Cogn Tech Work (2005) 7: 70–75 DOI 10.1007/s10111-005-0176-4
E D I T ORI AL
Peter H. Jones Æ Cristina Chisalita Gerrit C. van der Veer
Cognition, technology, and work: special issue on collaboration in context: cognitive and organizational artefacts Received: 14 January 2004 / Accepted: 9 November 2004 / Published online: 14 June 2005 Ó Springer-Verlag London Limited 2005
1 Introduction to the special issue This special issue presents current research organized by the theme of ‘collaboration in context’. Most of the six papers explore cognitive and organizational/cultural artefacts as objects expressing the details of collaborative work practice, and as research tools for understanding the contextual structures of collaborative work. The overall theme is not novel, but our approach to the topic was developed from a series of workshops originally focused on methods and analyses of collaborative activity. These workshops shared lessons learned and practical methods for collaborative analysis and system design problems from ethnographers, organizational scientists, system designers, and design researchers. With some surprise we find the papers converged independently on compatible orientations to analysis and design from a distributed cognitive perspective, constructing models of understanding from cognitive and organizational artefacts. Cognition, Technology and Work identifies its research interest at the convergence of people, technology and organizations, emphasizing a co-constructive relationship between human cognition and work. These six papers fit the journal’s mission by developing theory and empirical observation toward understanding the special involvement of collaborative groups in developing cognitive artefacts and using them as instruments of social information exchange. The bi-directional relationship of people to their work shows a physical embodiment and cognitive expression in the artefacts they use and make. We follow the making, use, and development of several
P. H. Jones (&) Redesign Research, Dayton, OH, USA E-mail:
[email protected] C. Chisalita Æ G. C. Veer Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
different forms of cognitive artefacts in these contributions. As a choice of methodology, most of these studies explain cognitive work processes through artefacts, analyzing traces and trails left behind after the action of interest moves on. But such cognitive analyses of field data demand a detailed activity analysis to complement ethnographic observation and documentation. Representations of work produced by participants are found in four papers, affording analysis of shared objects such as meeting minutes or the information-use recorded in work diaries. These extend or fuse together theoretical frameworks, in pursuit of explanatory power and to extend prior theoretical notions into new research. The case is made for expanding upon foundation theories, with all six contributions adapting activity theory, distributed cognition, or both. Two (Chisalita and van Fenema) integrate organizational theory to explain collaboration effectiveness or the breakdowns in critical team operations.
2 Discussion of issues A range of work domains and contexts in this issue offers breadth of application. Each study describes collaborative activity within a different work context; three study business work teams, but their work and practices vary substantially. Each domain requires different approaches toward framing contextual issues of collaborative activity. While all papers share a social-cognitive research perspective, we also acknowledge how distributed cognition finds itself distributed across several disciplines. If we note the primary contributing disciplines, we include cognitive psychology, cognitive science, anthropology, sociology, information science, and organizational sciences. We hope our six interdisciplinary research teams offer findings, insights, and effective methodologies that
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transfer to our readers’ collaborative work domains and problem areas. Each paper engages multidisciplinary research approaches chosen for the research problem, bolstered by critiques or insights into rationale for that research path. Research perspectives and theoretical views range from ethnomethodology to activity theory, distributed cognition, and collective mind theory. The contributors are interdisciplinary, bridging perspectives ranging from organizational science to human computer interaction and cognitive psychology. Each paper generates a tight interdisciplinary weaving of methods, theoretical frameworks, and themes, presented as a research approach to the domain and activity of interest. Cognitive sciences investigate individual mental processes for the most part, providing a shared background, issues, and vocabulary corresponding to individuals and an intrapersonal unit of analysis. Implicit in the special issue papers we find the assumption of mental models as a mechanism underpinning collaborative cognition, underpinning analyses of problem solving and serving as a basis for effective performance of collaborative work. While knowledge has traditionally been treated as situationally independent, mental models are now frequently (in some approaches) considered explicit instantiations of knowledge in an actual situation (van der Veer and Puerta Melguizo 2004), revealed in dependency to the context of performance. The notion of culturally-dependent mental models is explored in Chisalita’s paper, and van Fenema’s collaborative elasticity develops mechanisms for coordinating the embodied knowledge of team performance.
