Browsing by Subject "Repair"

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    Journal Article
    Infrastructuring as Ambiguous Repair: A Case Study of a Surveillance Infrastructure Project
    (Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW): Vol. 27, No. 2, 2018) Mikalsen, Marius; Farshchian, Babak A.; Dahl, Yngve
    Health and welfare organisations are under increased scrutiny regarding their ability to make innovations in and increase the productivity of their services by digitising and automating them. Our empirical case study focuses on the implementation of a new health and welfare surveillance infrastructure project in a large Norwegian municipality. The infrastructure project led to significant challenges for various reasons, such as coordinating with vendors and subvendors, balancing governmentally defined purchase and implementation processes with local work practices, tailoring packaged solutions, and the differing concerns of many actors across different municipal departments. moves through ongoing cycles project moves through ongoing cycles of breakdown and repair in order to implement a working infrastructure. Key to our analysis is the way repair plays out as the infrastructure project deals with the ambiguity resulting from uncertainties in relation to both how technology works in practice and how the project will be organised. We empirically analyse three collaborative repair mechanisms: value-network repair, process repair, and participation repair. Our study enriches the understanding of infrastructuring by discussing the collaborative repair mechanisms necessary for mobilising and adapting the practices, systems, and processes that coexist in infrastructure projects. Additionally, the concept of ambiguous repair suggests that tensions cannot be permanently resolved but rather should be considered an ongoing and necessary part of practical infrastructuring.
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    Journal Article
    Mediating Environments and Objects as Knowledge Infrastructure
    (Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW): Vol. 28, 43570) Hoeppe, Götz
    The knowledge infrastructures of the sciences have been considered as human-made networks or ecologies of people, artifacts, and institutions that enable the production, calibration, storage, dissemination and re-use of data. Complementing these studies, this paper examines how scientists use the digitally mediated, shared availability of “natural” environments and objects for infrastructural purposes. Drawing on ethnography and informed by ethnomethodology, I focus on the uses of the sky in astronomical observation. Astronomical research is oriented to observing, and re-observing, sources on the sky, making it its topic. Yet, the sky is also an infrastructural resource, as it provides stable saliences that can be used alongside existing records for ordering work, diagnosing trouble with artifacts in data, and repairing data across diverse sites of practice. I consider a case in which such uses of the sky were new to researchers working in a novel domain, and one in which such uses were already established, but new to a student being inducted to its work. In both cases properties of the sky became salient through being mediated digitally. As existing records and new observations were made available to a single computational order, these data became accessible to what Melvin Pollner called mundane reason, wherein ceteris paribus clauses are used reflexively to maintain a world in common. Although the sky may appear to be an extreme case, I argue that other mediated environments and objects, and the reflexive practices through which these are engaged, have similar infrastructural uses in other disciplines.
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    Journal Article
    Negotiating Priorities on the Shopfloor: A Design Case Study of Maintainers’ Practices
    (Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW): Vol. 32, No. 1, 2023) Kotthaus, Christoph; Vitt, Nico; Krüger, Max; Pipek, Volkmar; Wulf, Volker
    The coordination of maintenance work in manufacturing poses a crucial productivity factor in small and medium-sized companies (SMEs) but often seems to be rather neglected in practice as well as in much of the literature on maintenance. We shed light upon maintenance coordination work by presenting a design case study conducted in an SME over approximately two years. We took a participatory design-oriented approach, involving all roles on the shopfloor affected by maintenance work. In three major iterations during the pre-study, a release-ready prototype was developed and implemented by the users over the course of one year. The evaluation of the tool showed how a new and mostly unintended practice of information flow, error reporting, and prioritization emerged such that, for instance, foremen becoming a central node of communication, formal prioritization shifting away from higher management, and actual prioritization being done by maintainers. This paper contributes to the body of CSCW work on maintenance practice in SMEs by presenting detailed empirical findings on the coordination work of maintainers, as well as the evaluation of socio-technical interventions into maintenance practices.