Cédric Masclet

From Research to Practice in the Design of Cooperative Systems: Results and Open Challenges

COOP 2012 is the tenth COOP conference, marking twenty years from the first conference in 1992. In this special anniversary edition we asked researchers and practitioners to reflect on what have been the successes and the failures in designing cooperative systems, and what challenges still need to be addressed. We have come a long way in understanding the intricacies of cooperation and in designing systems that support work practices and collective activities. These advances would not have been possible without the concerted effort of contributions from a plethora of domains including CSCW, HCI, Information Systems, Knowledge Engineering, Multi-agent systems, organizational and management sciences, sociology, psychology, anthropology, ergonomics, linguistics, etc. The COOP community is going from strength to strength in developing new technologies, advancing and proposing new methodological approaches, and forging theories. From Research to Practice in the Design of Cooperative Systems: Results and Open Challenges presents theoretical contributions, empirical studies, systems development and evaluation, and innovative concepts on the following topics: Conceptual frameworks for understanding cooperative work or collective practices Guidelines for designing cooperative systems The influence of technologies (intelligent devices, mobile computing, ubiquitous computing, etc.) on cooperation Expertise, knowledge sharing and learning in cooperative work Communities and new forms of organization Innovative technological solutions and user interfaces for cooperation Methods for participatory design of cooperative systems Applications for, and studies of, social networking (including experiences in industrial contexts) Analysis of collective practices or collaborative work Reports of usage experiences and case studies

An observational study of multi-disciplinary co-design – application to an electromechanical device

This paper deals with the observational study of a multi-disciplinary and collaborative design project to produce an electromechanical plunger. The design of the device was carried out by students from different disciplines, in their final year. It was co-located and non co-located. Synchronous and asynchronous tasks were observed and several studies carried out with various scenarios. The aims of the study are to produce qualitative analysis based on the observations made, to prepare observational studies and quantitative analyses in an industrial context and to specify dedicated tools for the support of non co-located collaborative design. In this way, the paper presents a bibliographic study concerning various empirical approaches for observational studies of collaborative design. The successive observational studies are detailed: context, scenarios, tools, actors, recording means. A global qualitative analysis is finally proposed, highlighting the key parameters for the building of an industrial case observation.