Being unemployed is, by definition, someone without a job, but is it somebody without work? This paper presents an empirical study of unemployed job seekers and the work they do in connection with upholding their everyday life, job search, technology use, and the necessary connections with the public unemployment office (job center). Within the country where the research is conducted, the activities of the unemployed involve balancing formal legal requirements and procedures (to secure unemployment benefits, etc.) with informal navigation of the rules and regulations, networks and activities directed towards employment. The activities are mediated by digital platforms, e.g. job search, accountability, documentation, and, as a consequence, job seekers largely have to depend on their technologies and experiences to manage these processes. We present a study of interviews with job seekers (n=10) with an average age of 60, and two Participatory Design workshops with a total of 15 participants. Our analysis shows that the unemployed carry out work towards fulfilling formal requirements posed by the unemployment office, as well as setting up their daily, computer-supported routines, and a significant amount of unrecognized hidden work navigating rules, status and informal networks.

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.

Situated visualization is an emerging concept within visualization, in which data is visualized in situ, where it is relevant to people. The concept has gained interest from multiple research communities, including visualization, human-computer interaction (HCI) and augmented reality. This has led to a range of explorations and applications of the concept, however, this early work has focused on the operational aspect of situatedness leading to inconsistent adoption of the concept and terminology. First, we contribute a literature survey in which we analyze 44 papers that explicitly use the term "situated visualization" to provide an overview of the research area, how it defines situated visualization, common application areas and technology used, as well as type of data and type of visualizations. Our survey shows that research on situated visualization has focused on technology-centric approaches that foreground a spatial understanding of situatedness. Secondly, we contribute five perspectives on situatedness (space, time, place, activity, and community) that together expand on the prevalent notion of situatedness in the corpus. We draw from six case studies and prior theoretical developments in HCI. Each perspective develops a generative way of looking at and working with situatedness in design and research. We outline future directions, including considering technology, material and aesthetics, leveraging the perspectives for design, and methods for stronger engagement with target audiences. We conclude with opportunities to consolidate situated visualization research.

This paper illustrates the multifaceted aspects of caring practices, and the ways they are entangled with the organizing of community-driven initiatives. Highlighting the situated inter-dependencies between concerns for care and efficiency, and considering caring practices as essential to the practical work that makes communities work, we reflect on how caring and efficiency rationalities frame the use, and scope the design of digital technologies. Drawing on two cases, the analysis shows the ways in which digital technologies oftentimes overshadow communities' key concerns for care, and how attempts to design for community settings can result in anti-designs, that is sociotechnical configurations that can disrupt caring practices. The contribution of the paper is twofold: first, an analysis of the different configurations of caring and efficiency and, second, a focus on care in the design and appropriation of technologies into this space.

Research focusing on how collaborative writing takes place across multiple applications and devices and over longer projects is sparse. We respond to this gap by presenting the results of a qualitative study of longer-term academic writing projects, showing how co-writers employ multiple tools when working on a common text. We identify three patterns of multi-application collaboration as well as four common types of motivations for transitions between applications. We also extend existing taxonomies of collaborative writing by proposing a categorization of the functions served by the text as object and backbone of the collaboration. Together, these contributions offer a framing for understanding transitions within and across artifact ecologies in work around a common object. Our findings highlight ways in which features like concurrent editing may in fact challenge the collaborative writing process, and we point to opportunities for alternative application models.

We report on findings from seven design workshops that used ideation and sketching activities to prototype new situated visualizations - representations of data that are displayed in proximity to the physical referents (such as people, objects, and locations) to which the data is related. Designing situated visualizations requires a fine-grained understanding of the context in which the visualizations are placed, as well as an exploration of different options for placement and form factors, which existing methods for visualization design do not account for. Focusing on small displays as a target platform, we reflect on our experiences of using a diverse range of sketching activities, materials, and prompts. Based on these observations, we identify challenges and opportunities for sketching and ideating situated visualizations. We also outline the space of design activities for situated visualization and highlight promising methods for both designers and researchers.

This paper examines territorial functioning in collaborative writing through a mixed methods study involving interviews and analysis of collaboratively authored documents. Our findings have implications for the way we think about collaborative writing as a design problem, in that current conceptualizations of collaborative writing emphasize the work context rather than the work itself, at the cost of understanding interpersonal dynamics that are central to the common process. The findings come from 23 interviews with 32 university researchers and students regarding their experiences with collaborative writing of academic texts. The analysis of these interviews is supplemented with visualizations of the revision histories of documents written by a subset of the study participants. We discuss our findings in terms of fragmented exchanges in common information spaces and consider the shared document as a mediator for the simultaneous accomplishment and negotiation of work.

The field of Shape-Changing Interfaces explores the qualities of physically dynamic artifacts. At furniture-scale, such artifacts have the potential of changing the ways we collaborate and engage with interiors and physical spaces. Informed by theories of proxemics, empirical studies of informal meetings and design work with shape-changing furniture, we develop the notion of proxemic transitions. We present three design aspects of proxemic transitions: transition speed, stepwise reconfiguration, and radical shifts. The design aspects focus on how to balance between physical and digital transformations in designing for proxemic transitions. Our contribution is three-fold: 1) the notion of proxemic transitions, 2) three design aspects to consider in designing for proxemic transitions, and 3) initial exploration of how these design aspects might generate designs of dynamic furniture. These contributions outline important aspects to consider when designing shape-changing furniture for informal workplace meetings.

In this paper, we present a case study of an urban organic food community and examine the way the community shapes its artifact ecology through a combination of appropriation of freely or cheaply available tools, and the long-term effort of building the community's own website. Based on participatory observation, content analysis of communication documents, and a series of interviews, we see how the collection of artifacts that a community uses to support their practice form what we refer to as their community artifact ecology. A community artifact ecology is multifaceted, dynamic and pending on what the members bring to the table, as well as on particular situations of use. The community artifact ecology concept is important for CSCW as it enables framing of the relationship between communities and technologies beyond the single artifact and beyond a static view of a dedicated technology.