This thesis investigates the knowledge sharing process between individuals working at companies located in business centres. Through literature review and user-centred approaches taken from interaction design methodologies, I find clear patterns indicating that knowledge sharing can create individual, organizational, communal and in the long- term also societal growth. Throughout this thesis project I examine knowledge sharing in the specific context of business centres and highlight motivations and barriers in this process. In doing so I find that motivations for inter-organizational knowledge sharing exists amongst the intended users, but that these motivations are seldom realised into action. This is shown to be greatly related to the lack of a digital presence that considers the barriers in knowledge sharing, which opens up for possible design solutions. The project concludes in a high fidelity prototype of a CSCW-platform with the goal of increasing the knowledge sharing culture by giving users a greater awareness over individuals in their near surroundings and new ways to connect with these individuals.

Expert investigators leverage their advanced skills and deep experience to solve complex investigations, but they face limits on their time and attention. In contrast, crowds of novices can be highly scalable and parallelizable, but lack expertise and may engage in vigilante behavior. In this dissertation, I introduce and evaluate the framework of expert-led crowdsourcing through three studies across two domains, journalism and law enforcement. First, through an ethnographic study of two law enforcement murder investigations, I uncover tensions in a real-world crowdsourced investigation and introduce the expert-led crowdsourcing framework. Second, I instantiate expert-led crowdsourcing in two collaboration systems: GroundTruth and CuriOSINTy. GroundTruth is focused on one specific investigative task, image geolocation. CuriOSINTy expands the flexibility and scope of expert-led crowdsourcing to handle more complex and multiple investigative tasks: identifying and debunking misinformation. Third, I introduce a framework for understanding how expert-led crowdsourced investigations work and how to better support them. Finally, I conclude with a discussion of how expert-led crowdsourcing enables experts and crowds to do more than either could alone, as well as how it can be generalized to other domains. / Doctor of Philosophy / Expert investigators leverage their advanced skills and deep experience to solve complex investigations, but they face limits on their time and attention. In contrast, there is growing interest among non-professional members of the public to participate in investigations, but they lack the expertise or may engage in harmful behavior. In this dissertation, I introduce a new concept called, expert-led crowdsourcing, that allows professionals and non-professionals to work together on a high-stakes investigations in two domains: journalism and law enforcement. First, I explored how expert-led crowdsourcing played out in CrowdSolve, a real-world investigation of two decades-old murder cases. At CrowdSolve, over 250 amateur sleuths supported eight law enforcement experts to uncover new leads two for the two cases. Second, I build two software applications, GroundTruth and CuriOSINTy, to better support expert-led crowdsourced investigations. GroundTruth helps investigators work with a crowd to find the exact geographic location where a photo was taken. CuriOSINTy extends GroundTruth's capabilities to help investigators with more complex and multiple investigative tasks involved in identifying and debunking misinformation on social media. Third, I compared and contrasted the three prior studies to develop a more detailed understanding of expert-led crowdsourced investigations and how to better support them. Finally, I conclude with a discussion of how expert-led crowdsourcing enables experts and crowds to do more than either could alone, as well as how it can be used in other professions.

There are myriad examples of virtual communities and environments available for collaborative activities. However, most of these environments are confined to the desktop and thus preclude collaboration while users are on the move. Through a scenario-based design process, this article establishes the importance of mobile collaborative environments that are readily accessible for users on mobile devices. The element of mobile accessibility for collaborative environments renders them ubiquitous—they can be used anywhere and at any time. A working prototype is then presented that has been developed to supplement an existing desktop-based online virtual community. The prototype illustrates a generic, extensible and platform-independent architecture for translating a desktop collaborative environment into a mobile system. Based on the prototype, we also foresee its application for users in fieldwork settings, particularly for learning and educational activities of teachers, students, and peers through collaboration in a distributed environment. / Master of Science

