Research
Two people discussing the artwork Multiviews in a workspace as part of a Research through Art project.
Boundary Rogues in Cooperative Research Through Art: Keep That Potato Rolling, 2025
“We demonstrate how Research through Art (RtA) extends the CSCW agenda to include considerations of “work as a mental-emotional experience” complementing “work as a practice.” We do this by documenting how one art piece, Multiviews, was created in connection to a workplace and later displayed in different circumstances and contexts, producing the art piece as a sociomaterial entity. As a sociomaterial entity, Multiviews allowed organizational members to engage with the elusive phenomenon “the future of work” in novel ways, informing us as CSCW researchers about the importance of including the mental-emotional experience of work when designing cooperative technologies. Multiviews pushed the notion of “comfort” from a physical consideration on ergonomics and practicalities to bring the emotional experience of comfort into the center of attention, prompting people to imagine the workplace as a mental experience as well as a physical or digital place. Reflecting upon our unorthodox methods of collaborating with an artist in the CSCW study, and the role which the art piece played in the collaboration, we suggest extending CSCW research vocabulary on boundary objects in cooperative work with the concept of the boundary rogue to describe how the fundamental strangeness of the artwork as a sociomaterial entity made it function as a collaborative artifact uniquely productive across the multiple contexts: work, art, and research, providing new types of insights.” Kellie Dunn and Pernille Bjørn. 2025. Boundary Rogues in Cooperative Research Through Art: Keep That Potato Rolling. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW): 1–47. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10606-025-09522-4
“Hybrid interaction, where co-located participants fold their bodies to accommodate the technology.”
Achieving Symmetry in Synchronous Interaction in Hybrid Work is Impossible, 2024
“Designing new technologies to support synchronous interaction across distance has for many years focused on creating symmetry for participation between geographically distributed actors. Symmetry in synchronous interaction has, to some extent, been achieved technologically (while multiple social, historical, political, and hierarchical concerns continue to exist) and proven empirically in the increased use of remote-work technologies that were used during the pandemic. However, synchronous interaction in hybrid work is achieved differently, since the asymmetry produced by some participants being collocated while others geographically distributed introduces increased complexities for such interactions. Focusing on this challenge, we ask: To what extent can symmetry in cooperative work engagements be achieved in hybrid work contexts? We explore this question by interrogating multiple different empirical examples of synchronous hybrid interaction collected across different organizations, activities, and events. We found that the effort required to accomplish hybrid work includes additional articulation work necessary for bounding multiple intertwined artefacts across sites, devices, and applications. Further, the multiple artefacts setup across sites, combined with asymmetric collocation across participants, produce incongruence in technological frames of reference for each participant. All participants in hybrid work have only partial access to the hybrid setup, and no single person has access to the complete setup. The incongruence in technological frames produces insurmountable gaps in collaboration, causing all hybrid work situations to be characterized fundamentally by asymmetric relationships. We argue that symmetry in hybrid synchronous interaction is impossible to attain in attempts to solve this problem through design. Instead, we propose that designers of cooperative technologies for hybrid work shift towards developing artefact-ecologies supporting hybrid work, focusing on asymmetry as a necessary feature. Fundamentally, the design strategy should explore novel ways of taking advantage of the multiple different artefact-ecologies which serve as the foundation for the hybrid collaboration. Instead of striving for symmetry, we propose to feature asymmetric conditions in future technology designs for hybrid interaction.” Pernille Bjørn, Juliane Busboom, Melanie Duckert, Susanne Bødker, Irina Shklovski, Eve Hoggan, Kellie Dunn, Qianqian Mu, Louise Barkhuus, and Nina Boulus-Rødje. 2024. Achieving Symmetry in Synchronous Interaction in Hybrid Work is Impossible. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction. https://doi.org/10.1145/3648617
Conceptualizing ambiguities as multifinalities from which many questions and futures can be imagined.
What Research through Art can bring to CSCW: exploring ambiguous futures of work, 2024
“As work is shifting and changing, we, CSCW researchers, must consider our role in creating work futures, and what experiences we want to produce through technology design. What qualities are important to consider about the human experience when designing work technologies for the future? Exploring the potentials of artistic practices for epistemological inquiry, we demonstrate Research through Art as a novel futuring approach for CSCW research, leveraging the power of artistic practice for exploring questions of human experience. We engaged with young artists who created art pieces that manifested their hopes, intuitions, and anxieties on the future of work. Our analytical inquiry of these artistic practices allowed us to explore what different futures might be imaginable and what might these futures feel like. We find that futuring entails engaging with ambiguities, which can be a productive resource for design. We identified the ambiguities of time, purpose, body, identity, and agency as foundational for the imaginaries produced by the artists. By intersecting the ambiguities, we can begin to systematically frame novel design questions for CSCW technologies of the future by conceptualizing these ambiguities as multifinalities – single points from which many possibilities emerge.” Dunn, Kellie, Shklovski, Irina and Bjørn, Pernille. "What Research through Art can bring to CSCW: exploring ambiguous futures of work" i-com, vol. 23, no. 1, 2024, pp. 33-55. https://doi.org/10.1515/icom-2023-0038
ReWork Artistic Exploratory: Research & Art Exhibition, 2023
A public exhibition at the University of Copenhagen exploring the topic “the future of work” through art and research artifacts.
