As mental health concerns grow among Asian American communities, there is an urgent need for culturally-relevant support. While digital mental health treatments (DMHTs) offer new opportunities for interventions, they have largely been focused on non-minority populations in the U.S. (e.g., Caucasians, females, who are middle-aged). Through co-design sessions with Asian Mental Health Collective (AMHC), this study examines the unique mental health challenges faced by Asian Americans, intergenerational connections and elements of culturally-relevant mental health support. The co-design sessions resulted in two prototypes: A multifunctional community hub, to strengthen connections and resource access, and a storytelling app, for sharing and preserving cultural narratives. These prototypes drew from community co-design sessions to include elements of storytelling, community-centered approaches, and intergenerational engagement in addressing mental health concerns among Asian Americans. Leveraging the heterogeneous and similar cultural experiences among Asian Americans, this paper presents and discusses nuances and considerations for digital mental health technology (DMHT) designs for minority communities.

This paper characterizes the mental health technology "kits" of individuals managing depression: the specific technologies on their digital devices and physical items in their environments that people turn to as part of their mental health management. We interviewed 28 individuals living across the United States who use bundles of connected tools for both individual and collaborative mental health activities. We contribute to the HCI community by conceptualizing these tool assemblages that people managing depression have constructed over time. We detail categories of tools, describe kit characteristics (intentional, adaptable, available), and present participant ideas for future mental health support technologies. We then discuss what a mental health technology kit perspective means for researchers and designers and describe design principles (building within current toolkits; creating new tools from current self-management strategies; and identifying gaps in people's current kits) to support depression self-management across an evolving set of tools.

Mental wellbeing has become a crucial aspect of overall health and has drawn increased attention to mental health concerns. Research in human-computer interaction (HCI) has explored how technologies can support mental wellbeing and address mental health issues. However, current research predominantly reflects Western cultural perspectives, leaving gaps in our understanding of mental wellbeing, coping strategies, and digital tools for mental wellbeing support from Eastern cultural viewpoints. To start to address this disparity, we interviewed 19 Taiwanese emerging adults aged between 18 and 29—a demographic uniquely susceptible to mental health challenges due to the transitional nature of this life phase. We explored their conceptualization of mental wellbeing, the challenges they encounter, the strategies they employ for managing mental wellbeing, and the role of digital tools in this process. The results highlight the intricate influence of cultural, political, social, and individual factors, and their interactions on mental wellbeing.

When individuals experience stressful situations, it is common to disclose personal challenges and stress and seek social support on social media platforms. To better understand and improve social support in online environments, this study uses Reddit as a case study to examine how people navigate support-seeking online during stressful times. We conducted interviews with 16 individuals who used Reddit to share stress and seek support, exploring their motivations and outcomes of their posts and the challenges encountered. Findings reveal that users typically seek emotional, informational, network, and esteem support online and receive the desired support. Beyond immediate support receipt, online support interactions may have sustained positive impacts, such as mindset and social practice changes, the formation of offline friendships, and contributions to personal resilience in navigating stressful events. However, a mismatch between expectations and received responses, along with the inherent barriers of online communities, presents challenges. We discuss Reddit's affordances and limitations for stress disclosure and support exchange within the broader social media ecosystem, and then propose design implications to enhance online support exchange, such as fostering clearer communication, increasing support engagement, and community empathy.

The number of older adults who are homebound with depressive symptoms is increasing. Due to their homebound status, they have limited access to trained mental healthcare support, which leaves this support often to untrained family caregivers. To increase access, a growing interest is placed on using technology-mediated solutions, such as voice-assisted intelligent personal assistants (VIPAs), to deliver mental health services to older adults. To better understand how older adults and family caregivers intend to interact with a VIPA for mental health interventions, we conducted a participatory design study during which 6 older adults and 7 caregivers designed VIPA-human dialogues for various scenarios. Using conversation style preferences as a starting point, we present aspects of human-likeness older adults and family caregivers perceived as helpful or uncanny, specifically in the context of the delivery of mental health interventions, which helps inform potential roles VIPAs can play in mental healthcare for older adults.

