Dave Randall

University of Siegen · Institute of Information Systems and New Media

The evolution of smart home technologies, particularly agentic ones such as conversational agents, robots, and virtual avatars, is reshaping our understanding of home and domestic life. This shift highlights the complexities of modern domestic life, with the household landscape now featuring diverse cohabiting units like co-housing and communal liv...

Supporting older adults in developing their ability to learn using digital tools in a self-directed way holds the potential to make them more autonomous. A promising space for that is in participatory design. However, currently we lack the tools to support their learning in a sustainable way during as well as beyond a single project. Hence, in our...

Sustainable HCI and Human-Food-Interaction research have developing interest in preventing food waste through food sharing. Sustainability requires attention to both the opportunities and challenges associated with the building of food sharing groups engaged in the redistribution of food but also in developing a wider agenda which includes, for ins...

Food practices have become an important context for questions around sustainability. Within HCI, Sustainable HCI and Human-Food-Interaction have developed as a response. We argue, nevertheless, that food practices as a social activity remain relatively under-examined and further that sustainable food practices hinge on communal activity. We present...

In this paper, we introduce an innovative design concept for the curation of data, which we call 'Data Story'. We view this as an additional resource for data curation, aimed specifically at supporting the sharing of qualitative and ethnographic data. The Data Story concept is motivated by three elements: 1. the increased attention of funding agenc...

This work forms a part of a series of “on the ground” studies dealing with (post-)conflict situations, focusing on the iterative, participatory design of a tool, Cyberactivist, for protection for activists and the empirical research that led to it. Work on the development of privacy and security tools has not always recognized the fragile nature of...

An increasing number of people around the world are forced to leave their homes due to the climate catastrophe, regional conflict or poverty. In their new host countries however, refugees and migrants are frequently met by a wide range of challenges, including wider societal participation. The difficulties migrants and refugees face have also incre...

This paper documents some details and some examples of the influence of ethnomethodological work in the fieldwork tradition associated with European CSCW; in particular what has been termed ‘ethnomethodologically informed ethnography’. In so doing, we do not wish to downplay other perspectival and methodological contributions but to simply suggest...

Ageing societies and the associated pressure on the care systems are major drivers for new developments in socially assistive robotics. To understand better the real-world potential of robot-based assistance, we undertook a 10-week case study in a care home involving groups of residents, caregivers and managers as stakeholders. We identified both,...

There has been increasing interest in designing for dementia in recent years. Empirical investigation is now needed of the long-term role of caregivers in appropriating ICTs into the complex daily life of people with dementia (PwD). We present here the outcomes of a 4-month evaluation of the individual, social and institutional impact of a videogam...

As ethical issues become increasingly important and problematic in research, this chapter reflects on our own investigations into some of the ethical considerations involved in long-term research ‘in the wild’. In particular, we consider two relevant issues: the effect of a long-term relationship with a community, and the delineation and relevance...

In this paper, we describe the feminist perspectives that have informed design in the HCI community, and develop an argument for an approach that translates these broad commitments into a pragmatic design space, drawing on emancipatory agendas such as participatory design. As designers of technologies, we regard creating research infrastructures th...

This workshop is aimed at bringing together a multidisciplinary group to discuss Machine Learning and its application in the workplace as a practical, everyday work matter. It's our hope this is a step toward helping us design better technology and user experiences to support the accomplishment of that work, while paying attention to workplace cont...

For migrants and refugees, settling in a host country often proves hugely problematic. The ability to communicate marks a significant step in the process of resettlement. The current high number of migrants coming to Europe has therefore meant that the need to improve and increase the availability of language provision has become more pressing. Nev...

In this paper, we provide a participatory design study of a mobile health platform for older adults that provides an integrative perspective on health data collected from different devices and apps. We illustrate the diversity and complexity of older adults’ perspectives in the context of health and technology use, the challenges which follow on fo...

The Open Science (OS) agenda has potentially massive cultural, organizational and infrastructural consequences. Ambitions for OS-driven policies have proliferated, within which researchers are expected to publish their scientific data. Significant research has been devoted to studying the issues associated with managing Open Research Data. Digital...

Studying armed political struggles from a CSCW perspective can throw the complex interactions between culture, technology, materiality and political conflict into sharp relief. Such studies highlight interrelations that otherwise remain under-remarked upon, despite their severe consequences. The present paper provides an account of the armed strugg...

Smart Meters are a key component of increasing the power efficiency of the Smart Grid. To help manage the grid effectively, these meters are designed to collect information on power consumption and send it to third parties. With Smart Metering, for the first time, these cloud-connected sensing devices are legally mandated to be installed in the hom...

