Kari: I am naturally very pleased; a public recognition from people one respects must be one of the deepest social needs and pleasures. Ars longa, vita brevis — when one looks backwards, whatever the achievements are they tend to look small and half-finished with respect what could have been done. It is very comforting to find that perhaps all of it has not been in vain…  And as I said in the talk, only hermits do their lifetime achievement alone, and thus my award is also award to the research communities where I have worked and to people with whom I have collaborated.

EUSSET: Your works on activity and practice have inspired new lines of scientific inquiry in human-computer interaction; they shaped the perspective of many researchers. How did you arrive at the practice and activity-oriented line of reasoning over 30 years ago? You mentioned Pentti Kerola, Yrjö Engeström, and Liam Bannon as the people who inspired you, but what was it, that inspired you the most about the theories of activity and practice?

Kari: Back in early 1980s I was interested in computers and learning, and together with two colleagues, Heikki Putkonen and Ilkka Tervonen, we decided to develop a new programming language, SAMPO, for learning elementary programming. It was strongly influenced by LOGO, but we wanted to base the structure of commands on the grammar of Finnish language. My colleagues were programmers; I was responsible of the conceptual side. From activity psychology books by Leontev and Galperin I found action-operation dynamics, which gave a good theoretical starting point for our efforts, and that was the start of my interest in Activity Theory. Then I met Yrjö Engeström and his group, who were developing a method to change every day work practices bottom-up, ultimately by workers themselves; eventually this became their Change Laboratory approach. I was impressed in their attempts to combine historical analysis, theoretical analysis and interventions; the echo of this can still be seen in my talk. When Engeström 1987 published his “activity system” concept, I saw its analytic potential for my own purposes, and have been using it since then.

EUSSET: EUSSET is 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?

Kari: Maturing as a researcher means acquiring a lot of practical knowledge what others have written, how methods function, how to publish and so on. But it also means developing a “personal intellectual position” – a system of beliefs of what is true and important (PIP). Often this development is tacit, just a side effect of research work, but it can be accelerated – and perhaps made more fun – by consciously selecting trustworthy persons and accepting their guidance. There are three groups of people to consider: leading lights, classics, and peers. “Leading lights” are those members, usually of the previous researcher generation, who are currently pushing the field forward: select a couple of best and learn from them – become their unofficial student, so to say. The best means best related to your personal taste: who you want to follow? This way you can “borrow” the PIP of your leader for a while, while your own is still in preparation. “Classics” are foundational building blocks for a PIP: researchers whose ideas keep their usefulness over generations. Who do your leading lights reference to, when they develop their argument? That is a useful starting point to search for yours, but one should be constantly looking for additions, which in our interdisciplinary field may come from different directions. Finally, one needs a network of trustworthy peers of the same generation to serve as a sounding board and a support, and to mature and grow older together.  

There is always a hope that the best papers are still to be written

Kari Kuuti

EUSSET: A lifetime achievement award might sound a bit like a closure or a “thank you and goodbye” message. However, it is not the intention of the EUSSET-IISI Lifetime Achievement Award. I am sure, you will remain an active member of the scientific community. What are your plans for the upcoming years? What is currently attracting your attention? Where do you expect new fascinating challenges to emerge?

Kari: There is always a hope that the best papers are still to be written!  In the latter part of the talk I raised up a number of loosely related issues without much explanation, but I believe that it is possible to weave together an argument that connects them (and a couple of others left out) into a somewhat coherent whole. I have been working with the theme already for a while, and although research as a hobby is perhaps even more enjoyable than it was as work, the problem is that without those deadlines the progress with respect to publishing tends to be slow. Reading more is always more pleasant than writing… As sidelines, I have now promised to help two of my younger colleagues with their projects, one in developing a position in critical design, another in politics of system development. These three projects will keep me occupied for a while, I presume.

EUSSET: What are your wishes for the EUSSET and for the CSCW community? Where do you see the CSCW research in the future? What is the responsibility of a CSCW researcher towards the society and towards the scientific community?