Adolescents with chronic illnesses need to learn self-management skills in preparation for the transition from pediatric to adult healthcare, which is associated with negative health outcomes for youth. However, few studies have explored how adolescents in a pre-transition stage practice self-management and collaborative management with their parents. Through interviews with 15 adolescents (aged 15-17), we found that adolescents managed mundane self-care tasks and experimented with lifestyle changes to be more independent, which sometimes conflicted with their parents' efforts to ensure their safety. Adolescents and their parents also performed shared activities that provided adolescents with the opportunity to learn and practice self-management skills. Based on our findings, we discuss considerations for technology design to facilitate transition and promote parent-adolescent collaboration in light of these tensions.

Mental health symptoms are commonly discovered in primary care. Yet, these settings are not set up to provide psychological treatment. Digital interventions can play a crucial role in stepped care management of patients' symptoms where patients are offered a low intensity intervention, and treatment evolves to incorporate providers if needed. Though digital interventions often use smartphone and wearable sensor data, little is known about patients' desires to use these data to manage mental health symptoms. In 10 interviews with patients with symptoms of depression and anxiety, we explored their: symptom self-management, current and desired use of sensor data, and comfort sharing such data with providers. Findings support the use digital interventions to manage mental health, yet they also highlight a misalignment in patient needs and current efforts to use sensors. We outline considerations for future research, including extending design thinking to wraparound services that may be necessary to truly reduce healthcare burden.

Software engineers exhibit higher burnout and suicide rates compared to many other information workers. Consequently, mental wellbeing is a growing concern to technology organizations. To better understand the challenges of supporting mental wellbeing in the context of the work of software engineering, we conducted 14 interviews with software engineers. We examine the different aspects of their lived experiences with mental wellbeing at work, their strategies for managing mental wellbeing, the challenges they face in using these strategies, and recommendations they have for mental wellbeing technologies. We contribute to the HCI literature by discussing how mental wellbeing should be considered within the context of work across individual, team, and organization levels, and highlight the need for integrating mental wellbeing into the technologies employees use at work.

Digital tools have potential to support collaborative management of mental health conditions, but we need to better understand how to integrate them in routine healthcare, particularly for patients with both physical and mental health needs. We therefore conducted interviews and design workshops with 1) a group of care managers who support patients with complex health needs, and 2) their patients whose health needs include mental health concerns. We investigate both groups' views of potential applications of digital tools within care management. Findings suggest that care managers felt underprepared to play an ongoing role in addressing mental health issues and had concerns about the burden and ambiguity of providing support through new digital channels. In contrast, patients envisioned benefiting from ongoing mental health support from care managers, including support in using digital tools. Patients' and care managers' needs may diverge such that meeting both through the same tools presents a significant challenge. We discuss how successful design and integration of digital tools into care management would require reconceptualizing these professionals' roles in mental health support.

As smartphone and wearable tracking devices have grown in popularity, more individuals have begun collecting their own health data. While these data are often perceived as a persistent record of health and used to inform future behaviors, it is inevitable that some data are captured during a period of disruption or non-routine circumstances. If not appropriately contextualized, visualizations of these data can lead to missed opportunities in self-reflection, or worse, misinterpretation. To better understand how self-tracked data captured during non-routine circumstances are reflected upon after the disruption has ended, we interviewed women about how they might reflect on data from a recent pregnancy. We propose the concept of bounded situational context (BSC) to encapsulate how individuals define the boundaries of disruption within their data based on external and internal contexts. We discuss how self-tracking tools can be designed to align data visualizations with individuals’ perceived boundaries to aid in data interpretation.

Young adults have high rates of mental health conditions, but most do not want or cannot access formal treatment. We therefore recruited young adults with depression or anxiety symptoms to co-design a digital tool for self-managing their mental health concerns. Through study activities-consisting of an online discussion group and a series of design workshops-participants highlighted the importance of easy-to-use digital tools that allow them to exercise independence in their self-management. They described ways that an automated messaging tool might benefit them by: facilitating experimentation with diverse concepts and experiences; allowing variable depth of engagement based on preferences, availability, and mood; and collecting feedback to personalize the tool. While participants wanted to feel supported by an automated tool, they cautioned against incorporating an overtly human-like motivational tone. We discuss ways to apply these findings to improve the design and dissemination of digital mental health tools for young adults.

