Lars Rune ChristensenIT University of Copenhagen
Lars Rune Christensen
PhD
About
49
Publications
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Introduction
Lars Rune Christensen research is on the intersection between information technology and ethnography. He is primary investigator of “Rohingya mHealth: Increasing Access to Healthcare for the Rohingya Community in the Refugee Camps in Bangladesh” (https://blogit.itu.dk/rohingyamhealth/). In Denmark, his research is on digitalisation in the Danish public sector and he is head of a work package within EcoKnow (ecoknow.org).
Publications
Publications (49)
Honorable mention award received at CSCW 2021 https://cscw.acm.org/2021/awards/
Background:
Transcutaneous auricular vagus nerve stimulation (ta-VNS) is a new non-invasive technique developed as treatment option for drug resistant epilepsy. A few studies have been carried out showing that the efficacy and tolerability of ta-VNS is comparable with traditional implanted VNS but the feasibility of the therapy has been poorly des...
This paper draws attention to new complexities of deploying artificial intelligence (AI) to sensitive contexts, such as welfare allocation. AI is increasingly used in public administration with the promise of improving decision-making through predictive modelling. To accurately predict, it needs all the agreed criteria used as part of decisions, fo...
The mental health needs of people affected by humanitarian crisis are significant but may be overlooked by healthcare providers. This paper reports on a 3-month, mixed method, field trial of a digital screening tool to identify people suffering mental health issues in Kutupalong refugee camp in Bangladesh. First, findings show that of 958 persons s...
This paper examines the nature of discretion in social work in order to debunk myths dominating prevalent debates on digitisation and automation in the public sector. Social workers have traditionally used their discretion widely and with great autonomy, but discretion has increasingly come under pressure for its apparent subjectivity and randomnes...
It is our pleasure to welcome you to this PACMHCI GROUP issue. For over 25 years, the GROUP research community has supported the development of robust scholarship at the intersection of Computer Supported Cooperative Work, Human Computer Interaction, Computer Supported Collaborative Learning and Socio-Technical Studies. This volume is the latest pr...
It is our pleasure to welcome you to the first PACMHCI GROUP issue. For over 25 years, the GROUP research community has supported the development of robust scholarship at the intersection of Computer Supported Cooperative Work, Human Computer Interaction, Computer Supported Collaborative Learning and Socio-Technical Studies. This volume is the late...
Accounting for the ways in which ICT initiatives are worked into local communities is part of rendering “the local perspectives” within ICT4D. This paper is part of that. Based on in-depth fieldwork, we investigate the integration of an agricultural information service into a rural community in Bangladesh. We find that it takes work beyond the init...
Based on fieldwork, we investigate the integration of an agricultural information service into a rural community in Bangladesh. We find that it takes work beyond the initial design and cursory introduction of the service to make the service work in a low-income rural community: it takes the strength of the farmers self-help groups to circulate the...
On the basis of an ethnographic field study among artificial life researchers, this article proposes the concept of allusive machines to describe how technical systems variously allude people into shaping their own beliefs. The concept of allusive machines is inspired by previous research on persuasive technology, which defines technologies as inst...
In this paper, we present Krishi Kontho (literally, "agricultural voices"), which is an agricultural information service that utilises pre-recorded voice messages, and SMS, that are pushed to smallholder farmers mobile phones at intervals carefully choreographed with the life cycles of their crops. We present the design of the service, and we prese...
Despite the advent of a flurry of digital technologies, paper prevails on manufacturing shopfloors. To understand the roles and value of paper on the shopfloor, we have studied the manufacturing practices at two state-of-the-art automotive supplier facilities, applying ethnographic fieldwork, in-depth interviews, as well as photo and document analy...
Digital devices play an important role in medical treatment and will in the future play a larger role in connection to cures of health-related issues.
Traditionally medicine has been tested by clinical double blind, randomized trials to document the efficacy and safety profile. When it comes to the use of digital devices in treatments the protocols...