A key issue for smart home systems is supporting non-expert users in their management. Whereas feedback design on use cases (such as energy feedback) have gained attention, current approaches to providing awareness on the system state typically provide a rather technical view. Long-term investigations of the practices and resources needed for maint...

Knowledge and expertise sharing has long been an important theme in CSCW and, importantly, one that has frequently challenged a prevailing view concerning knowledge management. This critique focused, initially, on the practical problems associated with issues of Organisational Memory (OM), and in particular the difficulties inherent in an oversimpl...

It is often argued that blockchain is a 'disintermediating' technology, which will find an application in a variety of domains because it provides for speed, low cost and the removal of layers of trustful encounters. In this paper, we want to argue that the degree to which this might be true depends very much on the kind of application envisaged. W...

The book is an exploration of the theoretical, conceptual and methodological foundations of human-centred design. Specifically, it critically examines the notion of 'practice' and argues for an understanding of the concept which emanates from engagement with design problems rather than simply from social scientific theory. The contributors to the b...

This chapter provides an ethnography of a complex scenario involving the construction of a power plant and, in so doing, tries to show the importance of a practice-based approach to the problem of technical and organizational change. The chapter reports on fieldwork conducted in a highly complex and tightly coupled environment: power plant construc...

Mobility assistance ICTs have become important companions in daily life due to rising digital affordances. However, understanding and researching everyday way-finding is still challenging, mainly because of the sheer difficulty to collect empirical data of concrete occasions. Hence, we argue that those methodological challenges make it harder to un...

Falls are a serious problem in aging societies. A sedentary life style and low levels of physical activity are major factors aggravating older adults’ fall risk. Information and communication technology (ICT)-based fall prevention interventions are a promising approach to counteract the fall risk of this target group. For some time now, fall preven...

Studying the setup and development of an initiative of computer clubs in intercultural neighborhoods, this paper builds on the theory and method associated with value sensitive design to account for the use of off-the-shelf technology in a diverse cultural context, and over an extended period of time. We present three cases from one of these comput...

This chapter emphasizes the role of ethnography for design-related matters. The issue of the relevance and purpose of ethnography is critical to understanding its role in human-computer interaction (HCI). The origins of ethnography lie in a challenge to conventional theoretical thinking about other cultures, of which the best known example is proba...

Social media and user-generated content (UGC) are increasingly important features of journalistic work in a number of different ways. However, their use presents major challenges, not least because information posted on social media is not always reliable and therefore its veracity needs to be checked before it can be considered as fit for use in t...

Social media and user-generated content (UGC) are increasingly important features of journalistic work in a number of different ways. However, their use presents major challenges, not least because information posted on social media is not always reliable and therefore its veracity needs to be checked before it can be considered as fit for use in t...

The availability of ICT services can be severely disrupted in the aftermath of disasters. Ad-hoc assemblages of communication technology have the potential to bridge such breakdowns. This article investigates the use of an ad-hoc system for sending SOS signals in a large-scale exercise that simulated a terrorist attack. In this context, we found th...

This long-term study analyzes the structure of a technology-mediated local initiative fostering cross-cultural understanding and respect: come_IN intercultural computer clubs provide open yet guided access to modern information and computer technology and offer a space for computer-related collaborative practices of children and adults in intercult...

We present a user-centered development process for a GPS monitoring system to be used in dementia care to support care for persons withwandering behavior. The usage of GPS systems in dementia care is still very low. The article takes a socio-technical stance on development and appropriation of GPS technology in dementia care and assesses the practi...

Tenenberg, Roth, and Socha’s paper “From I-awareness to we-awareness in CSCW” is, or should be, of special significance to those in the CSCW and HCI communities with more than a passing interest in the theoretical issues that underpin our work. It can be argued, and I would be a proponent of this view, that fundamental intellectual disagreements to...

Falls and their consequences are arguably most important events for transition from independent living to institutional care for older adults. Information and communication technology (ICT)-based support of fall prevention and fall risk assessment under the control of the user has a tremendous potential to, over time, prevent falls and reduce assoc...

Mobile devices have conquered nearly all parts of the daily life. These devices support their owners in specific situations, both at work and in leisure contexts, and therefore make it increasingly difficult to keep work and private life separated. Examining the practices around the use of mobile technology has become a topic of some interest as is...

Bosnia-Herzegovina and its administrative unit or "entity", Republika Srpska are divided, transitional post-war societies. The aim of this paper is to present a preliminary analysis of regional activists' use of information and communication technology (ICT) and to identify improvement potential. Empirical investigations of social media use and qua...

Social media usage during the recent uprisings in Arab countries has gained increasing attention in human–computer interaction research. This study adds to these insights by providing some findings on the use of information and communications technology (ICT), specifically mobile media, by opposition forces and political activists during the Syrian...

