organizations and society. Who knows … maybe we can change the world … or at least make a real difference somewhere!

Thesis (doctoral)--Universität Freiburg im Breisgau. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 215-235).

Web applications offering real-time collaboration support (e.g. Google Docs) allow geographically dispersed users to edit the very same document simultaneously, which is appealing to end-users mainly because of two application characteristics. On the one hand, provided real-time capabilities supersede traditional document merging and document locking techniques that distract users from the content creation process. On the other hand, web applications free end-users from lengthy setup procedures and allow for instant application access. However, implementing collaborative web applications is a time-consuming and complex endeavor since offering real-time collaboration support requires two specific collaboration services. First, a concurrency control service has to ensure that documents are synchronized in real-time and that emerging editing conicts (e.g. if two users change the very same word concurrently) are resolved automatically. Second, a workspace awareness service has to inform the local user about actions and activities of other participants (e.g. who joined the session or where are other participants working). Implementing and integrating these two collaboration services is largely ine cient due to (1) the lack of necessary collaboration functionality in existing libraries, (2) incompatibilities of collaboration frameworks with widespread web development approaches as well as (3) the need for massive source code changes to anchor collaboration support. Therefore, we propose a Generic Collaboration Infrastructure (GCI) that supports the e cient development of web-based groupware in various ways. First, the GCI provides reusable concurrency control functionality and generic workspace awareness support. Second, the GCI exposes numerous interfaces to consume these collaboration services in a exible manner and without requiring invasive source code changes. And third, the GCI is linked to a development methodology that e ciently guides developers through the development of web-based groupware. To demonstrate the improved development e ciency induced by the GCI, we conducted three user studies encompassing developers and end-users. We show that the development e ciency can be increased in terms of development time when adopting the GCI. Moreover, we also demonstrate that implemented collaborative web applications satisfy end-user needs with respect to established software quality characteristics (e.g. usability, reliability, etc.). / Webbasierte, kollaborative Echtzeitanwendungen (z.B. Google Docs) erlauben es geografisch verteilten Nutzern, Dokumente gemeinschaftlich und simultan zu bearbeiten. Die Implementierung kollaborativer Echtzeitanwendungen ist allerdings aufwendig und komplex, da einerseits eine Nebenläufigkeitskontrolle von Nöten ist und andererseits die Nachvollziehbarkeit von nicht-lokalen Interaktionen mit dem gemeinsamen virtuellen Arbeitsraum gewährleistet sein muss (z.B. wer editiert wo). Um die Entwicklung kollaborativer Echtzeitanwendungen effizient zu gestalten, wurde eine Generische Kollaborationsinfrastruktur (GKI) entwickelt. Diese GKI stellt sowohl eine Nebenläufigkeitskontrolle als auch Komponenten zur Nachvollziehbarkeit von nicht-lokalen Interaktionen auf eine wiederverwendbare und nicht-invasive Art und Weise zur Verfügung. In drei dedizierten Studien, die sowohl Entwickler als auch Endanwender umfassten, wurde die Entwicklungseffizienz der GKI nachgewiesen. Dabei wurde die Entwicklungszeit, der Umfang des Quelltextes als auch die Gebrauchstauglichkeit analysiert.

