It is with deep sadness that we bid farewell to Volkmar, who passed away far too early on 6 January 2024 after a long illness at the age of 56.
This interview offers Volkmar’s perspective on CSCW and research. It was conducted on the occasion of his receiving the EUSSET-IISI Lifetime Achievement Award in 2023. The interview was published post-hum, following the sad passing of Volkmar in January 2024. Before that, he had provided us with the initial draft of the interview. After much deliberation, we decided to share Volkmar’s insightful thoughts with the broader community in this form.
EUSSET: Volkmar, you have been awarded the EUSSET-IISI Lifetime Achievement Award as announced during the ECSCW 2020. Congratulations! In this interview, we would like to learn more about your personal perspective on the award and on the CSCW research.
The award was established to recognize outstanding contributions to the innovation and reorientation of the computing field to better face of the challenges of rapidly changing technical and social circumstances. It acknowledges your impact on the CSCW and on the work of researchers in this field. As the chair of the awards committee you also had the chance to shape the message related to this award – now you have become the lauerate.
What does the award mean to you as a person?
Volkmar: Well, to me it came as a nice surprise. As a researcher, the various reviewing procedures your ideas and the conduct of your work undergo give you some feedback about pieces of your work, but it is very difficult to get feedback on the driving forces behind your efforts. You may have a lot of publications, and maybe these are cited by many other researchers, but tangible feedback on the impact these had, and the inspiration they provided, comes only through such awards. And since the award addresses my ‘lifetime’, I felt very honored, and surprisingly happy.
EUSSET: EUSSET remains a very young organization. One third of active EUSSET members are PhD students and there are equally many young members working as postdocs or assistant professors. Many of the members are looking up to you as an eminent authority seeking an advice concerning research focus, career paths, or simply becoming and being a researcher. What would be your message to them?
Volkmar: Be curious. Be who you are. Be curious who you are.
First: Be curious. For being a good researcher, you need to take a deep interest into the world as it is, how it became like that, and where it is heading. With ‘deep’ I mean that it is important to also acknowledge those aspects that are not in line with your own convictions and experiences. As a young PhD researcher who took pride in his ‘participatory design’ attitude, I had to present the project I was working in to the ‘worker representative council’ of one of the largest German private health insurance companies in order to get their approval, and ideally, their support. I rarely spoke to a less interested crowd in my life, and got a very bored approval. I left the meeting with the impression, those ‘worker representatives’ were just not doing their job. But I picked that experience up and tried to find out how that could be, given that they volunteered for the job, and had been elected. That spark of interest helped me finding out how difficult it actually is for practitioners, to imagine how their work would change given there are new software tools or information infrastructures available. And given that impact is so hard to imagine, why should they not instead turn their attention to much more obvious topics?
Second: Be who you are. With a bachelor thesis, and maybe also with a master thesis, you may be able to regard those as tasks that have to get executed in order to earn you a certificate, and their exact topics and results may never again matter to you or to anybody in your future career. If you pursue a PhD with that attitude, it will be even more painful and exhausting as it is anyway. If you stick with a topic for three to five years, it will become a huge part of your life, and research suddenly becomes a very personal, even intimate endeavor. It does not make sense to undertake this endeavor just because there is funding and a supervisor who finds you somewhat interesting. The topic, the methodology, the scientific community you report to, they all should fit your interests, believes, experiences and personality. In the final years of my master studies I developed the idea that I could be a researcher in Computer Science, I had specialized on Artificial Intelligence and even visited some national conferences. Due to a private contact I stumbled across the book “Informatik und Gesellschaft” (“Computer Science and Society”, co-authored by Thomas Herrmann, also a member of the CSCW community), which gave me for the first time the impression that there could be the option to pursue my general interest into “improving society” also as a researcher in CS. I started out working with the DFKI (German National Research Center for Artificial Intelligence), but then decided to change to the University of Bonn, although I had been offered a contract for only 10 months there, although I had literally no clue about the competences requested (CSCW, Usability) – and showed that in my job interview – , although all (!) of my future colleagues therefore voted for another candidate, and although their boss hired me nevertheless just based on my knowledge in AI, not because I would particularly fit the advertised position. I did so just because former colleagues of that group had shown an interest in “Electronic Democracy”, and I really wanted to learn to work with users. Because that did fit my interest profile better, that was more who I was.