Young adults have high rates of mental health conditions, yet they are the age group least likely to seek traditional treatment. They do, however, seek information about their mental health online, including by filling out online mental health screeners. To better understand online self-screening, and its role in help-seeking, we conducted focus groups with 50 young adults who voluntarily completed a mental health screener hosted on an advocacy website. We explored (1) catalysts for taking the screener, (2) anticipated outcomes, (3) reactions to the results, and (4) desired next steps. For many participants, the screener results validated their lived experiences of symptoms, but they were nevertheless unsure how to use the information to improve their mental health moving forward. Our findings suggest that online screeners can serve as a transition point in young people's mental health journeys. We discuss design implications for online screeners, post-screener feedback, and digital interventions broadly.

Depression is a challenging condition that requires individuals to manage their moods and emotions over time. Within CSCW, there has been an interest in understanding how individuals seek and share support on social media and in online communities. However, less attention has been paid to how collaboration as an aspect of self-management of depression unfolds in people's daily lives. In this paper, we explore the collaborative self-management work of 28 individuals managing depression who live in the United States. Data collection included remote semi-structured interviews with an associated cognitive mapping exercise. Our findings describe who participants turn to for day-to-day collaborative support, how collaborative activities are enacted (across both mood-focused and preventative support practices), and where these often technology-mediated interactions occur across text, phone, video, and picture-based channels. We discuss collaborative self-management in the depression support context, including key characteristics: agency, reciprocity, time, and interaction. We also present a four-step model of how the process occurs over time (awareness, planning, interaction, and reflection). We conclude by discussing how technology ecosystems support individuals' collaborative self-management.

Collaborative Care Programs (CCPs) integrate mental health services into primary care settings to help patients access much needed treatment. Technologies could increase the effectiveness of CCPs, but we know little about what collaboration challenges technologies must address in this complex clinical setting. To investigate these challenges and technology opportunities, we conducted interviews and contextual inquiries with 30 patients and providers in an obstetric CCP. Using the Parallel Journeys Framework as a lens, we uncover new collaboration challenges (e.g., weighing risks and benefits of treatment, conflicting opinions and ambiguous responsibilities) at the intersection of patients' obstetric and psychosocial care journeys. We discuss new CSCW implications and technology opportunities, such as the importance of addressing support gaps in cyclical experiences, and the need to resolve provider conflicts to refocus on patient needs. These contributions inform how technologies can support patient engagement and collaboration with providers to access and receive treatment, as well as improve health outcomes.

Digital tools can support individuals managing mental health concerns, but delivering sufficiently engaging content is challenging. This paper seeks to clarify how individuals with mental health concerns can contribute content to improve push-based mental health messaging tools. We recruited crowdworkers with mental health symptoms to evaluate and revise expert-composed content for an automated messaging tool, and to generate new topics and messages. A second wave of crowdworkers evaluated expert and crowdsourced content. Crowdworkers generated topics for messages that had not been prioritized by experts, including self-care, positive thinking, inspiration, relaxation, and reassurance. Peer evaluators rated messages written by experts and peers similarly. Our findings also suggest the importance of personalization, particularly when content adaptation occurs over time as users interact with example messages. These findings demonstrate the potential of crowdsourcing for generating diverse and engaging content for push-based tools, and suggest the need to support users in meaningful content customization.

In pursuit of mental wellness, many find that behavioral change is necessary. This process can often be difficult but is facilitated by strong social support. This paper explores the role of social support across behavioral change journeys among young adults, a group at high risk for mental health challenges, but with the lowest rates of mental health treatment utilization. Given that digital mental health tools are effective for treating mental health conditions, they hold particular promise for bridging the treatment gap among young adults, many of whom, are not interested in - or cannot access - traditional mental healthcare. We recruited a sample of young adults with depression who were seeking information about their symptoms online to participate in an Asynchronous Remote Community (ARC) elicitation workshop. Participants detailed the changing nature of social interactions across their behavior change journeys. They noted that both directed and undirected support are necessary early in behavioral change and certain needs such as informational support are particularly pronounced, while healthy coping partnerships and accountability are more important later in the change process. We discuss the conceptual and design implications of our findings for the next generation of digital mental health tools.