3 Contexts of collaboration A significant issue in collaboration research shows in defining the overarching or guiding context for joint activity studies. When we speak of context, we must acknowledge our own choice of context to study. Context is not neutral. Research-defined contexts structure our observations, and in research interventions we may unwittingly impose our view of context on the environment. The context we aim to study is that which represents the most meaningful organization of practice, and includes the drivers and constraints that most directly involve participants in the domain. The researchers in this issue adopted theoretical approaches that require definition of an appropriate work context for understanding the relationship of collaborative activity to context. Distributed cognition and activity theory both require elevating the unit of analysis to embrace a complex social system, including the organizational context unique to each domain. Three authors discuss intellectually-driven practices (design and scientific research), domains exhibiting a high degree of individual motivation and team autonomy. These practices and their environments are not constrained by the external regulation and environmental
demands found in the high reliability work domains, such as air traffic control and aviation (cited in Fields and van Fenema’s articles). As we aim to draw forth multicontextual models of collaborative work practice, we find two ranges in this research that frame our contextual questions. 1. Locus of group motivation or orientation: Where is the ‘‘objective’’ of activity located Internal, team or individually defined: Design activity (Spinelli), Scientific research (Jones) External, orientation to activity defined by satisfying external requirements: Chisalita (Dutch police), Fields (Air traffic control) 2. Contextual constraints: To what extent and how is activity constrained? Low constraint context: e.g., Life sciences research (Jones) shows few constraints within the accepted practices of research Task constraints: Nature of the individual task defines immediate context for joint participants, e.g. Design (Spinelli), Manufacturing (Chisalita) Process constraints: Process-driven. Context characterized by constraints on all activity (e.g. Air Traffic Control) Conducting contextual research requires a multidisciplinary orientation to balance methods, domain knowledge, and organizational insight. However, with no common guiding or disciplinary model of context, we find various approaches across the literature adopting the concept. Each included research study describes a context within which observations of individual or joint activity are found. These contexts are typically framed as the organizational environment, culture, or larger team in which the observations of group behavior accrue meaning. In practice, this means we describe the immediate organizational unit or process that encompasses the participants and their collaborative work. But looking further into the practices presented in these studies, we acknowledge evidence of multicontextual work domains and recognize the possibility of ignoring some contexts for the activity, like a rival hypothesis offering alternative explanations of the social cognition in complex work. We ask readers to draw upon their own understanding of context and to enter into this inquiry with the researchers.
4 Cognitive artefacts, made and used Several of the studies distinguish the roles of cognitive artefacts created and used by multiple participants in collaborative work practices. Artefacts analysis offers access into the cognitive work underlying these ethnographically-observed practices. Some researchers (e.g. Norman 1991) consider computer-based artefacts any artificial device that displays information among cogni-
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tive artefacts in work research. The studies in this issue follow the trend of ethnographic investigation of physical, tangible written objects that reflect individual and collaborative goals, needs, and emerging conditions in the activity. Jones and Nemeth (2004) described these as endogenous cognitive artefacts, which are constructed by users to make their own work better or easier. Exogenous artefacts are developed outside of the workplace and installed for use, and would also include specialized information systems, unless designed by close involvement with the users. Most of the contributors describe use of endogenous artefacts, revealing the distribution of cognitive resources associated with meeting minutes (Ramduny-Ellis), flight progress strip (Fields), furniture and displays appropriated in space (Spinelli), and scientific articles (Jones). Users maintain physical cognitive artefacts in spite of, or perhaps because of the information technology provided. They often do a better job of supporting distributed cognitive work. For example, the printed research article is created as an external artefact, located from a publisher’s source to answer a research issue. A distributed cognitive view shows how it is used as an endogenous, shared computational resource. By its selection and use, it functions as if created by the lab, being read by other scientists and discussed in lab meetings. As a researcher inscribes notes and highlights the pages, an article becomes personalized and internalized for memory. These examples show how endogenous cognitive artefacts adjoin and clarify their boundaries with (exogenous) systems through actual use. Such constructed artefacts are simple and sufficient cognitive resources, yet they reveal the boundaries and limitations of infrastructures and supporting systems. These shared, physical cognitive artefacts can be compared to exogenous alternatives not being used for a similar objective. Ground controllers print and annotate progress strips, while these data, and most other flight information, remain in digital form (but not annotated and physically shared). Ramduny-Ellis’ research shows the creation, use, and arrangement of minutes and other paper artefacts, and then compares the use of TeamSpace and other alternative systems for managing these objectives. Life scientists reported almost never reading articles onscreen, but print, annotate, and share printed copies with other scientists. In these descriptions we find the boundaries of effective utility were reached. Exogenous artefacts, typically digital artefacts and systems, were simply underused, sidestepped by continuation with the conventional genre, a printed endogenous artefact.
