EUSSET: Ina, we are pleased that you have been awarded the EUSSET-IISI Lifetime Achievement Award, as revealed during ECSCW 2024. Congratulations!
In light of this honor, we would like to gain your personal perspective on both the award and CSCW research. This award recognizes outstanding contributions to the innovation and redirection of the computing field, particularly in response to the challenges of our rapidly changing technical and social landscape. It acknowledges your significant impact on CSCW and the work of researchers within this field. What does receiving this award mean to you personally?
Ina: I feel immensely honored to have received this reward as a visible sign of appreciation and ‘belonging’. This is important to me since at the early stages of my career I have found myself ‘at the margins’. I have come a long way from studying physics to doing CSCW research. Not only did encountering CSCW in 1991 encouraged me to primarily focus my research on doing ethnographic studies in different work settings. I also felt that my interdisciplinarity was welcome: my early work on an STS perspective on scientific work, my experiences with German industrial sociology, my interest in studies of gender in science and technology, and in an ethical-political perspective on design.
EUSSET: EUSSET boasts a significant number of PhD student members, comprising at least a third of its active members. A similarly substantial portion consists of young professionals at the postdoctoral or assistant professor level. Many of these members view you as an esteemed authority and seek your guidance on research directions, career trajectories, and navigating the complexities of becoming and thriving as a researcher. What message would you impart to this group?
Ina: I am aware of the enormous pressure on young researchers in today’s academic world and am not sure if I can give useful advice. So much depends on a supportive environment and on the possibility to place one’s work in important publication venues. My first point concerns the importance of collaborating with people who share your values and perspectives and with whom it is a pleasure to work with. To be part of a good team is of immense value. Being active in research networks that are relevant to your research helps finding people with whom to write project proposals and forge longstanding relationships. I also would recommend looking out for opportunities to do fieldwork in contexts that offer a longer-term perspective. This is important in several respects: it opens the opportunity of studying practices in-depth, getting to know a field and the main stakeholders really well; and allows to engage in the design of artifacts that have the chance of being appropriated, further developed, and so on. In one word: the chance of doing practice-based research. Too many research engagements are too short to achieve these goals.
EUSSET: As researchers, we all encounter challenges and experience fulfilling breakthroughs. What was the most significant challenge you faced in your career, and what advice would you offer to early-career researchers who might be confronting similar obstacles?
Ina: The most significant challenge for me for a long time was the fact that I was not considered ‘mainstream’ – too interdisciplinary and focused on topics that were not considered relevant during the first half of my career (who cares about gender, about social aspects of science and technology?), not sufficiently ‘hardcore’ later, when I started working as a professor of informatics at TU Wien. Although challenging, facing obstacles can also provide the strength to pursue research and other aims against the ‘mainstream’ (e.g. colleagues’ ideas about relevant research topics, methods, and so forth) and find allies on the way. So, stick to your approach, to what intrigues you and you feel worthwhile engaging with.
EUSSET: What achievement are you most proud of, and which brought you particular happiness? What made this achievement special? What did you, and perhaps others, learn from it?
Ina: I had lots of good moments – a paper being accepted, a successful project proposal, a field trial that provided important insights … I remember having been particularly proud when we were invited to present the ‘Colour table’ (a mixed reality tool in support of collaborative urban planning) at an exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris. Apart from such moments, I am proud to have had and still have the opportunity to collaborate with excellent researchers – Ellen Balka, Carla Simone, Kjeld Schmidt, Tone Bratteteig, Toni Robertson, to name a few. Engaging in joint conceptual work and writing together helped me reach insights that I would not have been able to produce just by myself. I think it is important to invite others into your ‘projects’, to be open to what they have to contribute, and not to insist on ‘owning’ particular research materials and ideas.
EUSSET: We conduct our research in a highly dynamic environment, characterized by rapidly changing topics of interest. Given this rapidly evolving context, what is your perspective on the future of CSCW? Do you believe this context is less dynamic than it appears compared to earlier decades?
Ina: CSCW is a complex field of research, and it requires dedication and enthusiasm to become a good researcher. It is a highly dynamic field since new technologies with collaborative potentials are emerging all the time. I see two avenues to pursue in the future. First, CSCW researchers have produced a large and rich corpus of workplace studies in a wide range of settings, among them health care, design work, scientific work, ‘centers of coordination’, and so forth. I think it is high time to dedicate more effort to a comparative analysis of studies with and across domains. To compare something like, for example, home care arrangements in different countries without sidestepping the empirical complexities of the practice of caregiving is challenging. It may involve sharing empirical material from different contexts. Working through material from different empirical studies allows to progressively refine the ‘sensitizing concepts’ we use, showing how they may help capture the aspects of an observed phenomenon that ‘matter for design’ and, ultimately, build better systems. Another focus to strengthen is our understanding of coordinative technologies in practice, what makes them work and what their limitations are. The world is full of large-scale systems used at work and beyond and an important contribution for CSCW to make is to improve our understanding of these technologies, most of which have been developed without a practice-based perspective, and how they eventually can be improved to better support work and other activities.
EUSSET: Ina, thank you for sharing your valuable insights. Your experience is greatly valued by our community. We extend our congratulations and best wishes for your future endeavors.
The interview was conducted by Mateusz Dolata
