In this Introduction to the Special Issue on Re-Imagining Participatory Design, we wish to provide a context for the following papers by elucidating some of the themes that have helped shape the field of participatory design as well as touch on some emerging issues.We do not attempt a formal historical review of the participatory design field, nor examine the ongoing debates about the concept of participation, as these have been discussed elsewhere.

This paper argues that a new paradigm for HCI research, which we label the 'practice' perspective, has been emerging in recent years. This stands in contrast to the prevailing mainstream HCI paradigm, which we term the 'interaction' perspective. The 'practice turn', as it has been dubbed in the social sciences, provides a conceptual frame to organize a variety of issues emerging in more recent HCI research. While this approach has been present in certain strands of HCI research for some time, it has not been articulated fully to date. In this paper, we provide a short account of the main tenets of this perspective, and then show how it can illuminate some of the recent debates within HCI. Our argument is one which does not seek to replace extant HCI theories, but rather to provide an alternative, complementary theoretical lens which may illuminate the present confusion among both researchers and practitioners as to the direction of HCI. The paper articulates a set of issues which can help direct HCI research programs, as well as highlighting the potential contribution of the HCI field to this practice approach itself, in terms of a more nuanced understanding of emerging practices.

The field of interaction design to date has been predominantly concerned with designing products, that is, devices, systems, and more recently services. A growing body of theoretical and empirical analyses suggests that the scope of interaction design needs to be expanded: An explicit concern of the field should include not only helping designers create better products but also helping people themselves create better environments for their work, learning, and leisure activities. In this article we argue that expanding the scope of interaction design beyond products requires a revision of some of the most central concepts in interaction design, including the notion of “the object of design” and our understanding of the impact of technologies on human practices. The aim of the article is to explore some of these conceptual challenges and discuss possible ways of dealing with them. We differentiate between intrinsic and extrinsic technology-enabled practice transformation, and foreground the need for interaction design research and practice to more directly deal with analysis and construction of technology-enhanced activity spaces. The implications of these notions for the research agenda of interaction design are discussed.

SUMMARY The impact of culture on knowledge management in international teams is an important topic which is still not well understood. We contribute to the discussion by presenting two case studies of small software teams involved in distributed software development. In doing so, we illustrate how cultural and social issues influence the way knowledge exchange is performed by analyzing four knowledge sharing practices: status meetings and maintaining awareness, the collaborative use of shared artifacts and repositories, spending time at the other site and human ‘bridges’ that mediate between people and cultures. Our findings suggest that organizational culture is permanently re‐negotiated and adjusted to fit the distributed collaboration, as the teams learn how to deal with each other. Socialization plays a significant role in this learning process, and people are more likely to draw on national stereotypes when breakdowns occur. The influences of national culture and site‐specific organizational culture are subtle and not easy to separate from other factors. Based on our experience, we argue that in order to achieve an accurate understanding of knowledge sharing practices in globally distributed software teams, these need to be studied in context, longitudinally, and from both the onshore and offshore perspectives. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Software development requires complex context specific knowledge regarding the particularities of different technologies, the potential of existing software and the needs and expectations of the users. Hence, efficient knowledge management counts amongst the most important challenges for software teams. In international teams, one of the most important issues regarding knowledge sharing is the impact of culture under different aspects: national, organizational and professional. There seem to be very few studies dealing with the issue of culture in regard to knowledge management practices in GSE. We want to contribute to the discussion by presenting case studies of small size software teams dealing with international software development in the context of offshoring. In doing so, we illustrate how cultural and social issues influence the way knowledge exchange is performed by analyzing several knowledge management practices, considering the role of meetings, artifacts and tools, knowledge brokers and mutual visits between sites.

The development of information technology (IT) has had a tremendous impact on organisations in recent decades. New information systems (IS) have been introduced into organisations and their effects...

The research reported in this paper set out to explore novel, interactive techniques to stimulate active participation, involvement and learning by children visiting a museum, through ubiquitous computer technology. To achieve this, a systematic design process was undertaken, which involved exploring Scenario-Based Design, Design-Based Research and a number of technology probes. These lead to the selection, design and implementation of "Re-Tracing the Past" in the Hunt Museum in Limerick, Ireland. The "Re-Tracing the Past" learning environment, with a focus on history and material culture, is described in detail and evaluated.The evaluation takes a case-based approach using video recording and post hoc analysis of the activities, discussion, reaction, and questioning by the children, both as individual participants and in interactive groups. The data derived from these video recordings is analysed in the context of eight design themes, which informed the development of the novel, computer-augmented museum exhibition. These themes included: (1) materiality; (2) narrativity; (3) sociality; (4) activity; (5) multimodality; (6) engagement; (7) computer as augmentation tool; and (8) pedagogical activity. The project culminated in the articulation of a series of outline design guidelines or design heuristics relating twelve experiential criteria to five supporting design informants and resources. These guidelines could be adapted to the design of other interactive learning environments for children. This together with very detailed description of the Scenario-Based Design and Design-Based Research in action constitute the major contributions of the research.

Re-Tracing the Past: exploring objects, stories, mysteries, was an exhibition held at the Hunt Museum, in Limerick, Ireland from 9th--19th June 2003. We attempted to create an exhibition that would be an engaging experience for visitors, that would open avenues for exploration, allow for the collection of visitor opinions,and that would add to the understanding of material already in the Museum,rather than focus on "gee-whiz" technology. Thus our augmented environment completely hid the technology from view. A key objective was to be faithful to the ethos of the Museum, and to produce an exhibition that would stand up to scrutiny by Museum professionals. This design study paper gives a flavour of the exhibition by taking the reader on a tour of the whole design and development cycle-through site pictures, drawings, scenarios, pictures of the exhibition spaces, the interactive components, and visitor comments.

This workshop aims to bring together people engaged in the study of the relationships beytween organizational learning and CSCW to present and discuss their ideas and findings. Issues will include conceptual frameworks; the role of organizational learning in getting the work done; empirical studies of the relation between organizational learning and CSCW; methods for developing applications that support organizational learning; and the relationship between studies of organizational learning and studies of organizational memory.

Our analyses of the activities performed by users of computer systems show complex patterns of interleaved activities. Current human - computer interfaces provide little support for the kinds of problems users encounter when attempting to accomplish several different tasks in a single session. In this paper we develop a framework for discussing the characteristics of activities, in terms of activity structures, and provide a number of conceptual guidelines for developing an interface which supports activity coordination. The concept of a workspace is introduced as a unifying construct for reducing the mental workload when switching tasks, and for supporting contextually-driven interpretations of the users' activity structures.

This paper outlines a set of proposals for the development of system documentation based on an analysis of user needs. It is suggested that existing documentation is not sensitive enough to the variety of levels of user expertise, nor to the variety of contexts in which on-line help is required. We outline three specific proposals for fulfilling these needs: a quick reference facility, a command-line database, and a facility for full explanation and instruction, and suggest a number of ways in which users might access these facilities. Finally, we suggest a way of combining these facilities into an integrated structured manual, offering more effective user support than is currently provided.