Lars Rune Christensen

CareCoor: Augmenting the coordination of cooperative home care work

OBJECTIVES The present study aims to augment the network of home care around elderly. We investigate the nature of cooperative work between relatives and home care workers around elderly persons; present the CareCoor system developed to support that work; and report experiences from two pilot tests of CareCoor. METHODS We employed ethnographic fieldwork methods and conducted participatory design workshops to throw light on the nature of cooperative home care work, and to elicit implications for the design of an IT system that would support the work of relatives and home care workers around elderly persons. The design implications led to the development of a prototype, called CareCoor, which is accessible via a tablet PC and on the Internet. CareCoor was subsequently evaluated in two pilot tests. The first lasted a week and included three elderly, their next of kin and the affiliated home care workers, while the second test lasted for six weeks and involved five elderly people, their next of kin and relevant home care workers. RESULTS In the paper we make three major points, namely, (1) home care work is highly cooperative in nature and involves substantial coordinative efforts on the part of the actors involved, (2) the network of care around elderly can be augmented with new technology that allows all members of the network to follow, influence and be a part of the cooperative care of the elderly, and (3) CareCoor, the prototype introduced in this study, shows promise as it was well received during test and evaluation. CONCLUSION Home care work is increasingly important due to the ageing populations of Europe, the USA and large parts of Asia. Home care work between relatives and home care workers is inherently a cooperative effort, and can be facilitated and augmented by new information technology such as CareCoor. The pilot tests of CareCoor revealed promising results and will be further developed and evaluated in a larger test.

Challenges and Opportunities for Collaborative Technologies for Home Care Work

This article offers an exploration of home care work and the design of computational devices in support of such work. We present findings from a field study and four participatory design workshops. Themes emerging from the findings suggest that home care work may be highly cooperative in nature and requires substantial articulation work among the actors, such as family members and care workers engaged in providing care for older adults. Although they provide home care for older adults in cooperation, family members and care workers harbour diverging attitudes and values towards their joint efforts. The themes emerging are used to elicit a number of design implications and to promote some illustrative design concepts for new devices in support of cooperative home care work.

Relation work: Creating socio-technical connections in global engineering

In this article the notion of relation work will be put forward to describe efforts of connecting people and artefacts in a multitude of ways as part of facilitating global interaction and coordination in an engineering firm. Relation work can be seen as a parallel to the concept of articulation work. Articulation work describes efforts of coordination necessary in cooperative work, but, arguably, focuses mainly on taskspecific aspects of cooperative work. As a supplement, the concept of relation work focuses on the fundamental relational aspect of cooperative work. Relation work forms the fundamental activities of creating socio-technical connections between people and artefacts during collaborative activities required to create and enact the human and electronic network and engage with articulation work in cooperative engagements. The concept of relation work is applied within an ethnographic study of War Room meetings in a Global engineering firm. It is argued that relation work is a perquisite for other activities such as articulation work. Relation work is described in a number of dimensions, including connecting people with people, people with artefacts, and artefacts with other artefacts.

Documentscape: intertextuality, sequentiality, & autonomy at work

On the basis of an ethnographic field study, this article introduces the concept of documentscape to the analysis of document-centric work practices. The concept of documentscape refers to the entire ensemble of documents in their mutual intertextual interlocking. Providing empirical data from a global software development case, we show how hierarchical structures and sequentiality across the interlocked documents are critical to how actors make sense of the work of others and what to do next in a geographically distributed setting. Furthermore, we found that while each document is created as part of a quasi-sequential order, this characteristic does not make the document, as a single entity, into a stable object. Instead, we found that the documents were malleable and dynamic while suspended in intertextual structures. Our concept of documentscape points to how the hierarchical structure, sequentiality, and authorless nature of documents serve as a constitutive platform for the development of iterative and emergent work practices, making it possible for highly distributed actors to collaborate with limited communication, as the documentscape serves as a vehicle of coordination.

Practices of stigmergy in architectural work

Actors coordinate their cooperative efforts by acting on the evidence of work previously accomplished. The paper introduces, on the basis of a field study, the concept of stigmergy to the analysis of coordinative practices in architectural work. It distinguishes between practices of stigmergy and articulation work. Stigmergy is understood as coordination achieved by acting directly on the evidence of work previously accomplished and articulation work is understood as second order efforts to coordinate collaborative work. Furthermore, this leads to a distinction between representational artifacts associated with practices of stigmergy and coordination mechanisms in the service of articulation work.

