TY - BOOK T1 - Resources, co-evolution and artifacts: Theory in CSCW Y1 - 2007 A1 - Mark S. Ackerman A1 - Christine A Halverson A1 - Erickson, Thomas A1 - Kellogg, Wendy A KW - co-evolution KW - CSCW theory KW - resource AB -

How do software and other technical systems come to be adopted and used?

People use software and other technical systems in many ways, and a considerable amount of time and energy may be spent integrating the functionality of the system with the everyday activities it is intended to support. Understanding how this comes about, and understanding how to design systems so that it happens more easily, is a topic of great interest to the CSCW, IT and IS communities.

Resources, Co-Evolution and Artifacts: Theory in CSCW approaches this problem by looking at resources - artifacts that have come to be used in a particular manner in a given situation - and examining how they get created, adopted, modified, and abandoned. The theoretical and empirical studies in this volume examine issues such as:

- how resources are tailored or otherwise changed as situations change;

- how a resource is maintained and reused within an organization;

- the ways in which the value of a resource comes to be understood;

- the ways in which an artifact is transformed to function more effectively;

- how one might approach the problem of designing a resource de novo.

PB - Springer CY - New York UR - NoFile ER - TY - JOUR T1 - The intellectual challenge of CSCW: the gap between social requirements and technical feasibility JF - Human-computer interaction Y1 - 2000 A1 - Ackerman, Mark S KW - computer supported cooperative work KW - cscw KW - CSCW theory KW - social-technical gap KW - socio-technical gap AB -

Over the last 10 years, Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) has identified a base set of findings. These findings are taken almost as assumptions within the field. In summary, they argue that human activity is highly flexible, nuanced, and contextualized and that computational entities such as information sharing, roles, and social norms need to be similarly flexible, nuanced, and contextualized. However, current systems cannot fully support the social world uncovered by these findings. In this article I argue that there is an inherent gap between the social requirements of CSCW and its technical mechanisms. The social-technical gap is the divide between what we know we must support socially and what we can support technically. Exploring, understanding, and hopefully ameliorating this social-technical gap is the central challenge for CSCW as a field and one of the central problems for human-computer interaction. Indeed, merely attesting the continued centrality of this gap could be one of the important intellectual contributions of CSCW. I also argue that the challenge of the social-technical gap creates an opportunity to refocus CSCW.

VL - 15 UR - Complete ER -