How do you work with a robot millions of miles away to make scientific discoveries on a planet you've never set foot on? Although much work in human-robot interaction describes the meaningful relationships that humans forge with their robots in one-on-one encounters, when robots venture into places where humans cannot go - in search and rescue operations, ocean voyages, or even into space - they do so as part of a large human team. Decisions about what the robot should do and where it should go are therefore the result of large group interactions instead of individual human cognition: the realm of organizational sociology. This talk draws on over a decade of ethnography with NASA's robotic spacecraft missions, specifically focusing on the Mars Exploration Rover mission. Going behind the scenes of the mission, I show the meaning-making, emotional connections, and embodied synergy that scientists develop as they work with their robots millions of miles away on a daily basis. This begins by learning to see through the robots' “eyes” on another planet, yet the peculiar social arrangement of mission work produces a deeper connection to the robot explorers too: one that is no doubt responsible for the extraordinary success and unexpected longevity of the mission team. Studying robotic spacecraft teams demonstrates how humans build a particular and peculiar empathy with their robotic colleagues that goes beyond anthropomorphism. Instead, this case points to the many and unusual ways in which organizations participate in our interactions with, understanding of, and ultimately care for the robots we work with in everyday life.

Attracting contingent workers, teleworkers, small start-up teams and the self-employed, co-working spaces have grown from corner coffee shops and internet cafes, to business empires with thousands of members in urban locations. Yet the rise of co-working in the twenty-first century has received only limited attention in CSCW, despite co-workers' copious use of distributed collaborative tools. CSCW has more frequently addressed the challenges of working together, apart - that is, how we might support or otherwise transpose rich collocated interactions into distributed environments. This paper explores the challenges of working alone and apart, yet together, based on observational study and interviews at three large co-working spaces in New York City. Using a sociomaterial approach, we identify and explore core tensions visible in the site between participation in a distributed work team and in a distinct, collocated community, which we label the co-working paradox. This includes local configurations of digital and physical materials that shift locus of participation, that blend work and home, and manage employer visibility. We use these themes to suggest a generative return to certain core concepts in studies of distributed work - namely, common ground, workspaces, and placefulness - to further study and design for the growth of these unique environments.

We present an interview study of 34 participants in the US and Korea who described how they manage their personal data, from work files to family photos. Through their 'data narratives' - accounts of their data management practices, including device usage patterns and negotiations with system and brand ecosystems' we explore how individuals negotiate a complex, multi-service, and morally-charged sociotechnical landscape, balancing demands to share and to safeguard their data in appropriate ways against a shifting background of changing technologies, relationships, individuals, and corporations. We describe the guiding framework that people use to make decisions as a 'moral economy' of data management, contributing to our understanding of context-specific system choices.

It is not surprising that HCI researchers are attracted to the role of technology in global processes as many of us already live inherently transnational lives. While the notion of global connectedness is hardly new, the issues that confront us are more than specific concerns for remote migration, distributed work, or developing nations. Rather, we argue that transnational HCI is a contemporary condition of the design and use of technological systems, both at home and abroad. This special issue of Human-Computer Interaction is dedicated to exploring how and why a transnational lens matters to the study, design, and development of computational systems. We consider this theoretical perspective in terms of both present technology use to construct and manage transnational relations and processes, and the possibilities such a lens opens for future research and design. The papers in this issue contribute to the field of HCI by bringing the principles developed in anthropology, sociology, and elsewhere to bear on the conversation in HCI, retooling them for our present context, while preserving the richness of their methodological orientation.

In this paper we argue that how scientific collaborations share data is bound up in the ways in which they produce and acquire that data. We draw on ethnographic work with two robotic space exploration teams to show how each community's norms of "data-sharing" are best understood as arising not from the context of the use or exchange of data, but from the context of data production. Shifting our perspective back to the point of production suggests that digital artifacts are embedded in a broader data economy. We present implications for analysis of data in interactional context, and for introducing systems or policies that conflict with the value of data in its context of production.

As our technologies travel to new cultural contexts and our designs and methods engage new constituencies, both our design and analytical practices face significant challenges. We offer postcolonial computing as an analytical orientation to better understand these challenges. This analytic orientation inspires four key shifts in our approach to HCI4D efforts: generative models of culture, development as a historical program, uneven economic relations, and cultural epistemologies. Then, through reconsideration of the practices of engagement, articulation and translation in other contexts, we offer designers and researchers ways of understanding use and design practice to respond to global connectivity and movement.

Location-based ubiquitous computing systems are entering mainstream society and becoming familiar parts of everyday life. However, the settings in which they are deployed are already suffused with complex social dynamics. We report on a study of parole officers and parolees whose relationships are being transformed by location-based technologies. While parolees are clearly subjects of state discipline, the parole officers also find themselves subject to new responsibilities. This study highlights the complexities of power in sociotechnical systems and what happens when location becomes a tradable, technological object.

We trace how cultural probes have been adopted and adapted by the HCI community. The flexibility of probes has been central to their uptake, resulting in a proliferation of divergent uses and derivatives. The varying patterns of adaptation of the probes reveal important underlying issues in HCI, suggesting underacknowledged disagreements about valid interpretation and the relationship between methods and their underlying methodology. With this analysis, we aim to clarify discussions around probes, and, more importantly, around how we define and evaluate methods in HCI, especially those grounded in unfamiliar conceptions of how research should be done.

The personal archive is not only about efficient storage and retrieval of information. This paper describes a study of forty-eight academics and the techniques and tools they use to manage their digital and material archiving of papers, emails, documents, internet bookmarks, correspondence, and other artifacts. We present two sets of results: we first discuss rationales behind subjects' archiving, which go beyond information retrieval to include creating a legacy, sharing resources, confronting fears and anxieties, and identity construction. We then show how these rationales were mapped into our subjects' physical, social and electronic spaces, and discuss implications for development of digital tools that allow for personal archiving.