| 1. |
- Heath, Christian, et al.
(author)
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Configuring awareness
- 2002
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In: Computer Supported Cooperative Work. - Netherlands : Kluwer Academic Publishers. - 0925-9724 .- 1573-7551. ; 11:3-4, s. 317-347
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- The concept of awareness has become of increasing importance to both social and technical research in CSCW. The concept remains however relatively unexplored, and we still have little understanding of the ways in which people produce and sustain ‘awareness’ in and through social interaction with others. In this paper, we focus on a particular aspect of awareness, the ways in which participants design activities to have others unobtrusively notice and discover, actions and events, which might otherwise pass unnoticed. We consider for example how participants render visible selective aspects of their activities, how they encourage others to notice features of the local milieu, and how they encourage others to become sensitive to particular events. We draw examples from different workplaces, primarily centres of coordination; organisational environments which rest upon the participants’ abilities to delicately interweave a complex array of highly contingent, yet interdependent activities.
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| 2. |
- Pettersson, Mårten, et al.
(author)
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Ambiguities, Awareness and Economy : A Study of Emergency Service Work
- 2004
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In: Computer Supported Cooperative Work. - Dordrecht : Kluwer Academic Publishers. - 0925-9724 .- 1573-7551. ; 13:2, s. 125-154
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- This paper derives from a study undertaken at an emergency service centre by researchers at the Blekinge Institute of Technology, Sweden. It forms part of a project involving partners at the university and in Swedish emergency service centres. The focus in this project was on the possibility of developing new technology for use in these centres. One vision for the new technology is to support distribution of calls and handling of cases across several centres. Historically the work has been conducted in a number of different centres, where responsibilities are thus primarily geographically localised and where, as a result, practices in the different centres may be distinctively local. The study has focused on features of work familiar to the CSCW community, including documenting and analysing current work practices, understanding the properties of the technology in question, and perhaps most importantly how the technology functions in use. Our focus in this paper exemplifies these themes through the analysis of three cases. In the first, the issue in question is the way in which an emergency is identified and dealt with, it being the case that a typical problem to be dealt with by operators, and more commonly in the days of mobile telephony, is that of multiple reporting of a single case. Of particular interest here is the phenomenon of listening-in, which is a function in the Computer Aided Dispatch system and by contrast that of ‘overhearing’, which is not. The second and third cases focus on the relevance of large paper maps, given the existence of computerized maps in these centres. Based on our own analysis and on work done by others in similar contexts, we develop an argument for a sense of organizational relevance that hopefully integrates existing analytic interests in emergency service work.
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