This paper focuses on the complex and intimate setting of domestic home care. The majority of care for chronically ill people is realized by non-professionals, the relatives, who are often overlooked. Many of these informal caregivers are also elderly and face multiple, seriously demanding challenges in the context of informal care 24/7. In order t...

Come_IN computer clubs are an established approach to support inter-cultural and inter-generational learning in German neighborhoods. We explore the adaptation of the come_IN concept to the Palestinian context as a means to bridge the social and economic divide that has plagued West Bank society for a period of more than six decades. Social exclusi...

The authors of this proposal are members of an informal committee currently planning CSCW 2017 in Brazil. As we get set for this event, it is paramount to enroll a broader number of CSCW researchers in Latin America (LA) in the broader CSCW community. CSCW research in LA has been active since the mid 1990's although largely disconnected from the br...

Living Labs provide a ‘human-centric’ research approach for the design of new ICT artefacts. In Living Labs users participate over several design stages, providing insights into unexpected ICT use, co-creation and evaluation of new IT solutions. Although this approach is becoming more popular, there is little comparative and reflective work on its...

Online incentive mechanisms constitute a strategy to stimulate members to participate and perform tasks in virtual communities. Given the diversity of variables and particularities that define virtual communities and their contexts, it is a challenge to identify and define incentives that are adequate to a given community. Our focus is on providing...

The introduction of IT has changed the way we live in many ways. Historically, it can even be argued that socially embedded applications of information technology challenge and change practices to an extent rarely seen before with any other type of technological artifacts. If these IT artifacts have strong and recurrent impacts on people’s lives, w...

There is little doubt that insights gleaned from the turn to the ‘social’ (whatever that might mean) have had a profound impact on the development of information and communication technologies (ICTs). As was reported many years ago by Bannon (From human factors to human actors: the role of psychology and human-computer interaction studies in system...

It is perhaps stating the blindingly obvious when we say that technologically, organisationally, and socially, we are experiencing rapid change. Whether, however, our analytic approaches have kept up is an open question. In these concluding remarks, we examine the changing face of social, organisational, and work practice as a dynamic sociotechnica...

As was suggested in Chap. 1, we need to ‘… accumulate and synthesize knowledge about such social domains from case studies to be able to anticipate the use and behavioral impact of new designs’. In turn, Beringer suggests, we need to go about, ‘extracting key findings and summarizing key insights [so that] they can become a reusable set of foundati...

Emergency or crisis management, as is well-attested, is a complex management problem. A variety of agencies need to collaborate and coordinate in real-time and with an urgency that is not always present in other domains. It follows that accurate information of varying kinds (e.g. geographical and weather conditions; available skills and expertises;...

Design research processes often take place in publicly funded projects. Besides designers and users, public funding increasingly requires industry partners to participate in such projects. We present empirical insights from a joint research project in order to assess the claims connected with such funding structures and to report on challenges for...

We present the design and evaluation of a lightweight mobile S.O.S. system that facilitates ad-hoc communication between first responders and victims in emergency situations. Our approach leverages established protocols and standards in unforeseen ways to provide a platform supporting the creation of short-lived communication links. The system comp...

In this work we present a user-centered development process for a GPS-based monitoring system to be used in dementia care. Our research covers a full design process including a qualitative-empirical pre-study, the prototyping process and the investigation of long-term appropriation processes of the stable prototypes in three different practice envi...

Alternative mobility modes for older adults are increasingly important for economic, ecological and social reasons. A promising option is ridesharing, defined as use of the same vehicle by two or more people traveling to a common destination. In particular, mobile computer supported ridesharing provides a promising way to enlarge older adults' mobi...

Alternative mobility modes for older adults are increasingly important for economic, ecological and social reasons. A promising option is ridesharing, defined as use of the same vehicle by two or more people traveling to a common desti-nation. In particular, mobile computer supported rideshar-ing provides a promising way to enlarge older adults' mo...

The aim of the paper is to discuss the rising potential of social software to increase the knowledge management capabilities of virtual product development teams. It presents six fundamental transitions, elaborated from the empirical findings, which justify the rise of a more bottom-up, social creation and sharing of engineering knowledge in the vi...

Based on a field study in Guangdong Province, this paper describes the social media use of Chinese migrant workers in the manufacturing sector. It was found that social media plays a significant role in the lives of young workers who have left their rural hometowns in early adulthood and struggle to survive in the urban centers. They buy expensive...

When developing new ICT systems and applications for domestic environments, rich qualitative approaches improve the understanding of the user's integral usage of technology in their daily routines and thereby inform design. This knowledge will often be reached through in-home studies, strong relationships with the users and their involvement in the...

