Writ large. On the logics of the spatial ordering of coordinative artefacts in cooperative work

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Abstract

Enter a modern workplace, look around and look carefully, and you will notice a profusion of inscriptions of the most modest and unassuming kind. We are not here primarily referring to the mountains of text produced and perused as part of everyday work (such as letters, emails, reports, contracts), which naturally typically are the center of practitioners’ attention, but to an assortment of inconspicuous and mundane artifacts, such as fault report forms, folders, binder labels, part routing schemes, kanban cards, identification codes, that have been specially designed to facilitate the coordination and integration of cooperative activities. We call this vast and heterogeneous family of specialized artifacts ‘coordinative artifacts’. Though unremarkable, such artifacts play an essential role in enabling workers in modern work settings to get the work done in a reasonably orderly fashion. They provide a manifold latticework of signs by means of which distributed cooperative work activities are coordinated and integrated. Based on a series of ethnographic and similar studies of cooperative work in different domains of work (manufacturing, software engineering, architectural design, oncology treatment, ICD pacemaker treatment), the paper will attempt to show that we can begin to identify and describe the logics of the practices of designing and using such coordinative artifacts.

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@MISC{Schmidt2018,
 author = {Schmidt, Kjeld and Wagner, Ina},
 title = {Writ large. On the logics of the spatial ordering of coordinative artefacts in cooperative work},
 year = 2018,
 doi = {10.25969/mediarep/3797},
 volume = 5,
 address = {Siegen},
 series = {Working paper series / SFB 1187 Medien der Kooperation},
}
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