Understanding how and why people share negative emotions and thoughts on social media has received much scholarly attention. Scholars have identified a variety of factors that affect disclosure behavior, but as platforms offer a wider range of affordances that enable more diverse user behaviors and nuanced audience segmentation, these influencing factors are increasingly intertwined. However, little is known about the interrelatedness of platform, affordance, and audience. Drawing on survey data of 470 American adults during the COVID-19 pandemic, this study examines the interplay and relative strength of the factors influencing distress disclosure on social media. We introduce the concept of social media disclosure ecology as an analytical lens to understand online disclosure. The results suggest that perceived affordances (i.e., anonymity, persistence, visibility control) and relational closeness to audience separately and interactively predict the depth of distress disclosure, which in turn affects satisfaction with disclosure. This study contributes to the literature on online-disclosure and privacy, while providing implications for the design of social media to better support people in distress.

A growing body of work has emphasized the need for customizability and flexibility in mobile health technologies to increase support user autonomy. However, customization may be burdensome for people with motivational and cognitive challenges, such as those with mental illnesses, and the optimal level and type of customizability are unclear. Based on 32 interviews with people who experience symptoms of depression and anxiety, we examine how individuals use and customize mental health apps to manage their symptoms. Our findings suggest that participants’ engagement with the apps is affected by their level of energy and motivation, depending on the severity of symptoms. Customization is deemed desirable when the required user effort does not exceed users’ mental and motivational capacity and when ample resources are available. We discuss how customizable systems can increase autonomy without overburdening users in the context of mental health.

Qualitative research, the analysis of nonquantitative and nonquantifiable data through methods such as interviews and observation, is integral to the field of biomedical and health informatics. To demonstrate the integrity and quality of their qualitative research, authors should report important elements of their work. This perspective article offers guidance about reporting components of the research, including theory, the research question, sampling, data collection methods, data analysis, results, and discussion. Addressing these points in the paper assists peer reviewers and readers in assessing the rigor of the work and its contribution to the literature. Clearer and more detailed reporting will ensure that qualitative research will continue to be published in informatics, helping researchers disseminate their understanding of people, organizations, context, and sociotechnical relationships as they relate to biomedical and health data.

Much human-computer interaction work related to depression focuses on the population level (e.g., studying social media hashtags related to depression) or evaluates prototypes for digital interventions to manage depression. However, little is known about how people living with depression perceive and manage technology use, such as time spent on social media per day. For this study, we interviewed 30 individuals living with depression to explore their technology and social media use. We find that these individuals demonstrated emergent practices related to self-regulation, such as learning to monitor and adjust technology use to improve their emotional, cognitive, and behavioral health. Our findings add a human-centered viewpoint to the relationship between living with depression and technology and social media use. We present design implications of these findings for better empowering individuals with depression to encourage their natural inclinations to self-regulate technology and social media use.

While the HCI field increasingly examines how digital tools can support individuals in managing mental health conditions, it remains unclear how these tools can accommodate these conditions' temporal aspects. Based on weekly interviews with five individuals with depression, conducted over six weeks, this study identifies design opportunities and challenges related to extending technology-based support across fluctuating symptoms. Our findings suggest that participants perceive events and contexts in daily life to have marked impact on their symptoms. Results also illustrate that ebbs and flows in symptoms profoundly affect how individuals practice depression self-management. While digital tools often aim to reach individuals while they feel depressed, we suggest they should also engage individuals when they are less symptomatic, leveraging their energy and motivation to build habits, establish plans and goals, and generate and organize content to prepare for symptom onset.