Nya komplexa IT-system som erbjuder möjligheter för verksamheter och företag utvecklas runt oss hela tiden. Gränsen mellan människa och teknologi har blivit allt suddigare och människor identifierar sig med teknologi som fungerar som en resurs för dem. För att ett system ska ge så stor nytta som möjligt för en stor mängd människor inom olika verksamheter, behövs en förstahands förståelse för hur verksamheten och individerna i den fungerar. Detta för att sedan kunna implementera ett nytt, eller utveckla ett befintligt system, som passar behoven hos de som ska använda systemet. När traditionella arbetssätt digitaliseras för mer effektivitet i verksamheten, blir framgångsrik implementering otroligt viktigt för att digitaliseringen verkligen ska möjliggöra en resurs för anställda. Syftet med detta arbete är att få en förstahands förståelse av en situation och kontext där det traditionella arbetssättet kompletteras och delvis byts ut mot en digital version, en digital arbetsplats. Genom enkäter, intervjuer och workshops kunde beteendemönster identifieras och därmed tydliggöra användarnas attityd och relation till teknologi och den digitala arbetsplatsen, både individuellt och i grupp. Utifrån användarinformationen sammanställdes två olika ITidentiteter. Sammanställningen av användare och deras relation till IT bidrog till ökad förståelse för de anställdas inställning till den digitala arbetsplatsen, samt möjlig utveckling av denna för att passa olika verksamheter och anställda bättre. / New advanced IT-systems that offer better possibilities for organisations, are constantly being developed around us. The line between Man and Technology has become more unclear, to the extent that humans can identify themselves with resourceful IT. If a system is going to be useful for a larger amount of people within organisations - A first-hand knowledge of the context is needed, to then be able to successfully implement, or develop a system that is suitable for the users’ needs. When a traditional workplace is to be digitalised for a more efficient way of working, implementation is very important if the system is to be a resource for the users. The aim of this study is therefore to get firsthand knowledge about the context, where the traditional way of working is to be complemented or partially replaced by a digital version. Through surveys, interviews and workshops, patterns of behavior were identified and therefore 5 clarified the users’ attitude and relationship to technology- both individually and in groups. From the user research, two IT-identities were compiled. These IT-identities contributed to a better understanding of the staff attitudes towards the digital workplace, and possible development to suit many different employees and organisations.

En modernisering av Air Traffic Management pågår för att hållbart hantera den förutsedda ökningen av flygtrafik fram till år 2035. Som en del av denna modernisering har Saab AB utvecklat en produkt, “Digital Tower”, som möjliggör att flygtorn kan fjärrstyras genom ett system av kameror. I syfte om att öka kunskap kring flygledarnas behov och flygsäkerhet i takt med ökad mängd flygtrafik, har denna studie undersökt den kognitiva belastningen inom den operativa miljön av en Digital Tower som är i bruk. I dess nuvarande form har interaktiva gränssnitt inom arbetsmiljön begränsad flexibilitet och anpassningsmöjligheter. Frågeställningen har därför ställts kring hur dessa begränsade anpassningsmöjligheter påverkar flygledares arbete och samarbete. Studien har utgått ifrån en kvalitativ metodik, en contextual inquiry med observationer och intervjuer i kontext där arbetet skedde. Analysen gjordes utifrån Distributed Cognition som teoretiskt ramverk, vilket möjliggjorde en analys av den distribuerade kognitionen mellan aktörer och hur de brukar artefakter inom kontexten. Studiens slutsats är att gränssnittets begränsade anpassningsmöjligheter påverkar den kognitiva belastningen negativt, men anses inte som ett hinder för flygledarnas arbete. Eftersom den centraliserade arbetsmiljön har en stark närvaro av kollegor, har resultatet blivit att kollegorna kan kompensera för gränssnittets brister och avlasta i situationer av hög arbetsbelastning. / An ongoing modernization of Air Traffic Management is in effect to keep up with the forecasted increase in air traffic by 2035. As a part of this modernization a product was developed by Saab AB to control air traffic from remote control towers with a system of cameras, called “Digital Tower”. With the purpose of increasing the knowledge about the needs of Air Traffic Controllers and general flight safety with increased amount of flight traffic, this study researched the cognitive load within the operative Digital Tower environment in service. Currently the interactive interface within the work environment has limited flexibility and possibilities for adaptation. The study has therefore answered the question about how these limited adaptations affect the Air Traffic Controllers work and collaboration between them. The study has used qualitative methods in order to answer the question, by using a contextual inquiry which includes observations and interviews of the Air Traffic Controllers in their context. The result was analyzed by using Distributed Cognition theory, which made it possible to analyze the distributed cognition between people and artifacts within the context. The conclusion of the study is that the limited adaptations of the interface negatively affects the cognitive load, but has not been identified as a crucial interference for the Air Traffic Controllers. The centralized work environment has a strong presence of colleagues, which has led to the colleagues compensating for the limited interface by physically unburden the workload in critical situations.

