The Intellectual Challenge of CSCW: The Gap Between Social Requirements and Technical Feasibility

Mark S. Ackerman. “The Intellectual Challenge of CSCW: The Gap Between Social Requirements and Technical Feasibility.” John Carroll (ed.), HCI in the New Millennium, Addison-Wesley, 2001.

In CSCW, there is an inherent gap that divides what we know we must support socially and what we can support technically. Exploring, understanding, and ameliorating this gap is the central challenge of CSCW as a field and one of the central problems for HCI.

CSCW assumptions and findings:

• Social activity is fluid and nuanced, and this makes systems technically difficult to construct properly and often awkward to use (Garfinkel 1967; Strauss 1993).
• Members of organizations sometimes have different (and multiple) goals, and conflict may be important as cooperation in obtaining issue resolutions (Kling 1991)
• Exceptions are normal in work progresses (Suchman, & Wynn, 1984)
• People prefer to know who else is present in a shared space, and they use this awareness to guide their work (Erickson, et al., 1999)
• Visibility of communication exchanges and of information enables learning and greater efficiencies (Hutchins, 1995)
• The norm for using a CSCW system are often actively negotiated among users (Strauss, 1991)
• There appears to be a critical mass problem for CSCW systems (Markus, 1990)
• People not only adapt to their systems, they adapt their systems to their needs (co-evolution) (Orlikowski, 1993; O’Day, Bobrow, Shirley, 1996)
• Incentives are critical

There are two major arguments against the importance of any social-technical gap:

1. Some new technology or software technique will shortly solve the gap (unlikely)
2. The gap is merely historical circumstance and we will adapt to the gap in some form (co-evolution: we adapt resources in the environment to our needs. Our culture will adapt itself or the limitations of the technology, so the technical limitations are not important). It goes against a central premise of HCI that we should not force users to adapt.

If the social-technical gap is real, important, and likely to remain, then we must

1. ameliorate the effects of the gap
2. further understand the gap

So far, CSCW has only been working on first-order approximation, that is tractable solutions that partially solve specific problems with known trade-offs. CSCW shares problems of generalizability from small groups to a general population (as do all social sciences), prediction of affordances (as does HCI), and the applicability of new technological possibilities (as does the rest of computer sciences)

Relation to my thesis: This paper provides on overview of CSCW and the high-level challenge for the framework of my thesis (I am less interested in the CSCW as a science section). My thesis has a natural emphasis on “what we can support technically”, how to deal with the limitations when they are hardly manageable due to the complexity of the real world, and how it impacts the social. Ways to find a balances between technically working and organizationally workable in ubicomp. My work is linked to Greenberg and Marwood, CSCW technical researchers who demonstrated the social-technical gap (Marwood, B., & Greenberg, S. (1994). Real Time Groupware as a Distributed System: Concurrency Control and Its Effect on the Interface. Proceedings of the Computer Supported Cooperative Work : 207-217.

If concurrency control is not established, people may invoke conflicting actions. As a result, the group may become confused because displays are inconsistent, and the groupware document corrupted due to events being handled out of order. (p. 207)

My claim is that a technical solution is unlikely and co-evolution does not solve everything especially with the constant evolution of technologies and our techno-push world. However, I am wondering on gow to go beyond first-order approximation and constributing “cool toys”.