The TRACE-WORK project
Traces left behind by work are important for coordination and shared awareness among collaborators, and for individuals' overview of their own work. However, because many of these traces are byproducts of the actual work (such as time stamps and other meta data, or auxiliary files like notes or drafts), current user interfaces aren't designed to help users notice and use traces.
The TRACE-WORK project asks: How can workplace technology make digital traces into something that can be more readily perceived and interacted with? What would workplace tools look like if the notion of traces was engrained in their design, similar to the way that most of us expect computers to have windows and a mouse pointer? And what would this mean for work practices?
HOW (THE RESEARCH): To answer this, we are doing research to be able to say what exactly traces are, how they can be categorized, and how they support work. We are doing this by:
- ... consolidating existing research on human-computer interaction, design, and engineering that has proposed traces or trace-like concepts for specific use cases.
- ... doing empirical studies in Irish workplaces, using observations and interviews to identify real-world examples of traces and how people experience them.
HOW (PUBLIC PARTICIPATION): The foundation for this is co-research, where participants from Irish workplaces help shape the data collection and analysis. By drawing on participants’ expertise throughout the process, we strive for the outcomes to be more accurate and more relevant to the people and workplaces it concerns. To facilitate this, participants
- ... receive training in interview communication and qualitative data analysis, before they
- ... join the TRACE-WORK researchers in developing the interview questions and analysing collected data. So that participants don’t have to wait until the end of the project to experience relevance and value from the research, the training they receive will be adapted to make it applicable in their daily work as well.
We are currently looking for workplaces in Ireland interested in participating in this research.
Send an email to iLarsen-Ledet@ucc.ie or contact Ida Larsen-Ledet via LinkedIn if you or your organisation or workplace would like to hear more about the research.
The project is funded by the European Union. For more information, see the Horizon Europe project description page.
Traces
What are traces? That’s a good question! Hopefully, TRACE-WORK will result in a better definition of this.
We are undertaking a literature review to understand how people in human-computer interaction (HCI) have defined and explored traces so far. Stay tuned!
If you’re impatient, you can also read the paper that inspired the project: "Two Cases for Traces: A Theoretical Framing of Mediated Joint Activity" and the proposal for the 2025 CSCW workshop on Traces, Breadcrumbs, and Patina: Exploring and Designing with Traces of Activity.
Project methodology
TRACE-WORK will be using participant co-research. This is a term we have chosen for a form of participatory research that involves participants in doing the research beyond co-design activities.
The project aims to achieve this by
- training participants in research methods
- … to enable them to help develop the research protocols
- … and take part in data analysis.
The study will also involve observations of participants’ work and interviews to both prepare for these observations and discuss them afterwards.
The methodology is inspired by worker-led research, but as the research objectives are predefined, the project cannot lay claim to truly being worker-led.