Third: Be curious who you are. A PhD is usually located at a time in your life when you have placed the first cornerstones in your life: you decided to finish an education that would hopefully feed you for the rest of your life, you may have (or have had) a first long-term relationship, you may have moved (and settled) in a new town for the first time. But things are still in motion, life in general, and a PhD process for sure will provide you with many new experiences and challenges that have the potential to change you. That’s ok, so don’t stick too strongly to your concerns and beliefs, go with the flow and trust rather your skills of improvisation than your fear of change. That particularly applies to your research topics and career. Before I submitted my PhD on “Supporting Appropriation Work”, I have been offered/interested in PhD topics including “Privacy in Groupware” (there was unpublished research available that I could have built upon), “Metadata structures for environmental informatics” (project money available) and “Inductive Logic Programming” (an approach that would have allowed me to continue with AI with applications in CSCW, my own idea, but really far out). The final topic “appropriation” only emerged in my third year as a Phd, and it took me three more years to complete it. Not only to technically write it, but also in terms of reinterpreting my research experiences so that they would form a whole in the dissertation. While I did not expect be able to combine my social, political and technological interest when I started my research career, I grew more and more confident of myself to be able to do that.
EUSSET: As researchers we all experience challenges and moments of pride. What was the biggest challenge for you in your career? What would you suggest to younger researchers who might experience similar challenges?
Volkmar: The biggest challenge was definitely to get a permanent position in academia. The German University system only recently (well, in the last two decades) developed career ways that allow you to grow into tenurized positions, maybe with a temporary contract but with fixed goals to achieve in order to get tenure. When I started to look around after my PhD, there was a rigid border, if you got an ‘associate professor’ position, you had tenure immediately, but in order to get there, most hiring committees required a ‘habilitation’, a second book you would write after a PhD. It did not really matter that, with a PhD from Finland, I would have been eligible for an associate professorship anywhere else in the world… But that was my way, my problems. Today you may have other problems, the best general advice I can give is: don’t be dependent on it, always have a plan B. Foster also the skills that an industrial employer would value (e.g. team skills, languages, project management, current technological knowledge, experience with users/customers), in the end they will also help your research career. Understand that research is a deeply social endeavor, so try to actually be at places (conferences) and meet people, engage with the organizational side of research (reviewing, visiting and hosting workshops), join forces with others who are at the same career level. Yes, they may be competitors, but one can benefit greatly from mutually exchanging experiences. Understand and accept that research is also a business, so learn how to generate funds that will allow you to provide PhD positions to others, be familiar with the changing ‘fashions’ of research funding. Publication outlets focus you on advancing a discipline, funding organizations expect you to contribute to society, learn how to combine both in a meaningful way that speaks to you.
EUSSET: And what achievement are you most proud of and made you particularly happy? What was special about it? What did you and maybe others learned from this achievement?
Volkmar: That is a difficult question, as I felt often that I would just state the obvious from empirical observations, or complete the picture of our research landscape where I felt there was something conceptually missing. I rarely got any immediate feedback that allowed me to feel particularly proud. My most widely cited paper is the initial paper (with Volker Wulf) on “Infrastructuring” from 2009. I was proud of it as it was the first time I was able to describe the breadth of design issues I intended to further study, and for starting to develop a language to do so. I can be proud of it today not only for the number of citations, but also from the breadth of disciplines where it was cited (even outside HCI/CSCW/Information Systems). But if you look closer, most citations acknowledge the endeavor of valuing and informing user creativity at the same level as developer creativity, but they rarely build on the terminology I developed. Maybe it is too complex, as I was building on, but also reinterpreting Star and Bowker’s original idea on studying ‘Infrastructuring’ towards a ‘design turn’ in order to inform a collaborative design methodology which integrates activities of users and developers. That has also been criticized as taking the “infrastructuring” perspective “one bridge too far”, which felt odd to me as – in that picture – I actually intended to “redirect the river” (of technology-centered innovation of practices) to avoid the necessity to build “bridges” (i.e. studies of origins, dynamics and consequences of infrastructural change from yet another scientific discipline). Geoffrey Bowker himself was one of the editors of the Special Issue the article appeared in, and he invested an amount of time in improving the paper that could easily have earned him a co-authorship. So, there has been acknowledgement, but pride is difficult to feel when you feel that maybe there is still a lot of explaining to do…
But there is a kind of “inner pride” I do feel about that and other publications. My original interest in “collaboration”, or better put “self-organization” was not a scientific one, it was a political one. In the 90s, I was for six years part of an initiative to found a commune, a place where we would live and work together, autonomously, and outside the societal framework I grew up in with all its ecological, social and economic pressure points and power structures. You learn a lot about self-organization when you try to discuss complex issues (e.g. how to build your own health insurance infrastructure) with many people with different backgrounds and intentions. If you question the societal structures you are living in so deeply, the world becomes tangible as a fundamentally anarchistic place, not in the sense that it is “chaotic” (an absence of order), but in the sense that it consists of a negotiated order, and that the crucial question is: how to re-negotiate one particular aspect of that order once it does not fit my current or future need/practice? Over the years, I managed to use that critical attitude as a guiding force to follow interesting research questions, when e.g. in the field of crisis management, I sought to understand how over the course of a ‘crisis’ event, activity and role patterns change in and between professional institutions, volunteer networks, and citizens affected, and then focused on improving IT for improvisation, as actors would re-negotiate constantly whether they help others or need help in a highly dynamic and dangerous, even life-threatening environment.