Based on ethnographic fieldwork, and the modelling of work processes at a medical department, this paper considers some of the opportunities and challenges involved in working with models in a complex work setting. The paper introduces a flexible modelling tool to CSCW, called the DCR Portal, and considers how it may be used to model complex work s...
Building on data from fieldwork at a medical department, this paper fo-cuses on the varied nature of computational artifacts in practice. It shows that medical practice relies on multiple heterogeneous computational artifacts that form complex constellations. In the hospital studied the computational artifacts are both coordinative, image-generatin...
Building on literary theory and data from a field study of text in chemotherapy, this article introduces the concept of intertext and the associated concepts of corpus and intertextuality to CSCW. It shows that the ensemble of documents used and produced in practice can be said to form a corpus of written texts. On the basis of the corpus, or subse...
Building on data from fieldwork at a medical department, this paper focuses on the varied nature of computational artifacts in practice. It shows that medical practice relies on multiple heterogeneous computational artifacts that form complex constellations. In the hospital studied the computational artifacts are both coordinative, image-generating...
In this chapter, we attempt to achieve a better understanding of how cooperative work is partly accomplished by virtue of the actors' manipulation and control of causal relationships central to their material field of work. Previous CSCW studies have not focused extensively on causation in cooperative work (e.g. see Schmidt and Bannon 2013). Conseq...
Actors in the building process are critically dependent on a corpus of written text that draws the distributed work tasks together. This paper introduces, on the basis of a field study, the concepts of corpus, intertext and intertextuality to the analysis of text in cooperative work practice. This paper shows that actors in the building process cre...
On the basis of an ethnographic field study, this article introduces the concept of documentscape to the analysis of document-centric work practices. The concept of documentscape refers to the entire ensemble of documents in their mutual intertextual interlocking. Providing empirical data from a global software development case, we show how hierarc...
Actors coordinate their cooperative efforts by acting on the evidence of work previously accomplished. Based on a field study this article introduces the concept of stigmergy to the analysis of coordinative practices in the building process. It distinguishes between practices of stigmergy, articulation work and awareness practices. Stigmergy is und...
Creating social ties are important for collaborative work; however, in geographically distributed organizations e.g. global software development, making social ties requires extra work: Relation work. We find that characteristics of relation work as based upon shared history and experiences, emergent in personal and often humorous situations. Relat...
As indicated above, one of the main research issues in CSCW is the understanding of how cooperative work is coordinated and integrated by using artifacts. This issue has often been cast as a question of exploring how articulation work is practiced and supported by way of coordinative artifacts. A series of focused, in-depth field studies have been...
In this, the last chapter of the book, we shall consider the implications of our study for the field of CSCW.
In this chapter we will argue that CSCW has to provide the empirical descriptions as well as the conceptual development more or less on its own given that e.g. organizational studies do not frame their research problems towards technology development in the sense that their focus is repeatedly on factors and issues somewhat irrelevant to the immedi...
One of the major research issues in CSCW is the understanding of how cooperative work is coordinated. This issue has often been cast as a question of exploring how articulation work is practiced and supported by way of artifacts. In the words of Strauss, articulation work is a kind of supra-type work in any division of labour, done by the various a...
Perhaps it would be prudent to explore the relationship between design and construction work. In this chapter we will start with the question of how design relates to construction and subsequently consider how construction relates to design.
Stigmergy is a concept of coordination that may be employed to analyse human practice in complex work settings such as the building process. However, the concept of stigmergy was not originally developed in order to describe human practice, rather it was developed within the field of entomology i.e. the study of social insects. Transposing the conc...
In this chapter the investigation of the building process takes-off in earnest. It contains an introduction to the building process that points to the complexity of the process, and it is, as is the rest of the book, based on ethnographic fieldwork carried out in the course of 14 months in architectural offices and on building sites. In this period...