Kari: CSCW is facing a dilemma: all work is done in local practices, and IT systems should be designed starting from that; so CSCW is occupying a field that should be central in designing IT systems, but nobody outside the CSCW community seems to recognize it.  In the long run this may become corrected because of necessity, but we should not remain waiting for it but try our best to make our knowledge to bear in design now. One potential direction to gain such recognition would be for some research groups to start to develop long-term relationships with some user organizations with long-term system development needs, and consult them in requirements development and evaluation. A start for developing a practice-based system development method. Another potential direction to get started would be to get EU to support practice-based analysis and design experiments, EUSSET might be the channel to push this forward. Experiences in organizing cooperation for COVID-19 research and curing might give strong enough motivation for such experiments.

EUSSET: Thank you very much for your time and the insightful thoughts. It has been a pleasure to explore the past, the presence and the future of CSCW with you.

EUSSET: You mentioned the importance of ethnography. Is that something special for the European tradition and are there other things that stand out for ECSCW when you compare it to the international field of CSCW?
Volker Wulf: Yes, that is a good point which was the reason for a lot of intellectual, organisational, and institutional struggle. The European tradition, too some extend, had some intellectual and epistemological homogeneity, in the sense that it tried to ground IT design in a profound understanding of work or life practices. In the US the situation developed a little bit differently. The American CSCW community was always fragmented in different ways, also epistemologically. There were people that were very close to the so-called European type or approach. But other people still followed for a long time a rather positivist research agenda, in the beginning very much based on laboratory studies, ‘not in the real world’ types of research. Thus, the US people were a little but more divided. The Europeans were epistemologically more homogenous and maybe this created a larger intellectual impact. However, on an institutional scale one has to say that the US CSCW community has developed much better and attracted a much broader crowd around the globe to participate there, whereas the European community was perceived over time as too close and narrow in its methods and focus. Also in the way how they reviewed papers and so on. So while Europe had the advantage of a very successful intellectual movement, they could not really shape that into an institutionally attractive environment.

EUSSET: So the strength and at the same time the weakness of the European tradition of CSCW was their epistemological homogeneity?
Volker Wulf: Yes, you can argue that way. Well on the European side we made a couple of mistakes. We did not bring up young people systematically which in the US has a longer tradition and was quite successful. The US community also developed a internally, also in discussions with the European community. Then you have to see that internet and social media platforms got a larger importance, in the US specifically. So, the character of the US tradition also developed over time and still stayed broader than the European one. Moreover, I think that the industrial base is quite different. If you see what is going on in Silicon Valley. The success of Google, Facebook, parts of the apple ecosystem is very much based on providing services and IT artefacts for a large group people, whereas in Europe IT is very much related to work processes, to the application of IT in various fields. Therefore, the funding schemes are very different in the US and in Europe. This creates different directions, foci, and research styles.

EUSSET: Another aspect might be the role of workers’ unions that are very strong in some European countries, compared to the US. It had to be considered by ECSCW researchers.
Volker Wulf: This is completely true […] CSCW, like other applied computing domains, acts in practice. And the practice, the industrial practice or the practices in government or hospitals varies due to different institutional settings. It’s different throughout Europe, too. However, central and northern Europe have a certain shared tradition and history, also involving trade unions, at least to some extent, in co-designing work and work-supporting technologies. There are different traditions at play which came together in this interesting field.

EUSSET: If you compare the first ECSCW conferences and the upcoming one in Sheffield. Are the challenges still the same?
Volker Wulf: ECSCW had to undergo some intuitional challenges, too, because it lost people and it shrank in participation in a way that we could no longer accept. I think one of the biggest innovations is to combine the ECSCW conference with the Journal of CSCW which has a long tradition and is one if the highest rating journal in the international field of human-centred computing. By bringing these two media together in an interesting way, we were able to rise participation and also to rise the quality of submissions and specifically of accepted papers quite a lot.

EUSSET: And how did the research topics develop form 1989 until now.
Volker Wulf: Well, CSCW comes out of office automation in a way. Office automation had the approach to automatize many parts of the office work. You can understand CSCW as a counter-development or better a follow up after the automation did not work as envisioned. It came up as a new paradigm which sort of looked not into automation but into support of work. When we look at the studies that happen so far, we have very little studies dealing with support of work within manufacturing companies. There is a lot around offices, hospitals, and environments like that. In the last years you see a slide change. In Europe, this has also something to do with the fact that the founding schemes are developing towards the Internet of Things, Industry 4.0 type of research issues. So we see a widening of topics now in that way.

