Cultural dynamics play a significant role in the unfolding of the global software practice. Research in the other disciplines have utilized the idea of cultural models to help researchers investigate cultural influence in their respective fields. Cultural models are defined as the taken-for-granted, pre-supposed models of the world that are shared widely by members of a society and that help the members understand their world and influence their behavior in that world. Utilizing this cultural models idea, we conducted an ethnographically-informed investigation of a global software practice at a large vendor organization in India to uncover some cultural models embedded in the practice. This paper presents an ethnographic account of an escalation situation that occurred in the field. Using this situation as our unit of analysis, we uncovered three cultural models - Agreement, Flexibility, and Trust Cultural Models - that appear to have influenced the organization of the behaviors of the participant members. The findings illustrate how the internalized cultural models influenced the members' behaviors to make decision that conflicted the business prospects (e.g., Agreement Model), the different members internalized different understanding of the cultural elements (e.g., Trust Model), and the cultural models tacitly played the role of "cultural blind spots" (e.g., Flexibilty Model). Thus, the research demonstrates how the technical system of global software engineering is complexly intertwined with the cultural system of its members.

We report on an ethnographic study of the work practice and discovery process in a systems biology lab, and outline a tabletop visualization that was developed based on this study, in collaboration with the researchers. The feedback from the researchers on the current prototype is presented, and ongoing revisions are outlined. We conclude with some of the challenges involved in developing such tangible visualizations for discovery.

There has been a growing interest to develop technologies for laboratory environments. However, existing systems are underdeployed in real research labs. In order to create more successful technologies for the creative laboratory setting, we need a deeper understanding of the values of the researchers we are designing for and the unique roles of technology in the research laboratory. Our three-year ethnographic study of a biomedical engineering (BME) lab contributes to building this foundation for future design. Drawing form a distributed and situated cognition framework, our analysis highlights the ways in which technology is integrated into the researchers' daily practices. This study is one of the first deep ethnographies of a laboratory culture with a central focus on technology and provides several insights for the design community.

Even though information visualization (InfoVis) research has matured in recent years, it is generally acknowledged that the field still lacks supporting, encompassing theories. In this paper, we argue that the distributed cognition framework can be used to substantiate the theoretical foundation of InfoVis. We highlight fundamental assumptions and theoretical constructs of the distributed cognition approach, based on the cognitive science literature and a real life scenario. We then discuss how the distributed cognition framework can have an impact on the research directions and methodologies we take as InfoVis researchers. Our contributions are as follows. First, we highlight the view that cognition is more an emergent property of interaction than a property of the human mind. Second, we argue that a reductionist approach to study the abstract properties of isolated human minds may not be useful in informing InfoVis design. Finally we propose to make cognition an explicit research agenda, and discuss the implications on how we perform evaluation and theory building.