Had a great few days in Marseille attending COOP 2012, 10th International Conference on the Design of Cooperative Systems. The theme this year was “From research to practice: Results and open challenges”, and indeed there was an excellent variety of papers covering the entire space between field studies and design and evaluation. The program featured work on healthcare, industry use of social media, technology and the elderly, and a variety of work settings – including a contribution from our own NWL project that you can read here.
Moreover, we discussed three keynote presentations on very different topics. On Day 1, Graham Button gave an overview of the basic epistemological motivations of CSCW research and of, in particular, ethnomethodological enquiry, posing some provocative questions on whether current forms of work and non-work should be studied any differently. On Day 2, Marco Susani gave his designerly perspective on how new forms of collaborations (which he called “guerrilla collaboration”) emerge in an era of almost infinite digital possibilities. Finally, on Day 3, Manuel Zacklad reflected on the 20 years of the COOP community, proposing new frameworks for re-thinking cooperation and coordination with respect to new forms of digital interaction.
Beside a very high-quality program and great discussions with old and new colleagues, I also greatly enjoyed the lovely city of Marseille – although the temperature was much higher than what you could expect in May!
Overall, it was a great conference and setting the bar very high for the next edition in two years’ time: I am truly honoured to have been asked to serve as scientific co-chair (together with Dave Martin of XRCE Grenoble) for COOP 2014, and we will soon begin planning how to make it a success!
Professor Luigina Ciolfi 