The overall aim of this book, then, is to generate empirically informed accounts of the building process and discuss concepts of cooperative work and coordinative practices in order to frame technology development. As mentioned, the main questions being addressed are these: How do multiple actors from diverse organizations and disciplines achieve c...
In this chapter we shall explore how skills pertaining to the use of architectural plans may be acquired through apprenticeship. The case presented below in based on an ethnographic study tracking an apprentice and an accomplished actor as they work with and annotate architectural plans in the process of planning construction work. We will explore...
Coordinative Practices in the Building Process: An Ethnographic Perspective presents the principles of the practice-oriented research programmes in the CSCW and HCI domains, explaining and examining the ideas and motivations behind basing technology design on ethnography. The focus throughout is on generating ethnographically informed accounts of t...
Objectives:
The present study aims to augment the network of home care around elderly. We investigate the nature of cooperative work between relatives and home care workers around elderly persons; present the CareCoor system developed to support that work; and report experiences from two pilot tests of CareCoor.
Methods:
We employed ethnographic...
It is a feature central to cooperative work that practitioners develop and maintain their collective competences and skills, and one will in many settings find elaborate didac-tic practices that reflect this state of affairs. The concept of 'knowledge transfer' that plays a key role in the knowledge management research area offers an obvious framew...
This article offers an exploration of home care work and the design of computational devices in support of such work. We present
findings from a field study and four participatory design workshops. Themes emerging from the findings suggest that home care
work may be highly cooperative in nature and requires substantial articulation work among the...
In this article the notion of relation work will be put forward to describe efforts of connecting people and artefacts in a multitude of ways as part of facilitating
global interaction and coordination in an engineering firm. Relation work can be seen as a parallel to the concept of articulation work. Articulation work describes efforts of coordina...
Family members may in a significant manner contribute to the care of the elderly. The paper discusses, on the basis of a field study, the involvement of family members in the care of elderly living independently in their own homes. It argues that it is prudent to include family members when designing pervasive healthcare for the home of the elderly...
In their cooperative design practices, architects form series of interwoven representational artifacts. On the basis of a field study of architectural design, this article presents an analysis of these practices and shows how they are partly coordinated directly through the material field of work. This is described as 'practices of stigmergy'. Furt...
Actors coordinate their cooperative efforts by acting on the evidence of work previously accomplished. The paper introduces, on the basis of a field study, the concept of stigmergy to the analysis of coordinative practices in architectural work. It distinguishes between practices of stigmergy and articulation work. Stigmergy is understood as coordi...
This paper can be read as a motivation to do further research in relation to the physical aspects of work practice. A brief survey of contemporary conceptual frameworks is carried out with a focus on how these frameworks grasp the question of materiality in relation to work practice. In conclusion, it is suggested that in regard to further research...
Projects
Projects (7)
Rohingya mHealth is an action research project that supports the Rohingya community in the camps in Bangladesh bordering Myanmar. The partners in the project extend access to healthcare for the Rohingya by designing and implementing modules for a mobile health platform to combat malnutrition and mental health disorder. The partners are the Novo Nordisk Foundation, Friendship (an NGO), and the IT-University of Copenhagen.
Most of the countries in the world share a common goal, namely, to enhance the health of their populations and to improve the quality healthcare. In addition, countries have concerns to make the patient care better. With the introduction of ICT these countries make large investments in the healthcare sector, hence these countries need to assure and measure the value of their investments, and wisely allocate the healthcare resources. It is important to provide good information for decision making [1]. The concept (HIIPS) is a proposed healthcare information infrastructure research project that will be set in the Republic of Sudan especially in the Federal Ministry of Health and Ahfad University for Women Healthcare Center (AUW-HC) initially. After that it will be generalized to cover the whole Sudanese public hospital and link them together with the ministry of Healthcare in the Republic of Sudan, to make the information about the Sudanese citizens’ (patients) available and timely accessible, the idea is to enable Electronic Exchange of Electronic Patient Record (EPR) among public Sudanese hospitals in order to enhance the quality of work and help the medical staff in the decision making process.