The last decade has seen increased reports of mental health problems among college students, with college counseling centers struggling to keep up with the demand for services. Digital mental health tools offer a potential solution to expand the reach of mental health services for college students. In this paper, we present findings from a series of design activities conducted with college students and counseling center staff aimed at identifying needs and preferences for digital mental health tools. Results emphasize the social ecosystems and social support networks in a college student's life. Our findings highlight the predominant role of known peers, and the ancillary roles of unknown peers and non-peers (e.g., faculty, family) in influencing the types of digital mental health tools students desire, and the ways in which they want to learn about mental health tools. We identify considerations for designing digital mental health tools for college students that take into account the identified social factors and roles.

Psychosocial disability involves actual or perceived impairment due to a diversity of mental, emotional, or cognitive experiences. While assistive technology for psychosocial disabilities has been understudied in communities such as ASSETS, advances in computing have opened up a number of new avenues for assisting those with psychosocial disabilities beyond the clinic. However, these tools continue to emerge primarily within the framework of "treatment," emphasizing resolution or improvement of mental health symptoms. This work considers what it means to adopt a social model lens from disability studies and incorporate the expertise of assistive technology researchers in relation to mental health. Our investigation draws on interviews conducted with 18 individuals who have complex health needs that include mental health symptoms. This work highlights the potential role for assistive technology in supporting psychosocial disability outside of a clinical or medical framework.

People diagnosed with a chronic health condition have many information needs which healthcare providers, patient groups, and resource designers seek to support. However, as a disease progresses, knowing when, how, and for what purposes patients want to interact with and construct personal meaning from health-related information is still unclear. This paper presents findings regarding the information work of chronic kidney disease patients. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 13 patients and 6 clinicians, and observations at 9 patient group events. We used the stages of the information journey - recognizing need, seeking, interpreting, and using information - to frame our data analysis. We identified two distinct but often overlapping information work phases, 'Learning' and 'Living With' a chronic condition to show how patient information work activities shift over time. We also describe social and individual factors influencing information work, and discuss technology design opportunities including customized education and collaboration tools.

Millions of Americans struggle with depression, a condition characterized by feelings of sadness and motivation loss. To understand how individuals managing depression conceptualize their self-management activities, we conducted visual elicitations and semi-structured interviews with 30 participants managing depression in a large city in the U.S. Midwest. Many depression support tools are focused on the individual user and do not often incorporate social features. However, our analysis showed the key importance of sociality for self-management of depression. We describe how individuals connect with specific others to achieve expected support and how these interactions are mediated through locations and communication channels. We discuss factors influencing participants' sociality including relationship roles and expectations, mood state and communication channels, location and privacy, and culture and society. We broaden our understanding of sociality in CSCW through discussing diffuse sociality (being proximate to others but not interacting directly) as an important activity to support depression self-management.

The increasing ubiquity of health sensing technology holds promise to enable patients and health care providers to make more informed decisions based on continuously-captured data. The use of sensor-captured patient-generated data (sPGD) has been gaining greater prominence in the assessment of physical health, but we have little understanding of the role that sPGD can play in mental health. To better understand the use of sPGD in mental health, we interviewed care providers in an intensive treatment program (ITP) for veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder. In this program, patients were given Fitbits for their own voluntary use. Providers identified a number of potential benefits from patients' Fitbit use, such as patient empowerment and opportunities to reinforce therapeutic progress through collaborative data review and interpretation. However, despite the promise of sensor data as offering an "objective" view into patients' health behavior and symptoms, the relationships between sPGD and therapeutic progress are often ambiguous. Given substantial subjectivity involved in interpreting data from commercial wearables in the context of mental health treatment, providers emphasized potential risks to their patients and were uncertain how to adjust their practice to effectively guide collaborative use of the FitBit and its sPGD. We discuss the implications of these findings for designing systems to leverage sPGD in mental health care.

