Dynamics in artifact ecologies

Abstract

We increasingly interact with multiple interactive artifacts with overlapping capabilities during our daily activities. It has previously been shown that the use of an interactive artifact cannot be understood in isolation, but artifacts must be understood as part of an artifact ecology, where artifacts influence the use of others. Understanding this interplay becomes more and more essential for interaction design as our artifact ecologies grow. This paper continues a recent discourse on artifact ecologies. Through interviews with iPhone users, we demonstrate that relationships between artifacts in artifact ecologies cannot be understood as static, instead they evolve dynamically over time. We provide activity theory-based concepts to explain these dynamics.

Appropriation of an Activity-based Flexible Office in daily work

“…implementation in Rogers, 1995;excited state in Bødker & Klokmose, 2012). This involves a mix of old and newly developed routines and various setup problems that introduce tensions into the users' activities (Bødker & Klokmose, 2012). Individuals seek to avoid or reduce this tension during the implementation process (Rogers, 1995).…”

Activity Trackers, Relational Affordances, and Device Ecologies of Fitness Technologies (Preprint)

“…Even though these studies may include multiple trackers, the analytical focus still rests upon how various users engage with a single device, be a Fitbit or a Jawbone tracker. So the diversity of users and their perception (not the technologies) shapes the focus of these studies, and as a result, they may lose sight of the bigger picture or what the recent HCI conceptualizations [15][16][17] have begun to presents as a device ecology (of fitness-related technology), within which users interact with a multiplicity of technologies and digital representations of personal activities. The concept of artifact or device ecology suggests that artifacts and their affordances cannot be understood separately.…”

Computational Artifacts: Interactive and Collaborative Computing as an Integral Feature of Work Practice

“…The notion of 'computational artifact' was originally introduced by Lucy Suchman 3 in 1985 in a PhD-dissertation based on empirical studies at Xerox PARC and published as a technical report by Xerox PARC [37, pp. [iii], [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12]. 4 The notion of 'computational artifact' occupies an important place in the foundations of HCI, CSCW, and related fields of computing technology research, not because it is widely used, far from it, but because it figured prominently in the incontestably most influential attempt to formulate a conceptual foundation for this kind of research, namely, Lucy Suchman's Plans and Situated Actions: The Problem of Human-Machine Communication.…”

“…Noteworthy examples of such attempts are notions such as 'artifacts in use' [1], 'appropriation' of interactive artifacts [6; 49], 'coordination mechanisms' [27], 'ordering systems' [28], 'socially embedded technologies' [12], 'artifact ecologies' [2], and 'practice-oriented' or 'practice-based' computing [18; 29; 30]. However, it seems fair to say that the large variety of proposed conceptions, and the obvious fact that nothing even remotely akin to consensus has emerged, indicates that the whole issue is still wide open.…”