Activity - From a Theoretical to a Computational Construct

September 17 2005
At the ECSCW 2005 Conference
Paris, France

Most collaboration support is organized around tools: tools for communicating (e.g. email); tools for working on materials (e.g. editors); tools for searching (e.g. Google); etc. But real work, personal and collaborative activities, cuts across these tools. Some collaborative computer systems try to organize around activities, such as team-rooms and workflows. But these are heavyweight and rigid. Most people do most of their work using lightweight tools, which do not provide adequate activity management support. A goal of much current collaboration research is to develop collaboration tools to support lightweight, situated activities on-the-fly as well as tools to manage multiple activities.

Activity is a central theoretical construct in HCI and CSCW research – not only in Activity Theory, but also in Distributed Cognition, Situated Action, and other theoretical frameworks. These theories and frameworks provide analytic accounts of real human collaborative activities. The issue posed by this workshop is whether we can treat activity as a practical, electronically-represented construct – to have activity as a “first class” computational object, while still enabling the application programmer to make lightweight applications for the end-user.

This workshop aims at exploring issues related to improving the computational support for human activities, with a special focus on the collaborative aspects. The workshop seeks to bring together researchers from many different disciplines, styles of work, work domains, and technologies to explore and discuss the relationship between activity as a theoretical and a practical, social construct suited as a conceptual basis for the design of computer systems.

The workshop will focus on exploring this potential by discussing the constraints and possibilities of existing and emerging technologies for supporting human activities, and focusing on identifying current and future research directions. These goals will be accomplished through presentation of the participants' visions and research, brainstorming sessions, and small-group breakout sessions.

Important Dates