Practices of Stigmergy in the Building Process

Actors coordinate their cooperative efforts by acting on the evidence of work previously accomplished. Based on a field study this article introduces the concept of stigmergy to the analysis of coordinative practices in the building process. It distinguishes between practices of stigmergy, articulation work and awareness practices. Stigmergy is understood as coordination achieved by acting directly on the evidence of work previously accomplished by others. The article provides descriptions of stigmergy in the building process i.e. in design as well as construction work. It seeks to (1) introduce the concept of stigmergy to CSCW, (2) to delimit this concept in regard to other concepts of coordination such as articulation work and awareness and (3) to provide descriptions of practices of stigmergy in the building process and, in this capacity, to help explain how complex large-scale cooperative work is coordinated.

Stigmergy in human practice: Coordination in construction work

Stigmergy is a concept of coordination that may be employed to analyse human practice in complex work settings such as the building process. However, the concept of stigmergy was not originally developed in order to describe human practice, rather it was developed within the field of entomology i.e. the study of social insects. Transposing the concept of stigmergy from the field of entomology to the study of human practice raises a central question: Does the concept of stigmergy add anything to our ability to account for the coordination of human cooperative work? We will argue that it does. We will (1) explicitly compare and delimit the concept of stigmergy to well-established concept describing human coordinative practices and show that it differs from these concepts, and we will (2) apply the concept of stigmergy to an analysis of the coordination of construction work in order to explore the utility of the concept in the analysis of human practice.

Coordinative Practices in the Building Process: An Ethnographic Perspective

Coordinative Practices in the Building Process: An Ethnographic Perspective presents the principles of the practice-oriented research programmes in the CSCW and HCI domains, explaining and examining the ideas and motivations behind basing technology design on ethnography. The focus throughout is on generating ethnographically informed accounts of the building process and discussing the concepts of cooperative work and coordinative practices in order to frame technology development. Lars Rune Christensen provides an invaluable resource for these communities in this book. Illustrated with real examples from the building process, he reports on the cooperative work and coordinative practices found, allowing readers to feel that they know, from the point of view of the people working in the building process, what it is like to coordinate and do this kind of cooperative work.

α1,2-fucosyllactose Does Not Improve Intestinal Function or Prevent Escherichia coli F18 Diarrhea in Newborn Pigs

Objectives: Infectious diarrhea, a leading cause of morbidity and deaths, is less prevalent in breastfed infants compared with infants fed infant formula. The dominant human milk oligosaccharide (HMO), &agr;-1,2-fucosyllactose (2′-FL), has structural homology to bacterial adhesion sites in the intestine and may in part explain the protective effects of human milk. We hypothesized that 2′-FL prevents diarrhea via competitive inhibition of pathogen adhesion in a pig model for sensitive newborn infants. Methods: Intestinal cell studies were coupled with studies on cesarean-delivered newborn pigs (n = 24) without (control) or with inoculation of enterotoxigenic Escherichia coli F18 (7.5 × 1010/day for 8 days) fed either no (F18) or 10 g/L 2′-FL (2FL-F18). Results: In vitro studies revealed decreased pathogen adhesion to intestinal epithelial cells with 2′-FL (5 g/L; P < 0.001). F18 pigs showed more diarrhea than control pigs (P < 0.01). Administration of 2′-FL to F18 pigs failed to prevent diarrhea, although the relative weight loss tended to be reduced (−19 vs −124 g/kg, P = 0.12), higher villi were observed in the distal small intestine (P < 0.05), and a trend toward increased proportion of mucosa and activities of some brush border enzymes in the proximal small intestine. In situ abundance of &agr;-1,2-fucose and E coli was similar between groups, whereas sequencing showed higher abundance of Enterobacteriaceae in F18, Enterococcus in control and Lachnospiraceae in 2FL-F18 pigs. Conclusions: 2′-FL inhibited in vitro adhesion of E coli F18 to epithelial cells, but had limited effects on diarrhea and mucosal health in newborn pigs challenged with E coli F18.

On Intertext in Chemotherapy: an Ethnography of Text in Medical Practice

Building on literary theory and data from a field study of text in chemotherapy, this article introduces the concept of intertext and the associated concepts of corpus and intertextuality to CSCW. It shows that the ensemble of documents used and produced in practice can be said to form a corpus of written texts. On the basis of the corpus, or subsections thereof, the actors in cooperative work create intertext between relevant (complementary) texts in a particular situation, for a particular purpose. The intertext of a particular situation can be constituted by several kinds of intertextuality, including the complementary type, the intratextual type and the mediated type. In this manner the article aims to systematically conceptualise cooperative actors’ engagement with text in text-laden practices. The approach is arguably novel and beneficial to CSCW. The article also contributes with a discussion of computer enabling the activity of creating intertext. This is a key concern for cooperative work as intertext is central to text-centric work practices such as healthcare.