The question of how to develop and maintain appropriate, socially informed and sophisticated infrastructural systems is an ongoing concern for CSCW. Information infrastructure development efforts are usually large endeavors that involve many stakeholders, including several organizations that need to interoperate with legacy systems. Projects typically take several years to develop. The duration, variety, and sites of engagement in the development of information infrastructures can be challenging to approach with typical CSCW approaches. In this paper, we compare and analyze our varied experiences in order to generate lessons learned based on being embedded for three or more years as action researchers and ethnographers in infrastructure development projects in the domains of traffic engineering, vocational education, and ocean science. Drawing upon these experiences, as well as literature in infrastructure studies, design methodologies, and organizational studies, we extract guidance for researchers and practitioners seeking to understand and engage in long-term organizationally complex system development projects. Among these lessons, we encourage revisiting previously gathered data as scope and scale change, observing changes in the discursive "reference public" who will benefit from the system, and planning for different intellectual points of entry and exit. This paper lays groundwork for future developments in theory and method of collaborative design and development in and with complex systems.

Social media, blogs, podcasts, and other computer-mediated communication technology have become an integral way for the public to access and engage with research. However, despite the evolving challenges researchers face navigating these platforms, and the high stakes of online science communication, relatively little HCI research has focused on understanding and supporting online science communication through these participatory platforms. Through a review of the literature and a set of interviews with HCI researchers (n = 24), we identify challenges currently facing researchers who try to engage with the public about their work, and establish a research agenda for HCI to study, design, and evaluate technology to support science communication. Specifically, we advocate for the design of tools to support audience analytics, automated summary and outreach workflows, and providing quantitative and qualitative feedback about online outreach efforts, as well as additional research to elucidate the impacts of self-directed science communication efforts and the evolving roles of scientists on the participatory web. With shifting online platforms placing researchers in the role of advocates and participants in science communication, understanding and supporting these interactions is now more important than ever.

The construct of "situational awareness" (SA) has a rich and productive history within both academic literature and practice. Situational awareness as a technical term has its earliest roots in formative human factors research in service of military and flight applications. However, its value as a construct in other domains, particularly those having to do with rapid sensemaking in safety-sensitive conditions, has led to a broader applied and theoretical interest over the past few decades. As a discipline, CSCW has been relatively less engaged with this concept, but has empirical and theoretical tools that will be valuable to its study. To bring CSCW more fully into the conversation, we present a description of how operators in a city department of transportation's transportation management center (TMC) develop and maintain situational awareness for themselves and the key recipients of their critical information outputs. We identify some of the schemas operators must develop in order to effectively construct situational awareness and dynamically articulate common fields of work, and the social collaborative practices they engage in to support that awareness. Implications for design and further research are proposed.

Autistic individuals engage in sense-making as they seek to better understand themselves and relate to others within a society formed by neuro-typical social norms. Our research examines the ways in which autistic individuals engage in sense-making activities about autism on Twitter. We collected autism-oriented Twitter conversations and Twitter user profiles data of people participating in those conversation. Our research contributes empirical evidence demonstrating that that autistic sense-making on Twitter is constituted by (1) engaging in dynamic discussions of life experiences, (2) countering stigma with actions of advocacy, and (3) enacting neuro-atypical social norms.

Using scientific discoveries to inform design practice is an important, but difficult, objective in HCI. In this paper, we provide an overview of Translational Science in HCI by triangulating literature related to the research-practice gap with interview data from many parties engaged (or not) in translating HCI knowledge. We propose a model for Translational Science in HCI based on the concept of a continuum to describe how knowledge progresses (or stalls) through multiple steps and translations until it can influence design practice. The model offers a conceptual framework that can be used by researchers and practitioners to visualize and describe the progression of HCI knowledge through a sequence of translations. Additionally, the model may facilitate a precise identification of translational barriers, which allows devising more effective strategies to increase the use of scientific findings in design practice.

Online discussion websites, such as Reddit's r/science forum, have the potential to foster science communication between researchers and the general public. However, little is known about who participates, what is discussed, and whether such websites are successful in achieving meaningful science discussions. To find out, we conducted a mixed-methods study analyzing 11,859 r/science posts and conducting interviews with 18 community members. Our results show that r/science facilitates rich information exchange and that the comments section provides a unique science communication document that guides engagement with scientific research. However, this community-sourced science communication comes largely from a knowledgeable public. We conclude with design suggestions for a number of critical problems that we uncovered: addressing the problem of topic newsworthiness and balancing broader participation and rigor.