Qualitative Data Analysis Collage, 2025

This collage is the result of the data analysis phase of a Research through Art study about “the future of work”, situated in a Computer Science and Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) context. Research through Art leverages artistic practice as a form of inquiry, recognizing arts-based knowledge as complimentary to traditional research practices in computer science. The research is part of the project ReWork: The Future of Hybrid Work, funded by Digital Research Centre Denmark (DIREC).

In the study, CSCW researchers collaborated with four professional artists. Through a series of workshops, we discussed the topic, our own practices, and ideas about the future. Following the workshops, the artists created “art prototypes” (artistic works in progress or provocations, but not necessarily finished works of art) that explored “the future of work” through their own practices, sometimes in collaboration with other creatives, industry partners, and/or researchers. These art prototypes, alongside research artifacts from the ReWork project, were presented at a public event called the ReWork Artistic Exploratory: Research & Art Exhibition (RAE), attended by about 80 people, including academics, industry professionals, artists, and members of the public. At the event, researchers collected data about people’s thoughts, fears, hopes, and ideas in relation to both the artworks and research artifacts. Data included 32 structured mini-interviews, 6 semi-structured interviews (20–40 minutes each), photographs, polling, print materials, artifacts, and researcher memos.

Beyond gathering perspectives on “the future of work,” we also examined how people connect—or struggle to connect—with abstract topics such as “the future of [something]” through art. This raised our key research question: “What makes imaginaries of the future actionable and available in everyday reality?”

To analyze this rich and imaginative dataset, we applied an arts-based method we call "Data Collaging". The approach involved:

1. Gathering all data in material form (printed transcripts and visual media)

2. Listening to interview audio and cutting text snippets aligned with the research question

3. Visually interpreting snippets by collaging imagery and text (prioritizing connotation over denotation)

4. Gluing imagery to canvas to organically develop a thematic map

5. Documenting the process in metadata (journal entries, photos, reflective conversations, and an index linking metadata to primary data)

Through this process, the collage came to embody multiple layers of information: text snippets, interpretive imagery, thematic mapping, and metadata. The accompanying metadata journal is especially significant, as it details and explains each piece of imagery, its placement in the thematic map, and its relation to the research question—serving as the key that makes the abstract imagery legible and meaningful after the fact.

This interactive version of the data collage is an attempt to make the results of our handmade analysis legible for people outside the project, as a companion to the two forthcoming papers detailing our results and method. By clicking on the map points in the collage, you can read the metadata journal entry that was written when each piece of imagery was crafted, explaining how a particular text snippet and bit of imagery tell us something about the research question: what makes imaginaries of the future actionable?

The journal metadata also captures in-process reflections about the data collaging method itself. You may explore the collage thematically, by looking at pieces of imagery in proximity to each other, or chronologically through the numbered map points to follow the analysis in the order in which it was crafted.

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

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

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