5 Analysis and understanding These articles communicate findings from studies that adopted multiple and hybrid methods of analyzing collaboration. We discuss the significance of context and
constraints for making sense of work domains, and describe the tracing of artefacts as cognitive and physical markers of collaborative activity. Essentially, these analyses describe mechanisms of communication among members of occupational communities and organizations. Our research subjects are described as exchanging and using cognitive artefacts, information objects, or even meaning or values. A common objective was to analyze collaborative activity as a cognitive process in a work setting. Rather than using traditional domain decompositions, we instead find descriptions based on ethnography. A descriptive analysis approach attempts to understand cognitive work practices from the perspective of the subject, in the contexts where the subjects find meaning. While these projects started as analyses of collaboration, the common emergence from these investigations is not a traditional analytical product. Rather, these contributions show the product of understanding of how collaborative work is accomplished in these domains. How work is accomplished is also defined as ‘‘understanding,’’ as the ability to participate meaningfully in practice (Jordan and Henderson 1995). We aim to understand how our subjects understand their practice. We consider this type of analytical understanding a necessary foundation for any design or intervention that proposes to enhance the cognitive work practices in these domains.
6 Summary of papers Five empirical studies evolved from technology design projects that adopted field research approaches to study current practice within the larger design efforts. A theoretical essay from organizational researcher van Fenema draws from case studies and offers a new approach for social systems analysis of organizational contexts. While these are primarily ethnographic studies, most offer collaborative practice analysis approaches to researchers working with cognitive work analysis or cognitive systems engineering models. In ‘‘Artefacts as designed, Artefacts as used: Resources for uncovering activity dynamics,’’ RamdunyEllis and her team analyze cognitive processes in the variations of meaning and work practice embedded in the minutes, agendas, and transitory written artefacts produced in workgroups. Adopting an archeologicallyinspired approach to artefact analysis, meeting records from two field cases were analyzed as resources for reconstituting collaborative activity in meetings. While minutes are not themselves a collaborativelyproduced artefact, they exhibit several visible properties for analyzing collaboration across situations inaccessible to research intervention. Meeting minutes are a formal consensus account of group actions, and ethnomethodological approaches treat them as both artificial, sanitized records of ‘‘some’’ events, and as historical
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accounts of past behavior, documented for a specific group purpose. The authors note how formal meeting minutes rarely capture decisions, as perhaps expected, but rather they record actions or identify statements of agreement. The insight surfaces that such artefacts can span other ethnographic accounts of collaborative activity, providing clues and time-based analysis of group action. Minutes are incomplete records of social process, but the recorded details illustrate the richness of group context if analyzed as cognitive artefacts. The audience for the recorded minutes artefact may be upper management, or other ‘‘political’’ entities within the organization. Although a clear recording of actual decisions was not found, the analysis shows the use of the artefact to enable a type of social computation for meeting participants, a shared representation and agreement of ostensible collaboration. In this way, minutes as artefact provides a means both to draw out implicit models of social behavior, and to develop a shared rationale or understanding with designers. In case studies of two collaborative workgroups, analyzing agenda, minutes, and other artefacts and supported by ethnographic observation and interview, they confirmed that group decisions were rarely recorded, or were ambiguously referenced. Instead, meeting participants recorded actions taken and statement of agreement, suggesting such artefacts may have somewhat fuzzy accountability. As analytic tools, however, these artefacts offer access to implicit cognitive models and understanding of designers, and also enable tracing activities among collaborators over time and changes of group direction. In further analysis, they illustrate material, instrumental, and social encoding of the collaborative artefacts. The authors conclude from their experience with artefacts analysis that the approach ‘‘be used as an integral part of the rich ecology of elicitation and analytic techniques,’’ as a valuable and complementary method of collaboration analysis. Jones and Chisalita both investigated macro-cognitive processes in the work practices of specific organizations; Jones’ research was conducted in life sciences research labs and Chisalita’s in public service (Dutch state police) and private sector (a large manufacturing company). Both studies focus on the use and management of information in the conduct of everyday work tasks, and adopted socio-cognitive analyses of cultural drivers and motivation in the contexts of practice. Jones develops novel representations of the cognitive tasks in distributed information behavior in research work, analyzing information ecology and information lifecycle. Chisalita analyzes the underlying impacts of culture (occupational as well as local), values, and language in the adoption and use of technology in organizations. Peter Jones considers information practices in scientific research part of the social cognition of research work, in a contextual study of information use as activity. His study of life sciences research projects reveals information tasks often triggered by the imme-
