Third International Workshop on Analyzing
Collaborative Activity

 CHI 2005 Workshop, April 4, 2005

Cognition and Collaboration 
Analyzing Distributed Community Practices for Design

This workshop was the third in a series. The first workshop, Analyzing Collaborative Activity, was held at CSCW 2002 and the second, Distributed Cognition in Complex Processes, was held at CSAPC 2003 in Amsterdam.

These workshops share from research and practice the methods and approaches found effective for analyzing collaborative work in distributed community practices (e.g. scientific research, medical care, aviation). Designing tools and practices for collaboration presents a complexity of challenges to designers and researchers. In design research we’ve seen trends of exploring multiple and hybrid methodologies for understanding and analyzing collaboration and joint work. Field research, cognitive ethnography, cognitive artifacts analysis, and contextual research have been adapted to study collaborative activity in naturalistic work situations. These methods support a grounded understanding of activity and context, and help researchers identify opportunities in cognitive work with effective interactive technology design.

In practice, we recognize the difficulties in translating field data to meaningful representations, for both understanding and design. Several frameworks have emerged (e.g. distributed cognition, contextual design, activity theory) to distill models from rich field data, but researchers often pursue unique approaches to solve these problems. We are interested in analyzing the different translations of field research into representations these frameworks promote. Sharing theoretical and practical experience will result in new shared models of field data analysis for design.

Theory and method – Researching collaboration and cognition
 

Christine Halverson
IBM
Social Computing Group
San Jose, California
 

Using Distributed Cognition to Unpack Work Practices     

Boundary objects, please rise!
On the role of boundary objects in distributed collaboration and how to design for them          
 

Case studies of Collaboration: Analysis methods
 

Shared Landmarks in Distributed Collaboration Environments

Embodied Cognition and Student Collaboration:
Design and Interaction with a Chemistry Simulation 

How Does Virtuality Affect Team Performance in a Global Organization?
Understanding the Impact of Variety of Practices  

 A Tool to Support Collaboration in Electronic Paper Prototyping     

Evaluation of Collaboration Support for the Intelligence Community