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Coordinating, Contributing, Contesting, Representing: HCI Specialists Surviving Distributed Design

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COOP 2016: Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on the Design of Cooperative Systems, 23-27 May 2016, Trento, Italy

Abstract

This paper examines distributed design that involved educational science, information and communication technology (ICT) and human–computer interaction (HCI) specialists collaboratively designing a learning application. The design process is characterized by coordinating, contributing, contesting and representing. The HCI specialists “represented the user”, but users remained silent during the design process. The design work was dominated by ‘coordinating’ activity, but also ‘proposing’ and ‘evaluating’ activities were prominent. The educational science specialists were the most active ones in the design discussions, heavily involved in ‘proposing’ and ‘coordinating’ activities. The HCI specialists were involved in those as well, but distinctly contributed through ‘evaluating’ activity. Interestingly, also ‘challenging’ and ‘ignoring’ activities characterized the distributed design process among the educational science specialists and HCI specialists: design emerged as a political, conflictual process. The very limited ICT support for distributed design became also accentuated. This study opens up interesting avenues for future research in this respect.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    This categorization of design foci is from a very practical textbook on interaction design, while it provided a highly useful tool for making sense of the design work in this particular case.

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Acknowledgements

I wish to thank the project partners for participating in this study as well as the Academy of Finland and EU for providing funding for this study.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. INTERACT Research Unit, Faculty of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering, University of Oulu, Oulu, Finland

    Netta Iivari

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  1. Netta Iivari
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Correspondence to Netta Iivari .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. InterAction Laboratory Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science, University of Trento, Trento, Italy

    Antonella De Angeli

  2. LERO Department of Computer Science & Information Systems, University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland

    Liam Bannon

  3. Department of Communication Science, University of Siena, Siena, Italy

    Patrizia Marti

  4. Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science, University of Trento, Trento, Italy

    Silvia Bordin

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Iivari, N. (2016). Coordinating, Contributing, Contesting, Representing: HCI Specialists Surviving Distributed Design. In: De Angeli, A., Bannon, L., Marti, P., Bordin, S. (eds) COOP 2016: Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on the Design of Cooperative Systems, 23-27 May 2016, Trento, Italy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-33464-6_13

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-33464-6_13

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-33463-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-33464-6

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