diate individual ‘‘information need,’’ but motivated by a largely social context of shared collaborative cognition. In a significant divergence from cognitive studies of information behavior, Jones shows how the low-level operations of information retrieval constitute a fairly minor role in the multi-step, tightly-coupled information practices required to support experimental research. The information behavior of life sciences researchers is analyzed as a cognitive work practice in the temporal cycle of research projects. By defining research project as the (activity) unit of analysis, Jones develops contextual models of the information cycle of research and the institutional information ecology. Jones uses activity theory as a lens to reveal information practices in the context of cognitive work of life sciences research. This study contributes to research in contextual information seeking, perhaps best represented by the 1997 Tampere conference (Vakkari et al. 1997) that introduced several of the questions continued in this paper. Building on the activity theory approach, Jones distinguishes between information artefacts and the cognitive ‘‘information object,’’ articulating the researcher’s use of information as both mediating research instrument and target object of motivated, intentional action. The findings may generalize to other scientific research domains, especially with respect to the dominant and habituated simple search practices of PubMed (and Google) use as transparent and almost trivial tasks in more complex compound information practices. Given that the cognitive frameworks such as distributed cognition do not explicitly account for cultural issues, we recognize a contribution toward harmonizing culture in cognitive analysis of socio-technical systems. Chisalita shows how culture can be both a source of cohesion and conflict in collaborative organization and performance. Two case studies (in the Dutch Police and a large manufacturing company) are performed in order to analyze the cultural impact on the use of technology in collaborative work. In both case, studies the differences among different groups of end-users of the same technology as well as problems and breakdowns in using the technology and in the interaction among the groups are analyzed in cultural terms. The groups are approached using an occupational group perspective. The cultural impact on these groups is analyzed from occupational and local culture perspective. In this study, culture is investigated using two main aspects: language and values. The theoretical infrastructure of the paper draws-on conceptualizations of organizational culture and professional culture from organizational sciences. In order to connect culture with the use of the systems the paper builds further on approaches from information as well as groupware system literature. Practical implications of this study on the design of the technology are shown. One of the main issues brought into discussion in the practical implications is the concept of the boundary object (Star and Griesemer 1989). These objects should be ‘‘designed’’ in such a way that they could support the building of a common
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ground for interaction between communities that share different cultures (occupational, local, or both). Spinelli, Perry, and O’Hara illustrate a complementary and macro artefact analysis to that of the meeting minutes, in the cognitive resources inherent in threedimensional space. Building upon Kirsh (2001), whose work reveals individual cognitive use and coordination of objects and space, they extend unit and dimensions of analysis. Studying design teams in configurable workspaces, Spinelli et al. show how designers in problem-solving situations in complex social tasks reconfigure the arrangements, locations, and sociallyassigned meanings of things in the workspace to maintain shared goals, memory, and abet related cognitive tasks. The constitution and reconfiguration of the physical workspace was analyzed as representations of socially-coordinated knowledge and specific shared meaning. Objects located, marked, and repositioned in the workspace demonstrated embodied, physicallyestablished meanings, consistently interpreted by the participants, and exhibiting persistence of assigned meaning over time. They develop a framework they refer to as ‘Extended Cognition’ to afford analysis and explanation of sociospatial cognition in the distributed cognitive system of people collaborating in design meetings in such workspaces. Their cognitive unit of analysis accounts for the physical bodies of human actors, resources and objects adapted for their use in work, their social communities and spatial contexts. While roughly equivalent to a functional system (Hutchins, 1995) or activity system, they literally extend the analysis into spatial and embodied interaction as legitimate fields of physical-social-spatial analysis of group cognition. Their model is closest to Hutchins, in its symbolic manipulation of external representations as a computational resource. They found two overarching functions of socio-spatial cognition in the workspace; enabling conversation and narrative construction and generating cognitive scaffolding as a coordination mechanism. Fields, Amaldi, and Tassi also develop a model of distributed spatial cognition, in their view of the air traffic tower and the larger airport as a common information space (CIS) for complex task coordination. The fieldwork and analysis was part of a much larger effort involved in the design and deployment of a ground radar system. They build on Schmidt and Bannon’s (1992) CIS concept, establishing a socially-shared information space characterized by a central archive with shared routines recognized as a means for coordination of collaborative work. While typically intended in the CSCW context as a group-oriented shared interactive system, the Fields analysis proposes the physical airport as the shared CIS space, similar to the massively distributed space of Bertelsen and Bødker (2001). They use Bossen’s (2002) parameters of CIS to analyze spatial collaboration by traffic controllers in the airport CIS, and further analyze differences of situation awareness, communication style,