This event was the culmination of a year long collaboration with professional artists, industrial partners, and academic partners of the ReWork research project.
A Jubilee carriage with a 3D printing tool, printing a part for a subsequent Jubilee build.
Jubilee 3D @ Machine Agency, 2020-2023
A research team working on Jubilee3D, an open source rapid prototyping CNC motion platform with integrated tool changer. In early 2020, my team co-built a second Jubilee V2 in the Machine Agency lab at University of Washington, testing and making usability improvements to the original step-by-step documentation, creating process photos and video documentation, and making contributions to the project’s Github and Wiki.
Our team also researched the international Jubilee builders community online, via semi-structured interviews and data collection on the Jubilee Builders & Extenders Discord server. We are exploring and documenting the successful replication, extension, and fabricatability of the Jubilee machine, as well as how open source hardware communities share and improve technical knowledge. We have published a paper from this research: Jubilee: A Case Study of Distributed Manufacturing in an Open Source Hardware Project
Contributions:
hardware testing, technical documentation editing, technical writing, bug reports, qualitative remote interviews, analysis of Discord server data, qualitative data analysis, writing
A drawing of a goldfish printed in bacteria by BioArtBot
Perspectives from Lab Members on DIYBio Work in Community Biolabs, 2022
“DIYbio challenges the status quo by positioning laboratory biology work outside of traditional institutions. HCI has increasingly explored the DIYbio movement, but we lack insight into sites of practice such as community biolabs. Therefore, we gathered data on eleven community biolabs by interviewing sixteen lab managers and members. These labs represent half of identified organizations in scope worldwide. Participants detailed their practices and motivations, outlining the constraints and opportunities of their community biolabs. We found that lab members conducted technically challenging project work with access to high-end equipment and professional expertise. We found that the unique nature of biowork exacerbated challenges for cooperative work, partially due to the particular time sensitivities of work with living organisms. Building on our findings, we discuss how community biolab members are creating new approaches to laboratory biology and how this has design implications for systems that support non-traditional settings for scientific practice.” Orlando de Lange, Kellie Dunn, and Nadya Peek. 2022. “Short on time and big on ideas”: Perspectives from Lab Members on DIYBio Work in Community Biolabs. In Proceedings of the 2022 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS '22). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1358–1376. https://doi.org/10.1145/3532106.3533521
Participants in our Seattle Freeze study, co-creating hypothetical welcome guides to the city.
The Seattle Freeze Social Phenomenon, 2019
The Seattle Freeze is a social-cultural phenomenon referring to the difficulty of making new friends in Seattle. This project explored how different people think about and experience the Seattle Freeze. In this phenomenological qualitative study, we found that all participants defined the Seattle Freeze similarly but had different experiences with the phenomenon. We used multiple methods, including prompted selfie videos, individual and group interviews, and an interactive social activity. To organize our data, we used thematic analysis and looked for common themes in participant experiences. Using a Miro board, we coded predominant themes in both emergent and in vivo style and noted outliers. We then organized the codes into overarching themes, which were captured in a Miro board and discussed in our findings in our final report.
Contributions:
participant recruitment, lab and recording equipment logistics and setup, in-person interviews, note taking, thematic analysis, writing, presentation of results
An example of some of our findings in this usability study.
AIrline Booking Usability Study, 2018
As part of a master’s level course on usability studies, my team of 3 graduate students designed and conducted a usability study sponsored by a major airline. This airline’s development team sought to understand the experience of parents when they book flights for themselves and their young children through the airline’s website. The client had outlined several points in the process where they suspected that parents of young children may experience difficulty, and we designed a research plan to test these and other aspects of the online booking process.
Our team of 3 researchers recruited participants through a survey, scheduled and conducted ten 1-hour usability tests (4 in person, 6 remote), and analyzed qualitative and quantitative data from our sessions. In an in-depth final report, we identified situational problems, usability problems, and delighters; made detailed recommendations for changes and improvements with examples of user pain points and data; and identified areas that would benefit from further studies.
Contributions:
usability study plan/proposal, participant screening & recruitment, scheduling & logistics, note taking, remote interviews, in-person interviews, data analysis, writing, presentation of results