EUSSET: What are the biggest insights or successes of ECSCW?
Volker Wulf: I think the biggest achievement of this European practice based tradition is to link a deep understanding of work and life practices with the design of innovative IT artefacts. Understanding and designing, bringing together those two activities, is a crucial achievement and maybe the core achievement that this tradition has brought. Those concepts have been taken over by other communities, too, e.g. Information Systems, Human Computer Interaction, Computer Supported Collaborative Learning, Knowledge Management. The core success story is first of all epistemological and then, resulting from this, a research methodical stance. If you look then what this research paradigm has created you can point to a lot of interesting case studies which show how innovative technologies fit into practice and lead to more efficiency and higher quality of labour. But it has also brought up some interesting concepts like awareness, expertise sharing, boundary objects and spelled them out in a design oriented manner. So there are quite a couple of important concepts that have been developed, based upon profound empirical and design-oriented work in real-world organisations.

Volker Wulf holds the Chair of Information Systems and New Media at the University of Siegen and is the Vice-Director of the German Science Foundation Collaborative Research Centre ‘Media of Cooperation’ (DFG-SFB 1187). In addition, he heads the School of Media and Information (iSchool) at the University of Siegen and is still responsible for a research group at the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Information Technology (FhG-FIT) in Sankt Augustin. After completing a double degree in Computer Science and Business Administration at the RWTH Aachen and the University of Paris VI, he gained his PhD at Dortmund University. The completion of habilitation (from the Faculty of Computer Science, University of Hamburg) was followed by a research stay at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). As a Fulbright Scholar, he spent a sabbatical at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and Stanford University, Palo Alto in 2006/7. Since 2011 he has officiated as Dean of Faculty III (School of Economic Disciplines) at the University of Siegen. He currently is chair of the European Society for Socially Embedded Technologies (EUSSET)

References

• Volker Wulf; David Randall; Kjeld Schmidt (eds): Designing Socially Embedded Technologies in the Real-World, Springer, London, 2015
• Volker Wulf; Volkmar Pipek; Dave Randall, Markus Rohde; Kjeld Schmidt; Gunnar Stevens (eds): Socio Informatics – A Practice-based Perspective on the Design and Use of IT Artefacts, Oxford University Press, Oxford 2017 (in press)

The interview was conducted by Michael Koch & Alexander Richter on behalf of EUSSET in September 2017.

EUSSET: Myriam, you are part of the new generation of CSCW/HCI researchers and you have been especially active in the European CSCW community in the last years. How have you perceived the development?
Myriam Lewkowicz: It is interesting that in the last ten years we have seen a number of European conferences from our field that have considerably been dropping down, whereas at the same time the American conferences have flourished. Nevertheless, the European perspective on CSCW, like Volker described it in his interview, is well received. When you look at the publications, the American practice-focused research is growing. Additionally to what Volker said, I also think the American CSCW perspective was rather techno-centric before. It was dominated by the software industry. The studies in the beginning of the new Millennium were rather demonstrating a system and its evaluation. Now, I see many more papers that show how the system is based on an analysis of work practices and the use of the system is analysed more deeply. So, summarizing, the European perspective had a big influence on how studies were carried out. But the European community was lacking behind. The European researchers were very active and published at the big American conferences like ACM CSCW, ACM CHI etc. But at the same time the European conferences were dying. No people, no money. A little bit desperate. This is when it has been decided that the European community had to be renewed. We wanted to attract the young researchers.

EUSSET: Why should the European researchers send their papers to European conferences in the future? What is the added value of European CSCW conferences?
Myriam Lewkowicz: From a publication point of view there is no big difference. Perhaps now that ECSCW papers go into the JCSCW there is a small advantage by having your conference paper published in a journal automatically. But even more important than publishing, is building a network. If you want to stay in Europe, then you need a network. And we help people to build networks at the conferences. Moreover, we offer a focus. The conferences under the EUSSET auspices stay practice-focused. So participants get a good feeling for how this research is developing. ACM CHI and ACM CSCW are now so big and so broad that it is hard to explore new things. You basically stick to the people you know.