Technology is often viewed as either positive or negative. On one hand, in HCI, weight loss apps are usually seen as a positive influence on users. From the sociocultural perspective, on the other hand, media and technology negatively impact body satisfaction and contribute to eating disorders; however, these studies fail to include weight loss apps. While these apps can be beneficial to users, they can also have negative effects on users with eating disorder behaviors. Yet few research studies have looked at weight loss apps in relation to eating disorders. In order to fill this gap, we conducted interviews with 16 women with a history of eating disorders who use(d) weight loss apps. While our findings suggest these apps can contribute to and exacerbate eating disorder behaviors, they also reveal a more complex picture of app usage. Women's use and perceptions of weight loss apps shift as they experience life and move to and from stages of change. This research troubles the binary view of technology and emphasizes the importance of looking at technology use as a dynamic process. Our study contributes to our understanding of weight loss app design.

Collaborative patient-care teams rely on accurate and complete information in order to make informed decisions about their patients. However, patient-related information problems (PIPs) are a common occurrence in hospital work. These PIPs are any issues related to patient information that impact the patient-care team's ability to perform their work (e.g., wrong, missing, outdated information). To better understand the challenges that patient-care teams face in identifying and collaboratively managing PIPs related to the use of the electronic health record (EHR), we conducted a qualitative study of patient-care teams during morning rounds. In this paper, we describe the types of PIPs that the team members encountered and how they identified who was accountable for fixing the PIP. Through our analysis, we highlight the challenges that arise when team members have an unclear or conflicting assumption about who is responsible for fixing the PIP. We conclude with a discussion on improving organizational policies and EHR design in order to help reduce ambiguous accountability for the management of PIPs within collaborative teams.

Collaborative information seeking (CIS) is of growing importance in the information sciences and human–computer interaction (HCI) research communities. Current research has primarily focused on examining the social and interactional aspects of CIS in organizational or other settings and developing technical approaches to support CIS activities. As we continue to develop a better understanding of the interactional aspects of CIS, we need also start to examine the cognitive aspects of CIS. In particular, we need to understand CIS from a team cognition perspective. To examine how team cognition develops during CIS, we conducted a study using observations and interviews of student teams engaged in colocated CIS tasks in a laboratory setting. We found that a variety of awareness mechanisms play a key role in the development of team cognition during CIS. Specifically, we identify that search, information, and social methods of awareness are critical to developing team cognition during CIS. We discuss why awareness is important for team cognition, how team cognition comprises both individual and team‐level cognitive activities, and the importance of examining both interaction and cognition to truly understand team cognition.

When health services involve long-term treatment over months or years, providers have the ability, not present in acute emergency care, to collaboratively reflect on clients' changing health data and adjust interventions. In this paper, we discuss temporality as a factor in the design of health information technology. We define a temporal spectrum ranging from time-critical services that benefit from standardization to long-term services that require more flexibility. We provide empirical evidence from fieldwork that we performed in organizations providing long-term behavioral and mental health services for children. Our fieldwork in this context complements and provides contrasts to previous CSCW studies performed in time-critical hospital settings. Current literature shows a bias toward standardized records and routines in the implementation of health information technology, a policy that may not be appropriate for long-term health services. We discuss how the design of information systems should vary based on temporal factors.

Electronic medical record (EMR) systems are used by a wide variety of users. However, current research on the design and use of the EMR primarily focuses on clinical users such as physicians and nurses. While it is important to understand EMR use by clinicians, there is also a need to understand how non-clinicians use these systems because of the important role they play in the patient-care process. In this note, we present results of an ethnographic field study on the use and perceptions of EMR systems by non-clinicians in an emergency department. We then discuss design implications that can improve the system usability and strengthen the empowerment of these non-clinicians.

This paper presents the results of an ongoing study into the potential role of mobile or wireless health applications for targeting the prevention of excessive gestational weight gain in pregnant lower-income American women. Informed by a qualitative study of pregnant women's experiences, we develop a set of design requirements for designing mobile health (mHealth) interventions related to healthy pregnancies. We identify a disconnection between physical activity and food tracking application design paradigms, and the reality of pregnant women's lives and capacities. We introduce the concept of an individualized pregnancy ecology, which provides an alternative paradigm for design of health and wellness management tools for lower-income pregnant women.