The widespread adoption and use of social media in almost every aspect of our daily lives may outpace existing empirical understandings. In organizations, social media are increasingly used by professional individuals and communities to support dynamic collaboration and knowledge sharing. While there is a growing amount of research on this subject,...

The organization, technology and operation of microfinance have undergone much change and differentiation. Muhammad Yunus, a Nobel-prize winner first demonstrated the possible empowerment of poor people by means of microfinance. Even so, certain cases have indicated that this empowerment does not necessarily occur and that microfinance can even be...

In its traditional stance, participatory design (PD) is centred on certain work/application settings and is concerned with the involvement of representative users from these contexts. Nevertheless, current web technologies enable new forms of distributed participation which might allow PD processes to be implemented in a broader and flexible way, b...

We analyze practices of political activists in a Palestinian village located in the West Bank. Activists organize weekly demonstrations against Israel’s settlement policy and the separation wall. Over a period of 28 months, we conducted a field study consisting of eight days ‘on the ground’ observation and interviewing, and extensive monitoring of...

We present a study conducted in Sidi Bouzid, the Tunisian town where the Arab Revolution, also known as 'Arab Spring', started, and where the role of Web 2.0 and social media applications in the people's uprising have been much discussed. We identify four relevant phenomena: (1) the publication of classified materials via WikiLeaks challenged the r...

This paper develops a deeper understanding of professional software design by examining the emergent logic of a software design exercise. Decision-making is evident as a 'product' of activity, including coordinated attention to primarily two artefacts, the brief and the whiteboard. Thus, we pay attention to the 'situatedness' of decision-making, wh...

The aim of the paper is to discuss the rising potential of social software to increase the knowledge management capabilities of virtual product development teams. It presents six fundamental transitions, elaborated from the empirical findings, which justify the rise of a more bottom-up, social creation and sharing of engineering knowledge in the vi...

In this paper we wish to contribute to the recent ICT-design for and reflection of the application field of residential care homes. In doing so, the contribution of the paper is twofold: we wish to highlight some aspects of the every-day life of institutionalized elderly people - trust, sociality, and memory - which not only provoke reflection on d...

There is an increasing spread of flexible software applications that can be modified by adding components (sometimes called plug-ins or add-ons). A popular example in the software development domain is Eclipse, a flexible development environment that can be extended with literally thousands of different plug-ins. However, searching, installing and...

The aim of the paper is to discuss the rising potential of social software to increase the knowledge management capabilities of virtual product development teams. It presents six fundamental transitions, elaborated from the empirical findings, which justify the rise of a more bottom-up, social creation and sharing of engineering knowledge in the vi...

There is, of course, nothing in the slightest bit new about game playing in and around the home. Pieter Breughel’s famous painting, ‘Childrens’ Games’, painted in the 1500s, shows how many and varied the games that were played in the home environs were, albeit with very limited resources in terms of toys or other equipment. Breughel’s painting in f...

Medical team meetings provide a valuable setting for research into collaboration, problem-solving, decision-making, record-keeping and medical work processes as well as HCI (human-computer interaction) more generally. Li and Robertson stress the importance of configuring available technologies and resources to support collaboration in shared spaces...

In this panel we will explore two distinct approaches to reach transferability currently prevailing in the HCI community. We will discuss epistemological differences and the strengths and criticisms of each approach. Importantly, we will discuss the implications for HCI research practice given this diversity of methodological approaches.

This paper presents an exploration of how images captured by a wearable camera, SenseCam, might foster reflection on everyday experiences. SenseCams were provided to multiple members of four households who wore them simultaneously and reviewed the images after one week, and then again after a period of 18 months. The findings reveal how images capt...

Ontologies – a form of structured and logically related knowledge or classification hierarchy embedded in a computer system – are regarded by many scientists as having enormous promise for the consistent use and re-use of data. To realise this promise, however, is not straightforward. In this paper, based on ethnographic observation, we argue that...

In light of a move towards developing and offering functions rather than products, i.e. Product-Service Systems, the purpose of this paper is to discuss the rising potential of social software in the particular context of Product-Service System Engineering. The paper introduces an emerging Virtual Enterprise context within the aerospace industry, w...

Software engineering research (SE) as research on computer supported cooperative work (CSCW) is discussed. CSCW, as is well-known, is firmly based on a worldview that stresses the role of human actors in the production of technical artifacts, and in particular how best to understand the cooperative engagements that inevitably underpin human activit...

SenseCam is an automatic wearable camera, often seen as a tool for the creation of digital memories. In this paper, we report findings from a field trial in which SenseCams were worn by household members over the course of a week. In interviews with these users, it became apparent that the way in which SenseCam images were played back, the manner o...