EUSSET: There are not only CSCW and CHI, but also other conferences, like information systems conferences (ECIS, ICIS). How do you relate to them? What is special about ECSCW or other EUSSET conferences?
Myriam Lewkowicz: Again, we are smaller and much more focussed. You will not find positivist research or a lot of quantitative research at ECSCW. At the same time, we are very interdisciplinary. We have social scientists and computer scientists. We think that complexity is not something bad, but something interesting.

EUSSET: Coming back to the history of ECSCW. There were times where there were academic fights between computer scientists and social scientists. There was much more work on systems, on design of systems. Today my feeling is that ECSCW is rather dominated by social sciences, one could say it has become a little bit too descriptive. What is the role of design nowadays?
Myriam Lewkowicz: Yes, I agree. Sometimes it is a bit frustrating to see merely descriptive papers that could also have gone to a social sciences conference. What is interesting for ECSCW is the mix. The current situation is based on a number of factors, like the ways program committees are composed. ACM CHI and ACM CSCW have the same issue. What CSCW did was creating a sub-committee dedicated to systems work. We would like to see more design work. We think it is important to have the designers and the social scientists at the same conference! They have to work together. Also very relevant in this context: funding schemes, which have a big impact here. Most of the money is coming from projects. And projects have a short life time i.e. 3-4 years. This is really too short if you really want to create an understanding, to build something, to create impact and to publish. Also, having an impact and answering the big questions is not the same. What do we want to do? Are the systems a way to understand phenomena? Or do we want to create impact, e.g. help the people? These are different approaches to build systems. What is new and what is relevant is not the same. Sometimes people are not clear about their contribution and different reviewers are interested in different types of contributions. What is a good system paper for ECSCW? We have to discuss this in the community.

EUSSET: In the information systems community there have been some discussions about ‘rigour’ (scientifically correct) vs. ‘relevance’ (creating impact), whereas it is not clear why it should not be both. Does this apply to this discussion about good systems papers, too?
Myriam Lewkowicz: In an ideal world it should be both. But we are suffering from a lack of systems papers and I think it can be enough to see an innovative, inspiring system that has not yet shown its promises. You can have other people taking this idea and rebuild the system in a way to create impact. Impact can also be on the long term – and that is more difficult to document in usual papers.

EUSSET: Openness of the community, interdisciplinarity, … what does EUSSET do to come to that?
Myriam Lewkowicz: On the scientific side, I am not sure. From the organisational point of view, we for example try to stay a single track conference to bring people together and discuss. In addition, we are organizing a summer school, exchange programs and PhD courses. We want to support our people, especially young researchers, to see different disciplines and approaches … and yet stay focused on practices. So, the differences are not so much in the conferences themselves, but in all the side issues. At the conferences you see things you want to do, but in the other events you learn how to do them.

EUSSET: Is there anything we can learn from or adopt from successful CSCW / HCI conferences like ACM CHI?
Myriam Lewkowicz: I do not think that CHI is a good example. CHI is successful in being a place where everybody wants to publish. But it is not a community-building event. CHI is huge. It is so big you cannot meet anyone. But we surely can further improve our conferences. One thing I like in the conferences of other fields is that people present preliminary work that is discussed intensively at the conference. In this year’s ECSCW I think the exploratory papers presentations were quite successful in this sense. It is a way to have a discussion during the conference and work it into the full paper afterwards. We will continue this effort.

EUSSET: About the content of the research – What should European CSCW try to achieve in the future?
Myriam Lewkowicz: At the same time we have lost some systems work we have also lost conceptual work. We do not have a lot of papers reflecting and giving new concepts to tackle coordination and collaboration. This also goes with new systems. Additionally, we also should look into what we could say to the world about work. Work is evolving – and the European CSCW community has a view on this that is quite different from the American and Chinese views. We have something to say and should do so.