AIMS

The aims of the HWID working group are:

• To encourage empirical studies and conceptualisations of the interaction among humans, their variegated social contexts and the technology they use both within and across these contexts.

• Promote the use of knowledge, concepts, methods and techniques that enables user studies to procure a better apprehension of the complex interplay between individual, social and organisational contexts and thereby a better understanding of how and why people work in the ways that they do.

• Promote a better understanding of the relationship between work-domain based empirical studies and the iterative design of prototypes and new technologies.

• Establish a network of researchers, practitioners and domain/subject matter experts working within this field.

Thus on an overall level the working group aims at establishing relationships between extensive empirical work-domain studies and HCI design.

SCOPE

A Human-Work Interaction Design group (HWID) will provide the basis for an improved cross-disciplinary co-operation and mutual inspiration among researchers, but it will also lead to a number of new research initiatives and developments, as well as to an increased awareness of HWID in existing HCI educations. Complexity will be a key notion in the working group, it is not a priori defined or limited to any particular domains. A main target of the work group is the analysis of and the design for the variety of complex work and life contexts found in different business. Technology is changing human life and work contexts in numerous, multi-faceted ways:

• Interfaces between collaborating individuals; advanced communication networks

• Small and large-scale distributed systems

• Multimedia and embedded technologies

• Mobile technologies and advanced “intelligent” robots

With this evolution, toward new ways of working, has followed an intensive demand for techniques and technologies that address contemporary issues connected to:

• Communication, collaboration, and problem solving

• Large information spaces, variability, discretion, learning, and information seekin

• This evolution toward new ways of working and living must be embraced as a challenge to current knowledge and practice and one, moreover, which presents exciting new opportunities in:

• Epistemology, with knowledge acquisition, knowledge creation, management and knowledge sharing

• The symbiosis of users and contexts of use, between work and life-quality and with both professional and individual development.

It is a challenge to design applications that support users of technology in complex and emergent organisational and work contexts, and thus opportunities exist to focus on methods, theories, tools, techniques and prototype design on an experimental basis.

Home Page

http://ilex.cbs.dk/hwid/