Designing a Co-creation System for the Development of Work-process-related Learning Material in Manufacturing

The increasing digitalization and automatization in the manufacturing industry as well as the need to learn on the job has reinforced the need for much more granular learning, which has not yet impacted the design of learning materials. In this regard, granular learning concepts require situated learning materials to support self-directed learning in the workplace in a targeted manner. Co-creation approaches offer promising opportunities to support employees in the independent design of such situated learning materials. Using an action-design research (ADR) approach, we derived requirements from co-creation concepts and practice by conducting focus group workshops in manufacturing and vocational training schools to develop design principles for a co-creation system that supports employees through the creation process of work-process-related learning material. Consequently, we formulate four design principles for the design of a collaborative learning and qualification system for manufacturing. Using an innovative mixed methods approach, we validate these design principles and design features to demonstrate the success of the developed artifact. The results provide insights regarding the design of a co-creation system to support learners in the co-creation of learning material with the consideration of cognitive load (CL). Our study contributes to research and practice by proposing novel design principles for supporting employees in peer creation processes. Furthermore, our study reveals how co-creation systems can support the collaborative development of learning materials in the work process.

Crowdsourcing historical photographs: autonomy and control at the Copenhagen City Archives

This study of crowdsourcing practices at Kbhbilleder.dk at the Copenhagen City Archives provides a rich description of how motivation and work relations are situated in a wider infrastructure of different tools and social settings. Approximately, 94% of the work is here done by 7 of the 2,433 participants. The article contributes insights into how these super-taggers carry out their work, describing and placing images on a map, through an extensive discursive effort that takes place outside the institution’s more limited interface in private discussion forums with over 60 000 participants. The more exploratory qualitative work that is going on in different discussion groups does not fit within the archive’s technical framework. Instead, alternative archives are growing within privately owned networks, where participants’ own collections merge with images from public archives. Rather than focusing on the nature of participants’ motivation, the article suggests a relational perspective on participation that is useful for analyzing a systems’ support for participation. Pointing out how people’s motivation in citizen science correspond with relational and intra-relational aspects enables an approach to system design that potentially supports or counteracts these aspects.

Inverted Hierarchies on the Shop Floor: The Organisational Layer of Workarounds for Collaboration in the Metal Industry

Workarounds, or practices that deviate from the official pathway to a target, are frequent phenomena in the organisational context. With respect to collaboration, they highlight an area of mismatch between normative versus lived work practices, and therefore depict a relevant research area deeply rooted in computer supported cooperative work (CSCW). Building on the theory of hierarchical opposition by Louis Dumont and empirical data collected through ethnographic research at a company classified as a small- and medium-sized enterprise (SME) in the German metal industry, this paper addresses the emergence of workarounds in collaborative work processes by setting them into the wider organisational context. The organisational layer of analysis reveals that workarounds emerge to cater for inversed information power relations and information asymmetries in the shop floor setting, which require communication to flow against the hierarchical slope between planning and execution functions. By applying an organisational lens to the concept of workarounds, this paper contributes a novel empirical analysis that confirms the value of workarounds as a source of insight into collaborative practices.

Understanding Matchmakers’ Experiences, Principles and Practices of Assembling Innovation Teams

The team composition of a project team is an essential determinant of the success of innovation projects that aim to produce novel solution ideas. Team assembly is essentially complex and sensitive decision-making, yet little supported by information technology (IT). In order to design appropriate digital tools for team assembly, and team formation more broadly, we call for profoundly understanding the practices and principles of matchmakers who manually assemble teams in specific contexts. This paper reports interviews with 13 expert matchmakers who are regularly assembling multidisciplinary innovation teams in various organizational environments in Finland. Based on qualitative analysis of their experiences, we provide insights into their established practices and principles in team assembly. We conceptualize and describe common tactical approaches on different typical levels of team assembly, including arranging approaches like “key-skills-first”, “generalist-first” and “topic-interest-first”, and balancing approaches like “equally-skilled-teams” and “high-expertise-teams”. The reported empirical insights can help to design IT systems that support team assembly according to different tactics.

‘Technology is Everywhere, we have the Opportunity to Learn it in the Valley’: The Appropriation of a Socio-Technical Enabling Infrastructure in the Moroccan High Atlas

This paper describes the appropriation processes involved in establishing a socio-technical enabling infrastructure in a valley in the High Atlas of Morocco. We focus on the challenges of co-establishing such an intervention in a rural/mountainous region that is already undergoing a process of continuous development and profound transformation. We reflect upon the changes and unforeseen appropriation by our local partners and inhabitants in the valley of a computer club primarily used as an informal learning centre for school children. We followed an ethnographic approach and combined research perspectives from both socio-informatics and anthropology. This paper sheds light on what a successful cooperation and intervention in this kind of challenging environment can look like. It does this by taking seriously competing expectations, fragile infrastructural foundations and the socio-cultural context. Despite the challenges, the intervention managed to lead to the establishment of a socio-technical enabling infrastructure that plays a particularly valuable role in local educational endeavours and that is now moving towards supporting other members of the community. The paper thus provides insights regarding what has to be considered to create a mutually beneficial cooperation with all relevant stakeholders as well as a sustainable intervention.

Organizing Safe Spaces: #MeToo Activism in Sweden

Networked online environments can effectively support political activism. In Sweden, the #metoo movement resulted in over 100,000 people participating in activities challenging sexual harassment and abuse, including collecting testimonies via social media and drafting and discussing petitions published in print news media. Participation involved many risks, such as social stigma, losing one’s job, or misogynist terrorism, which meant that participation required a high level of trust among peers. Human-computer interaction (HCI) research on trust generally focuses on technical systems or user-generated data, less focus has been given to trust among peers in vulnerable communities. This study, based on semi-structured interviews and surveys of participants and organizers of 47 petitions representing different sectors in society, found that trust was aggregated over networks of people, practices, institutions, shared values, and technical systems. Although a supportive culture based on a feeling of solidarity and shared feminist values was central for safe spaces for participation, when activism was scaled up, social interaction had to be limited due to increased risk. HCI research views trust as a process of crossing distances, increasing over time; however, our results reveal that trust decreased over time as the movement grew and public exposure increased, a trend most evident when the participants actually came from a tightly knit community. Therefore, this study points out the significance to balance the need for transparency and community with the need for anonymity and distance in the development of tools to support large-scale deliberative processes that involve conflicts and risks.