Learning Content Management Systeme (LCMS) unterstützen die professionelle Erstellung, Verwaltung und Auslieferung von Lernmaterialien [BHMH02]. Die Speicherung der hierfür verarbeiteten Lerninhalte in einem zentralen Repository ermöglicht neben deren Wiederverwendung auch den Zugriff für mehrere Nutzer und somit das Zusammenführen der verschiedenen Kompetenzen, die während der Erstellung benötigt werden: Die mithilfe der Lernmaterialien zu vermittelnden Inhalte müssen nicht nur fachlich richtig, sondern auch didaktisch, gestalterisch und technisch für ein oder mehrere Zielgruppen individuell aufbereitet worden sein. Dabei reichen die Zielgruppen von verschiedenen Abteilungen bis hin zu Lernern mit verschiedenen Muttersprachen und Kulturen in international agierenden Unternehmen und Bildungseinrichtungen. Die Arbeit der Nutzer mit dem LCMS wird durch verschiedene Mechanismen und Funktionalitäten erheblich vereinfacht, ihre Zusammenarbeit untereinander blieb bisher aber weitestgehend unbeachtet. Das Promotionsvorhaben, das in Kooperation mit der chemmedia AG erfolgt, setzt an diesem Punkt an. Als Vorbild und somit zur Identifikation von Kommunikations- und Kooperationskonzepten werden Social- Software-Anwendungen herangezogen, bei denen die gemeinsame Content-Erstellung scheinbar unproblematisch stattfindet. Als methodische Klammer wird die DIN EN ISO/IEC 19796 [Deu09] herangezogen. Sie gibt einerseits die für die Analyse nötige Strukturierung der Prozesse bei der Lernangebotserstellung vor und liefert außerdem die für die Evaluation benötigten Qualitätskriterien.

Zugl.: Duisburg, Essen, Univ., Diss., 2005

Nous abordons dans cette thèse le problème de la conception d’un système informatique de soutien évaluatif, pour soutenir et évaluer en temps réel l’activité collaborative dans le cas particulier "d'une activité régie par des process issus d'organisations différentes". Nous définissons un process comme un ensemble de règles, de politiques, de plans, de normes ayant pour vocation de guider et de servir de référence à la réalisation d’une activité collaborative. Nous positionnons notre recherche dans le cadre applicatif de l’entrainement à la gestion de crise, et dans le cadre technologique de l’interaction tangible.Pour mettre en place un soutien évaluatif flexible et intelligible, nous proposons un système socio-technique capable d’apporter aux acteurs une conscience organisationnelle partagée et distribuée.Dans ce cadre, trois verrous essentiels sont considérés : (1) représentation et gestion de contextes liés à l’activité soutenue et aux interactions entre acteurs, (2) représentation et gestion des différents process liés à l’activité soutenue et à l’interaction, et (3) articulation entre l'activité soutenue et l'interaction.Pour répondre à ces verrous, nous proposons le système OrA s’appuyant sur trois groupes de principes relatif à l'activité soutenue et à l’interaction : modularité et représentation des process et contextes, gestion autonome et faiblement couplée des process et des éléments de contexte, coordination flexible entre ces mécanismes de gestion de process et de contextes.Ces principes sont mis en oeuvre au sein d’un système informatique s’appuyant sur les modèles des collecticiels, et en particulier CLOVER, des modèles de traces, des systèmes multi-agents normatifs.Ce système est évalué en démontrant la possibilité de modéliser les process d’un cas pratique d’exercice de gestion de crise, puis en proposant une utilisation en situation d’un exercice réel d’entrainement à la gestion de crise. / We discuss in this thesis about designing an computer system for an evaluative support , to support and evaluate in real-time the collaborative activity in the particular case of "an activity governed by processes from different organizations". We define a process as a set of rules, policies, plans, standards which aim to guide and be a reference for the realization of a collaborative activity. Our research is applied to training in crisis management, and situated in the technological context of tangible interaction.To implement a flexible and comprehensible evaluative support, we propose a socio-technical systemfor bringing the actors shared and distributed organizational consciousness.In this context, three key issues are considered: (1) representation and management of the contexts associated with the sustained activity and the interactions between the involved stakeholders, (2) representation and management of various processes associated with the sustained activity and the interaction and (3) the articulation between the sustained activity and the interaction.To answer these issues, we offer the OrA system based on three groups of principles, both about sutained activiy and interaction : modularity and representation of processes and contexts, autonomous management and loosely coupled processes and contextual elements, flexible coordination between these process and context management mechanisms.These principles are implemented in a computer system based on the model of groupware, especially CLOVER, a traces models, and normative multi-agent systems.This system is evaluated by demonstrating the ability to model the process of a practical case of crisis management exercise, and by providing a use situation of a real exercise training in crisis management.