Computer-supported cooperative work
Computer-supported cooperative work or computer-supported collaboration is the study of how people utilize technology collaboratively, often towards a shared goal. CSCW addresses how computer systems can support collaborative activity and coordination. More specifically, the field of CSCW seeks to analyze and draw connections between currently understood human psychological and social behaviors and available collaborative tools, or groupware. Often the goal of CSCW is to help promote and utilize technology in a collaborative way, and help create new tools to succeed in that goal. These parallels allow CSCW research to inform future design patterns or assist in the development of entirely new tools.
Computer supported cooperative work includes "all contexts in which technology is used to mediate human activities such as communication, coordination, cooperation, competition, entertainment, games, art, and music".
History
The development of this field reaches back to the late 1960s and the visionary assertions of Ted Nelson, Douglas Engelbart, Alan Kay, Glenn Gould, Nicholas Negroponte and others who saw a potential for digital media to ultimately redefine how people work. A very early thinker, Vannevar Bush, even suggested in 1945 As We May Think.The inventor of the computer "mouse", Douglas Engelbart, studied collaborative software in the 1960s. Alan Kay worked on Smalltalk, which embodied these principles, in the 1970s, and by the 1980s it was well regarded and considered to represent the future of user interfaces. However, at this time, collaboration capabilities were limited. As few computers had even local area networks, and processors were slow and expensive, the idea of using them simply to accelerate and "augment" human communication was eccentric in many situations. Computers processed numbers, not text, and the collaboration was in general devoted only to better and more accurate handling of numbers. This began to change in the 1980s with the rise of personal computers, modems and more general use of the Internet for non-academic purposes. People were clearly collaborating online with all sorts of motives, but using a small suite of tools to support all of those motives. Research at this time focused on textual communication, as there was little or no exchange of audio and video representations. Some researchers, such as Brenda Laurel, emphasized how similar online dialogue was to a play, and applied Aristotle's model of drama to their analysis of computers for collaboration. Another major focus was hypertext—in its pre-HTML, pre-WWW form, focused more on links and semantic web applications than on graphics. Such systems as Superbook, NoteCards, KMS and the much simpler HyperTies and HyperCard were early examples of collaborative software used for e-learning.
The origins of CSCW as a field are intertwined with the rise and subsequent fall of office automation as response to some of the criticisms, particularly the failure to address the impact human psychological and social behaviors can have. Greif and Cashman created the term CSCW to help employees seeking to further their work with technology. A few years later, in 1987, Charles Findley presented the concept of collaborative learning-work. Computer-supported cooperative work is an interdisciplinary research area of growing interest which relates workstations to digitally advanced networking systems. The first technologies were economically feasible, but their interoperability was lacking which makes understanding a well-tailored supporting system difficult. Due to global markets, more organizations are being pushed to decentralize their corporate systems. When faced with the complexities of today's business issues, a significant effort must be made to improve manufacturing systems' efficiency, improve product quality, and reduce time to market.
Audio
In the 1990s, the rise of broadband networks and the dotcom boom presented the internet as mass media to a whole generation. By the late 1990s, VoIP and net phones and chat had emerged. For the first time, people used computers primarily as communications, not "computing" devices. This, however, had long been anticipated, predicted, and studied by experts in the field.Pioneers
Other pioneers in the field included Ted Nelson, Austin Henderson, Kjeld Schmidt, Lucy Suchman, Sara Bly, Randy Farmer, and many "economists, social psychologists, anthropologists, organizational theorists, educators, and anyone else who can shed light on group activity." - Grudin.Politics and business
In this century, the focus has shifted to sociology, political science, management science and other business disciplines. This reflects the use of the net in politics and business and even other high-stakes collaboration situations, such as war.War
Though it is not studied at the ACM conferences, military use of collaborative software has been a very major impetus of work on maps and data fusion, used in military intelligence. A number of conferences and journals are concerned primarily with the military use of digital media and the security implications thereof.COVID-19
The idea of CSCW or computer-supported cooperative work has become useful over the years since its inception and most especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. The measures to mitigate the virus' spread led to firm closures and increased the rates of remote working and learning. People now share a common workspace, hold virtual meetings, see and hear each other's movements and voices in a common virtual workspace with a group-centered design.Central concerns and concepts
CSCW is a design-oriented academic field that is interdisciplinary in nature and brings together librarians, economists, organizational theorists, educators, social psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists and computer scientists, among others. The expertise of researchers in various and combined disciplines help researchers identify venues for possible development. Despite the variety of disciplines, CSCW is an identifiable research field focused on understanding characteristics of interdependent group work with the objective of designing adequate computer-based technology to support such cooperative work.Essentially, CSCW goes beyond building technology itself and looks at how people work within groups and organizations, as well as the impacts of technology on those processes. CSCW has ushered in a great extent of melding between social scientists and computer scientists. These scientists work together to overcome both technical and non-technical problems within the same user spaces. For example, many R&D professionals working with CSCW are computer scientists who have realized that social factors play an important role in the development of collaborative systems. On the flip side, many social scientists who understand the increasing role of technology in our social world become "technologists" who work in R&D labs developing cooperative systems.
Over the years, CSCW researchers have identified a number of core dimensions of cooperative work. A non-exhaustive list includes:
- Awareness: individuals working together need to be able to gain some level of shared knowledge about each other's activities.
- Articulation work: cooperating individuals must be able to partition work into units, divide it amongst themselves and, after the work is performed, reintegrate it.
- Appropriation : how an individual or group adapts a technology to their own particular situation; the technology may be appropriated in a manner completely unintended by the designers.
Articulation work
Articulation work is essentially the work that makes other work exist and possible. It is an effort made to make other work easier, more manageable, and can either be planned or unplanned. Therefore articulation work is an integral part of software process since software processes can sometimes fail or break down. Articulation work is also commonly known as "invisible work" since it is not always noticed. The concept was introduced by Anselm Strauss. He described it as a way to observe the "nature of mutually dependent actors in their division of labour". It was introduced in CSCW by Schmidt and Bannon in 1992, where it would be applied to more realistic work scenarios in society. Articulation work is inherent in collaboration. The idea of articulation work was initially used in relation to computer-supported cooperative work, but it was travelled through other domains of work, such as healthcare. Initially, articulation work was known for scheduling and allocation of resources, but now, extends beyond that. Articulation work can also be seen as the response developers make to adapt to changes due to error or misjudgments in the real world. There are various models of articulation work that help identify applicable solutions to recover or reorganize planned activities. It is also important to note that it can vary depending on the scenario. Oftentimes there is an increase in the need for articulation work as the situation becomes more complex.Because articulation work is so abstract, it can be split into two categories from the highest level: individual activity and collective activity.
- With individual activity, articulation work is almost always applicable. It is obvious that the subject is required to articulate his / her own work. But when a subject is faced with a new task, there are many questions that must be answered in order to move forward and be successful. This questioning is considered the articulation work to the actual project; invisible, but necessary. There is also articulation of action within an activity. For example, creating to-do lists and blueprints may be imperative to progressing a project. There is also articulation of operation within an action. In terms of software, the user must have adequate knowledge and skill in using computer systems and knowledge about software in order to perform tasks.
- In a teamwork setting, articulation is imperative for collective activity. To maximize the efficiency of all the people working, the articulation work must be very solid. Without a solid foundation, the team is unable to collaborate effectively. Furthermore, as the size of the team increases, the articulation work becomes more complex.