Privacy research has long focused on the individual. Yet most organizations are highly collaborative where teamwork is the norm. To examine privacy practices in collaborative settings, we conducted an ethnographic study of a highly collaborative and information-intensive setting -- an emergency Dept. (ED). We found that ED staff's work practices did not always align with the organization's privacy policies and procedures. We then discuss the use of workarounds when privacy policies interfere with work practices, the challenge of assigning accountability for enforcing privacy in collaborative environments, and implications for technical and policy design. We conclude with some thoughts on the future of privacy research in collaborative settings.

The coordination of distributed activities is central to organizational work. The effective functioning of organizations hinges on their ability to manage interdependencies both within (intra-) and between (inter-) various departments. However, more than just the management of these individual interdependencies is required for smooth work system coordination. Organizations must also manage the interactions between intra- and inter-departmental activities. To investigate how these interactions manifest in organizational work, we conducted a field study examining patient transfer process. We highlight the cross-boundary breakdowns that occur when intra-departmental and inter-departmental activities related to patient transfers negatively affect each other. We then describe the re-coordinating activities performed to mitigate the effects of cross-boundary breakdowns. We discuss a framework of inter-departmental coordination work that describes the relationship between cross-boundary breakdowns and re-coordinating activities. Furthermore, we classify the re-coordinating activities as a type of articulation work performed by hospital staff. This research can help us develop empirically-driven and theoretically-based design guidelines for coordination tools to maintain overall organizational workflow by balancing the goals and requirements of the various departments.

There is increasing interest in topics at the nexus of collaboration and information behavior. A variety of studies conducted in organizational settings have provided us with key insights about the collaborative aspects of seeking, retrieving, and using information. Researchers have used a range of terms, including collaborative information seeking (CIS), collaborative information retrieval (CIR), collaborative search, collaborative sensemaking, and others to describe various pertinent activities. Consequently, we lack conceptual clarity concerning these activities, leading to a tendency to use terms interchangeably when in fact they may be referring to different issues. Here, we offer collaborative information behavior (CIB) as an umbrella term to connote the collaborative aspects of information seeking, retrieval, and use. We provide the contours of a model of CIB synthesized from findings of past studies conducted by our research team as well as other researchers. By reanalyzing and synthesizing the data from those studies, we conceptualize CIB as comprised of a set of constitutive activities, organized into three broad phases—problem formulation, collaborative information seeking, and information use. Some of the activities are specific to a particular phase, whereas others are common to all phases. We explain how those constitutive activities are related to one another. Finally, we discuss the limitations of our model as well as its potential usefulness in advancing CIB research.

There has been a growing interest within the CSCW community to understand how actors in organizations collaboratively seek information. This focus had led to the emergence of the research area of collaborative information seeking (CIS). Despite an increasing number of conceptual as well as technical studies related to CIS, many fundamental questions still remain unanswered. For example, researchers within this space have argued that CIS goes beyond two or more individuals posing "question and answers" to each other in their attempt to seek the needed information. If CIS is not just about "question and answers", then what does it exactly constitute? We propose that one way to answer these questions is to conceptualize CIS as being constituted through, and orchestrated via, "narratives". In this research note, we elaborate upon the notion of "narratives", and talk about the potential usefulness of such a conceptualization for furthering CIS research and advancing CSCW scholarship.

Emotions are an often overlooked aspect of work since they are not included in formal work models. However, they continue provide critical information as well as be part of a rich social context for action. The following study focuses on the expression of emotions within the context of a particular work environment -- an emergency room -- and high-lights how it is used, why it is invisible in the work, and how it continues to persist through workarounds. These workarounds provide indications towards the design of so-ciotechnical systems to continue to support the expression of invisible emotions.

An important aspect of collaborative information seeking (CIS) is making sense of the information found, i.e., collaborative sensemaking. We conducted an ethnographic study of the CIS practices of healthcare providers in a hospital emergency department to gain a conceptual understanding of when and how collaborative sensemaking occurs during CIS activities. We present occasions and characteristics of collaborative sensemaking and design implications for collaborative information retrieval tools to support sensemaking.

