Resources, Co-Evolution and Artifacts

How do software and other technical systems come to be adopted and used?

People use software and other technical systems in many ways, and a considerable amount of time and energy may be spent integrating the functionality of the system with the everyday activities it is intended to support. Understanding how this comes about, and understanding how to design systems so that it happens more easily, is a topic of great interest to the CSCW, IT and IS communities.

Resources, Co-Evolution and Artifacts: Theory in CSCW approaches this problem by looking at resources - artifacts that have come to be used in a particular manner in a given situation - and examining how they get created, adopted, modified, and abandoned. The theoretical and empirical studies in this volume examine issues such as:

- how resources are tailored or otherwise changed as situations change;

- how a resource is maintained and reused within an organization;

- the ways in which the value of a resource comes to be understood;

- the ways in which an artifact is transformed to function more effectively;

- how one might approach the problem of designing a resource de novo.