Homes are a much discussed, but little empirically examined resource for action. Material stuff at home offer resources for social, organisational and individual activities that we routinely encounter and use on an everyday basis. Yet their purposes, storing and sharing practices of use and roles in social and organisational actions are hardly touched upon within Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) academic literature. As a consequence of this, there are critical gaps in understanding home organisation and management methods as a means of informing the design of novel technologies. This thesis is an examination of everyday routines in home, paying particular attention to tidying, storing, retrieving and sharing practices. To examine these practices at home, this thesis presents a combination of two qualitative studies using ethnographically oriented methods. Study one (Home’s Tidying up, Storing and Retrieving) concerns the topic of home storage in practice; investigating how householders create and use domestic storage practices and the methods used to manage their storage at home. Study two (Social Interaction around Shared Resources) concerns social interaction around shared resources, and the methods used to manage sharing practices at home. Semi-structured interviews, fieldwork observation, tour around a home, and a photo diary were undertaken to produce a ‘rich’ description of how householders collaborate in storing and sharing set of practices to manage their everyday routines. Several key finding emerged from the research, that are used to identify important implications for design of home organisational technologies, for example to support effective lightweight interactions, providing user controlled mechanism to make different levels of privacy protection for family members, offering effective awareness of family communications and notifications of the activities of other people around these organisation systems, and making available a range of flexible options for family members to access a shared resource. The thesis make the case that flexible systems should be designed allowing people to categorise things in different ways, and have the values of home asserted in technologies, considering factors such as emotion around the use of space in home organisation to make homes become the unique places that they are understood to be.

This thesis is concerned with the study of biomedical scientific research work that is intensely distributed, i.e. socially distributed across multiple institutions, sites, and disciplines. Specifically, this PhD probes the ways in which scientists co-operating on multi-sited crossdisciplinary projects, design, use and maintain information-based resources to conduct and coordinate their experimental activities. The research focuses on the roles of information artefacts, i.e. the tools, media and devices used to store, track, display, and retrieve information in paper or electronic format, in helping the scientists integrate their activities to achieve concerted action. To examine how scientists in globally distributed settings organise and co-ordinate their scientific work using information artefacts, a multi-method multi-sited study informed by different ethnographic perspectives was conducted focused on a large European crossdisciplinary translational research project in nanodiagnostics. Situated interviews with project scientists, participant observations and participatory learning exercises were designed and deployed. From the data analysis, several abstractions were developed to represent how the joined utilisations of key information artefacts support the co-ordination of experimental activities. Subsequently, a framework was developed to highlight key interactional strategies that need to be managed by experimenters when using artefacts to organise their work cooperatively. This framework was then used as a guiding device to identify innovative ways to design future digital interactive systems to support the co-ordination of intensely distributed scientific work. From this study, several key findings came to light. We identify the role of the experimental protocol acts as a co-ordinative map that is co-designed dynamically to disseminate various instantiations of experimental executions across sites. We have also shed light on the ways the protocol, the lab book and the material log are used jointly to support the articulation of scientific work. The protocol and the lab book are used both locally and across co-operating sites to support four repeatability and reproducibility levels that are key to experimental validation. The use of the local protocol / lab book dyads at each site is further integrated with that of a centralised material log artefact to enable a system of exchange of scientific content (e.g. experimental processes, intermediate results and observations) and experimental materials (both physical materials and key information). We have found that this integration into a co-ordinative cluster supports awareness and the articulation of experimental activities both locally and across remote labs. From this understanding, we have derived several sensitising tensions to frame the strategies that scientific practitioners need to manage when designing their multi-sited experimental work and technologists should consider when designing systems to support them: (1) formalisation / flexibility; (2) articulability / local appropriateness; (3) scrutiny / tinkering; (4) accountability / applicability; (5) traceability / improvisation and (6) lastingness / immediacy. Lastly, based on these tensions, we have suggested a number of implications for the design of interactive information artefacts that can help manage both local and multi-sited co-ordination in intensely distributed scientific projects.

The Australian business environment has been changing at an ever-increasing pace since the mid-1980s. Technological, economic and social changes have altered the working environment. There have been constant technological advances with information technology influencing most categories of work. Organisations in public and private sectors have ongoing expectations of increased productivity, increased quality of processes and swifter responsiveness to clients. Team roles have changed. Team members are multi-skilled and work is designed to emphasise the whole task. The Karpin Industry Task Force described a vision for an Australian business environment that would, by 2014, be one with a flexible, skilled and motivated workforce, world class managers, a customer comes first mentality, and an internationally competitive perspective. These characteristics are congruent with those of learning organisations. The aim of this study is to evaluate the suitability of groupware as the supporting infrastructure for a learning organisation. To do this, the study assesses the use of technology to support personal and team learning in a learning organisation, studies the impact of groupware on learning within workgroups, determines the extent to which communication and learning styles influence its effectiveness, and identifies ways in which groupware can be used to capture the information used to support knowledge management in an organisation. Two case studies are used to undertake this assessment. Three distinct yet related frameworks underpin this study. The first is that of Groupware and the related research frameworks of Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) and Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL). The second is the Learning Organisation and its supporting disciplines. The final framework is that of learning and the action-oriented learning processes. Each is examined and the interrelatedness of the frameworks is explored. The journey to produce this written material has been one of twists and turns, blind alleys and blinding revelations, observation and reflection. My choice of techniques has been eclectic, reflecting the breadth of theoretical material covered.