and culture (as ‘‘webs of significance’’) among the occupational actors in this distributed system. They find that shared artefacts (e.g., CCTV video) and representations (e.g., flight progress strips) may be transmitted and shared across the boundaries of occupational communities engaged in the airport system, but shared meanings and common interpretations were considerably lost between these ‘‘cultures’’. As in Chisalita’s research, cultural divisions emerged as a breakdown within the ostensibly collaborative shared project of safely managing aircraft traffic. The various actors in the system read and interacted with shared information artefacts such as the flight strip, as boundary objects of common use between groups. But the authors suggest that even a well-defined CIS (as in the design for the ground radar displays) may be insufficient, even for the highly-focused safety-critical airport environment. They conclude by extending the airport-as-CIS concept by proposing a ‘‘constellation of overlapping interdependent CISs articulated through boundary objects.’’ They conclude with a concern for the design of ground radar displays, expressing whether such a design of boundary objects provides suitable affordance for such shared interpretation. Van Fenema’s model illustrates the micro-dynamics of real-time collaborative behavior. In both cases, organizational theory and group behavioral research meet with theories of social cognition and technology use. Paul van Fenema’s collaborative elasticity serves as a useful framework for understanding and evaluating team performance. He observes that most collaborative teams both adapt to task and rely on some fixed routines, and the most effective teams exhibit elasticity between these states of task interaction. His research asks ‘‘why is elasticity required, how do people stay connected, and why does the elastic break?’’ It specifically addresses high reliability organizations (HROs) such as power plant operation, air traffic systems, and medical environments, that operate in real-time, or as the author says, ‘‘show time.’’ Integrating from distributed cognition and Weick’s (1993) collective mind theory (describing the distribution of collective organizational knowledge and sensemaking), van Fenema develops six essential dimensions of collaborative elasticity to explain and possibly prevent critical breakdowns in whole-team system interaction. Using the Mann Gulch firefighting disaster as a proof-of-concept analysis, van Fenema shows specific instances of elasticity breakdown among those that died in the Montana wildfire. He further shows how the resources of elasticity saved three survivors that collectively improvised and dynamically changed routines. His brief analysis suggests the necessity of acting from all six elasticity characteristics during the ‘‘show time’’ of the critical event. The elasticity concept suggests a prescriptive approach, with interventions and development of effective team behaviors for HRO teams. These five find technology and cognitive science researchers studying the organizational dynamics of
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collaboration, extending distributed cognition theories to better embrace empirical observations in situated workgroups and workspaces. Where the theoretical essays shed light on collaborative work from the (insufficiently adopted) organizational theory perspective, the empirical articles study organizations in the field and draw on theory to serve analysis. While the reported work domains rely extensively on information and communication technologies (ICT) to accomplish individual and collaborative work, the studies from Ramduny-Ellis et al and Spinelli et al. examined the social cognition inherent in everyday lowtech artefacts, respectively meeting minutes and physical space. These two papers looked at micro-organizational processes drawn from observation and analysis of the resources involved in group meetings for collaborative analysis of R&D work teams. Future research based on learning from this development should find its way into designing and evaluating prototypes and whole-system proposals in these organizational and practice domains. Our collective intention is to provide workable and evaluated approaches for cognitive analysis of collaboration in complex and intellectual work, and to promote several new distinctions for cognitive work research. We believe these approaches extend research beyond artefacts, their collaborative making and identities, and their organizational employ. These findings inspire further investigation, in particular, into the collaborative work use of space, time, and information. Research should draw upon the manipulation of the physical workspace as representation and meaningful artefact, and develop its implications for ambient intelligent environments, the smart home, and ‘‘unwired’’ workplace. These research approaches might further invest time (as in RamdunyEllis’ transect analysis and Jones’ collaborative lifecycles) as an instrumental resource for cognitive work analysis, further elaborating the process analysis of work and task.
Acknowledgements We gratefully acknowledge Dr. Erik Andriessen for his reviews, questions, and contributions to the articles and the process of preparing this special issue. We also warmly acknowledge Dr. Erik Hollnagel for his advice and guidance.
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