That attitude, integrating the political and the researcher ‘me’, is something, I am actually proud of.
EUSSET: We are living and conducting our research in a very dynamic environment. Topics of interest change very quickly. What is your perspective on the future of CSCW in this rapidly evolving context? Or is this context not so dynamic at it might seem?
Volkmar: What is CSCW? Four letters still in search of a context… No, not anymore, we matured. The CSCW community developed in the late 80s and early 90s an epistemological position that was fundamentally different from the more engineering-like perspective that dominated design-oriented technology research then, and from the crutches Psychology provided to integrate a “user perspective” in design. My predecessors in receiving the EUSSET-IISI-Lifetime Achievement Award like Kjeld Schmidt, Liam Bannon, Susanne Bodker, or Kari Kuuti know better than me to what extent that was intentional, or just driven by the fact that the innovations in collaborative technologies affected the social fabric of organizations so obviously, that a deeper look, an ethnomethodologically informed look, and a participatory design attitude turned out to be necessary. Today we understand that the changes the different technology waves of digitalization may bring to the various practice fields of our everyday lives always affect the social fabric of organizations or even the society as a whole. And we have developed research methods beyond the traditional technocrat’s belief that true innovation can only come from distancing from or even overthrowing current practices, we have proven that we can understand and foster the mutual understanding of technology innovators and relevant practice fields based on that epistemological position – for a better digitalization. We are aware that every new technology puts additional work on a practice field and introduces new dependencies that need to be managed, and that the evaluation of its benefits is actually a continuous process. We have methods that provide valuable conceptualizations for understanding these dynamics, and to also find design answers to meet the changing demands and concerns. Our methods can be used in all practice fields, they secure their relevance through the intensity in collaborating with practitioners. This advantage will always play out whatever technology innovation still lies ahead of us – if we manage to describe this asset accordingly.
If we today look at our old tech friend “AI”, who has haunted us already in the 80s with imaginaries of the efficiency of a model-driven collaboration, practitioners are now confronted e.g. with neural networks, basically a data-driven black box technology that is quite difficult to interrogate and improve, as its algorithm is a hollow shape, and the actual service quality is dependent on the data that is available for learning. Practitioners need to develop an understanding for this ensemble, and estimate to which extent they can trust, configure and manage this new type of technology, and how to interact with it when the service quality is too low, and developers need to consider modeling choices that open the black box a little. Approaches in ‘Explainable AI’ go that way, but I think that for many practice fields it is necessary to develop contextualized solutions, where again I would believe that the epistemological position established in CSCW will be a huge asset.
EUSSET: Is there anything else you would like to share with the community?
Volkmar: Continuing the discussion above, I would wish that we work towards a stronger branding independent of the notion of ‘Cooperative Work’. With its foundation, EUSSET coined the term of ‘socially embedded technologies’, and its program is broader. With the colleagues in Siegen, we started talking about ‘practice-based computing’ for more than ten years now, and recently framed the ideas as a new discipline of ‘Socio-Informatics’. That may look as a quite ‘German’ approach, and there may be a lot to discuss about the exact wording and whether it is politically sensible or historically accurate to postulate a new discipline while we build on almost 40 years of research already. But I feel that if we think of career paths, funding structures and publication opportunities, we need to make the relevance of our methodological strength more visible against that backdrop of the larger disciplines HCI and Information Systems.
And as a final thought, I cannot express enough gratitude for the general kindness and the respect I experienced in this scientific community. As a young researcher, I joined the community based on a certain political enthusiasm, not based on a sound education and much knowledge, yet my colleagues (most notably Volker Wulf) accepted their bosses decision to hire me and took on the effort to introduce me to the field. In the first years of my career, I have been introduced to important scholars like Douglas Engelbart, Joseph Weizenbaum, Jonathan Grudin, Kjeld Schmidt, Lucy Suchman, Paul Dourish, most of the founding members of EUSSET, all of the prior award winners – not based on my own scientific merits, but based on a general culture of inclusiveness and respect of this community. Aside from providing a nice feeling and interesting discussion opportunities, it also shows in the formal scientific process, the way how respectfully reviews are being written and how easy it is to access reviewing committees. That is an asset we can be proud of, and what we should cultivate.
EUSSET: Thank you so much for sharing your insights with us. Your experience is of great importance to the community. We express our congratulations and wish all the best to you for the future.
The interview was conducted by Mateusz Dolata.
