Collectives and Their Artifact Ecologies

Abstract

Computing today happens across multiple devices, applications, users, organizational units, and in the rest of the world outside. Groups and communities come together for different reasons and operate within contexts that may differ from dominant modes of production and consumption. With a foundation in activity theoretical HCI, we develop the concept of collective artifact ecologies. This concept enables us to identify struggles of collective use of computational devices today, delimiting collective artifact ecologies in order to study and explain how they develop and overlap. Through an analysis of three empirical cases, we illustrate the notion of collectives and how they face challenges in establishing, maintaining and negotiating their artifact ecologies. This paper, therefore, contributes a theoretical foundation for analyzing groups and communities as collectives, with a particular emphasis on the multiple tools and artifacts they use. To serve as a starting point for further engagement with these concepts, we provide guiding questions to support the understanding of collective artifact ecologies.

Envisioning Narrative Intelligence: A Creative Visual Storytelling Anthology

“…With these themes and criteria, we plan for future work to bridge the gap between our crowdsourced study and theoretical inquiry. As other theoretical work suggests, our authors may represent a collective, working toward the production of an artifact that is the anthology itself [41]. While we are not there yet, we conclude that this collective visual story construction lays fruitful groundwork for theory-building.…”

Emergent Collaborations Outside of Organizational Frameworks: Exploring Relevant Concepts

“…With their concept of collective artifact ecologies, Korsgaard et al [12] highlight the need for understanding the connections between multiple people and the multiple technological artifacts they use, adapt, or discard. Collective artifact ecologies emerge and evolve through continuous dynamic processes, supporting the collectives' activities, mediating personal relations, and bringing forward the identity of the collective to the wider world.…”

“…These constructs are in active use in the C&T community (see, e.g., [8]- [11]). In their theoretical work, Korsgaard et al [12] also propose the concept of "collectives" grounded in activity theory. There is a need, they claim, for a concept that is more than the ones mentioned above and usually used in fields exploring computer-supported collaborative work, "Collectives" refers to "the social constellations of people who pick up, learn, use, share, recommend, reject, modify and appropriate the many tools that come to play in and around their activities" [12] -in other words, who shape their artifact ecologies.…”

“…There is a need, they claim, for a concept that is more than the ones mentioned above and usually used in fields exploring computer-supported collaborative work, "Collectives" refers to "the social constellations of people who pick up, learn, use, share, recommend, reject, modify and appropriate the many tools that come to play in and around their activities" [12] -in other words, who shape their artifact ecologies. Korsgaard et al's collectives are a complementary theoretical construct to artifact ecologies, thus allowing us to understand "how multiple people in various constellations and contexts appropriate a wide range of interactive technologies, devices, services, and platforms to cooperate and collaborate toward shared commitments" [12]. In this paper, we aim to focus more specifically on emergent collaboration, which might occur as collectives and communities are forming or might take place inside them, but in different configurations.…”