Where the Footprints Lead: Tracking Down Other Roles for Social Navigation

Abstract

In the early 1980s, researchers working in the area of interactive systems became increasingly interested in the topic of cooperative work. Human beings are, after all, social animals, and most activities in which we engage are conditioned by and conducted in coordination with other individuals. We work collectively. However, until this point, the focus of interactive systems research had largely been on a single user sitting at a desk in front of a computer screen. The field of computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) emerged in response to this focus. It drew attention to the range of concerns that lay outside this computer/human dyad but which fundamentally affected the nature of work at the computer, such as the social setting in which the activity took place, and the role that that the activity played in an individual’s collaborative actions. In the years that have followed, CSCW has legitimised this concern and reoriented HCl to take into account the social context in which work is conducted. At the same time, it has also had an influence on the development of everyday technologies for computer-based work; as the Internet has become a more commonplace computational phenomenon, so technologies such as workflow and groupware have moved out of the research laboratory and into everyday computational practice.