Exploring and Designing with Traces of Activity
Workshop @ the 2025 ACM CSCW conference
Date: Saturday the 18th of October
Location: Bergen, Norway
The traces left over from people's activities are important for sense-making during work and collaboration. Traces help people remember and interpret the state of things, for example by helping them get a sense of what other people are or have been doing in a shared (digital) workspace.
The concept of traces has popped up in CSCW and HCI multiple times over the past decades, as have related concepts, including patina, footprints, breadcrumbs, document DNA, and stigmergic signs. The discussions have been about both systems development, design, and empirical studies. It is clear from this that the notion of traces is relevant to several sub-communities; yet, it hasn't been picked up in a structured way.
With this workshop, we invite researchers from multiple disciplinary approaches to come together to strengthen the conceptual apparatus surrounding traces and related concepts, to help advance the potential for future research on and with traces.
The primary aim of this workshop is to consolidate the currently many and often vague notions of what traces are and how to work with them in the creation and study of systems for collaboration and/or work.
In the workshop, we will
| Time | Activity |
|---|---|
| 8:00-9:00 | Arrival and registration (at main desk) |
| 9:00 | Welcome |
| 9:10 | Icebreaker |
| 9:45 | Short presentations and discussion in groups |
| 10:30 | BREAK |
| 11:00 | Show and tell and discussion in groups |
| 11:30 | Vote with your feet |
| 12:00-13:30 | LUNCH BREAK |
| 13:30 | On-site trace archaeology |
| 15:00 | BREAK |
| 15:30 | Thematic group discussions |
| 16:30 | Plenary reflection and follow-up planning |
| 17:00 | WORKSHOP ENDS |
Ida Larsen-Ledet is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at the School of Applied Psychology at University College Cork. She is currently working on the TRACE-WORK project, which aims to develop design principles for workplace technology that helps people draw on traces. Before this, her research has addressed collaborative writing and organizational knowledge sharing, including the use of social and information cues found in user interfaces. She has been on the organizing committee for NordiCHI and, currently, the 2025 Aarhus Decennial HCI Conference.
Myriam Lewkowicz is Professor of Informatics at Troyes University of Technology. She is interested in defining digital technologies to support existing collective practices or design new collective activities. This interdisciplinary research proposes reflections and approaches for analyzing and designing new products and services to support cooperative work. The main application domains for this research for the last fifteen years have been healthcare (social support, coordination, telemedicine) and industry (digital transformation, maintenance). She has organized numerous workshops at international venues related to CSCW research and has recently (2023 and 2024) chaired two workshops at ECSCW on data at the workplace. She has chaired the European scientific association EUSSET, and is deputy editor-in-chief of the CSCW journal, The Journal of Collaborative Computing and Work Practices.
Clemens N. Klokmose is an Associate Professor at the Department of Computer Science, Aarhus University. His research interests include collaboration, user interface technologies, and human-computer interaction. He is particularly interested in software platforms that inherently support collaboration in all aspects of their use, and that are tailorable while in use. He leads the development of the Webstrates platform webstrates.net, used for exploring this in practice. He is an experienced workshop organizer, was general co-chair of NordiCHI 2022, and is general co-chair of the 2025 Aarhus Decennial HCI Conference.
Carol Linehan is a Professor at the School of Applied Psychology at University College Cork. Her key research interests are centered on applying psychology to understand people’s experiences of work and organizations. She has particular interest in the impacts of work practices on employees' construction and performance of selves.
Luigina Ciolfi is Professor of Human Computer Interaction at the School of Applied Psychology at University College Cork and academic member of Lero – The Research Ireland Centre for Software. She has long experience researching mobile and flexible work from a CSCW practice-centered lens, and has co-organized numerous international workshops at venues such as the CHI, CSCW, ECSCW and DIS conferences. She is an Associate Editor of the CSCW Journal.