Ce document de synthèse décrit les travaux de recherche que nous avons effectués ces douze dernières années, depuis la soutenance de notre thèse le 13 mai 1997. En premier lieu, nous évoquerons la pluridisciplinarité de nos recherches ; pluridisciplinarité induite par une véritable mobilité thématique. Cette approche pluridisciplinaire constitue un atout pour notre projet de recherche, puisqu'elle est bien souvent nécessaire pour assurer une direction de recherches. Les travaux de recherches exposés dans ce mémoire se déclinent sur quatre thèmes distincts, reliés par une problématique commune d'assistance à l'utilisateur : - des travaux portant un point de vue «traitement du langage » : la compréhension de courts textes techniques pour l'assistance aux activités de spécification et de conception de logiciels, conduisant à une traduction formelle ou diagrammatique de type UML ; - des travaux portant un point de vue «traitement de connaissances» : l'acquisition, la modélisation et le traitement des connaissances invoquées dans les systèmes pédagogiques, d'aide à la décision, ou de médiation pour la coopération ; - des travaux portant un point de vue « communication/coopération » : les interactions entre agents logiciels distribués dans des systèmes de simulation, d'aide à la décision ou de conception collaborative ; - des travaux portant un point de vue «coopération et instrumentation d'activités coopératives » : l'analyse, la modélisation et l'instrumentation d'activités coopératives, ainsi que la conception participative de micro-outils logiciels (µ-outils) et leur intégration sur une plate-forme logicielle distribuée. La convergence de ces travaux s'opère avec les recherches menées depuis cinq ans sur la conception de systèmes de médiation pour faciliter la coopération entre utilisateurs de systèmes d'information coopératifs ou de collecticiels. Au-delà de la problématique de conception de systèmes coopératifs, nous nous sommes en effet posé deux sortes de questions : (1) « comment mieux médier la coopération et comment faciliter les communications dans cette coopération médiée ? », c'est le cœur du travail de thèse de Victoria Ospina (soutenue en décembre 2007) ; (2) « comment mieux partager l'information dans les systèmes coopératifs et comment évaluer la pertinence de l'information avant de la partager ? », c'est le cadre de la thèse que nous avons proposée à Jing Peng (octobre 2007).

Elderly care is currently undergoing a phase of development in which new technologies are anticipated to increase efficiency, secure quality of services and give care assistants more time with the elderly people. This thesis reports on a study of how people involve technologies in everyday home care work. It focuses on assimilation processes associated with people’s use of information and communication technologies (ICT) and other technologies. The main problem addressed in the thesis is how do care assistants assimilate new emerging technologies in their work practice? The aim of this study is to gain an understanding of assimilation processes and the ways that people learn and select different features of technologies in practice. Technology assimilation processes are in this work assumed being part of people’s everyday use and exploration of the technologies they have at hand. The underpinning fieldwork commenced 2001 and ended 2006 and comprises ethnographical workplace studies in three different home care organisations. When new technologies are brought into an organisation they are not introduced into a vacuum; the thesis shows they are introduced into an existing ecology of work, where links between technologies and resources are tightly associated with ways people deal with contingencies and coordination. The result of the study show that when individuals and workgroups configure their own web of supporting technologies they also reconfigure their workplace. In this work it is revealed that the home care geography holds two main activity domains which provide radically different conditions for technology use. How people effectively manage to balance their work in the two domains is seen as a crucial component in how we can understand use of new technologies. It is also concluded that the involvement of new technologies effect the structure of work as the care assistants either loose or are given a strengthened autonomy and control in their work. This is a relationship that is effected by and dependent on the different ways new technologies are involved and used. Assimilation processes are in this work understood as an ongoing orchestration of tools and technologies. They are catalysed through the conflict between new and established routines and the provision of a social space of innovation, which call for the ability to detect aspects in current practices that could be sorted out, retained and selected to be part of innovation. In home care, an example such innovation is found in innovative ways managing technologies and their involvement in practice. The challenge is to grasp how everyday assimilation processes can strategically advance practice as a whole. The perspective offered by - using technologies with care - suggests a different view on innovation. Such a view focuses on innovative use and workplace configurations, as it is aware of novel technical configurations.