The nature of the available information and its role in our lives have changed significantly, but the methods and tools that are used to access and share that information in collaboration have remained largely unaltered. Within the GROUP/CSCW community, the area of collaborative information seeking/retrieval/behavior (CIS/CIR/CIB) has drawn a new stream of interest to it in the recent years. This has been possible due to involvement and initiatives of several prominent researchers from various fields, such as IR, HCI, LIS, and CSCW. This workshop is aimed to take these efforts to the next level by focusing on theories and models that are grounded in the literature and existing empirical studies, as well as applications and tools that help us advance the field further. We are interested in bringing together a group of researchers working on various conceptual and technical aspects of collaborative information seeking, search, retrieval, and sensemaking. The workshop will provide an excellent opportunity to share your work-in-progress, seek valuable feedback from your fellow researchers, and start or strengthen collaborative endeavors.

This note outlines the critical role that boundary objects play in construction project teams. In this domain, boundary objects extend beyond their traditional role as information artifacts used to communicate between teams to serve a more influential role as guides for team collaboration.

Effective coordination is central to work in organizations. We conducted a field study examining challenges to coordination between clinical and non-clinical staff in the patient transfer process of a major academic hospital. We present one major challenge: lack of information sharing between these staff members and discuss the reasons for and consequences of this challenge to the work in the hospital.

This article presents a study identifying benefits and challenges of a novel hospital-to-hospital information technology (IT) outsourcing partnership (HHP). The partnership is an innovative response to the problem that many smaller, rural hospitals face: to modernize their IT infrastructure in spite of a severe shortage of resources. The investigators studied three rural hospitals that outsourced their IT infrastructure, through an HHP, to a larger, more technologically advanced hospital in the region. The study design was based on purposive sampling and interviews of senior managers from the four hospitals. The results highlight the HHP's benefits and challenges from both the rural hospitals' and vendor hospital's perspectives. The HHP was considered a success: a key outcome was that it has improved the rural hospitals' IT infrastructure at an affordable cost. The investigators discuss key elements for creating a successful HHP and offer preliminary answers to the question of what it takes for an HHP to be successful.

Multidisciplinary team members often must work together to find needed information. To identify when team members collaborate, why they collaborate, and how they collaborate during information seeking activities, we conducted a field study of a multidisciplinary patient care team. We found that the unit secretary, a non-clinical team member, had characteristics of various types of gatekeepers identified in previous studies. However, unlike those gatekeepers, the unit secretary also played a particularly active role during information seeking activities. Most medical information systems design focus on supporting collaboration amongst clinical staff. Our study highlights the importance of also supporting non-clinical team members.

Information seeking and management practices are an integral aspect of people's daily work. However, we still have little understanding of collaboration in the information seeking process. Through a survey of collaborative information seeking practices of academic researchers, we found that researchers reported that (1) the lack of expertise is the primary reason that they collaborate when seeking information; (2) traditional methods, including face-to-face, phone, and email are the preferred communication mediums for collaboration; and (3) collaborative information seeking activities are usually successful and more useful than individually seeking information. These results begin to highlight the important role that collaborative information seeking plays in daily work.

Most cooperative work takes place in information-rich environments. However, studies of "information work" tend to focus on the decontextualized access and retrieval problems faced by individual information seekers. Our work is directed towards understanding how information management is seamlessly integrated into the course of everyday activities. Drawing on an ethnographic study of medical work, we explore the relationship between information and temporal coordination and discuss the role of temporal patterns or "rhythms" in providing individuals with the means to coordinate information and work.

Medical care involves intense collaboration amongst a number of practitioners including physicians, nurses, and pharmacists. Their work is concentrated on a single patient, and yet their activities, motivations, and concerns are very different. We explore the use of a shared information system in helping these individuals coordinate their work. In particular, we use the idea of a common information space to explore how the shared information is incorporated into the diverse work practices of an intensive care unit. In addition to physical co-location, we found that providing information in many specialised representations is critical to managing their coordination. Unlike paper records, computer systems offer the ability to decouple information from its representations. This decoupling opens up a rich design space for systems that allow people with different interests, concerns and work practices to work together effectively. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

No abstract available.