Cooperative work differs depending on contexts and tasks, whether co-located, synchronous, or distributed in time and space. New technology allows new opportunities to support cooperation. A central aspect of cooperation is the relation to individual work; when co-located, people enter and exit cooperation seamlessly. This dissertation explores how technology, situation, and context interplay in various forms of cooperation. It addresses two research questions: (1) How do people get engaged in cooperative work? and (2) How can engagement in distributed cooperative work be supported?

The work focuses on ethnographic empirical studies that analyse the interaction between humans and technology across various domains. Workplace studies have been conducted in different fields. Emergency service work, truck driver's work, building maintenance workers, and visitor's technology use at a music festival. The workplace studies in the dissertation imply that field studies are conducted to document and analyse how people use technology and how this use takes place. Common to all studies is the work about activities distributed in time and space.

These research findings inform the development of new perspectives, concepts, and design challenges for distributed collaboration. The dissertation discusses two primary ways to engage in cooperative work are identified: requesting and choosing to engage through shared materials and artefacts support awareness and enable cooperative work. The results identify four factors to facilitate engagement in remote cooperative environments: supporting requests and choices to engage, providing opportunities to use artefacts, promoting shareability, and incorporating awareness technology.

The dissertation contributes new insights into the interplay between technology, situation, and context in cooperation. Providing design insights for distributed collaboration, and the exploration of design concepts and analysis models. The contributions emphasize the dynamic nature of collaboration and the importance of understanding the relationship between individual and cooperative work to support distributed and remote collaboration effectively.

In this paper we present results from a research and development project focusing on the use of mobile phones at a music festival. Our aim is to explore how the festival experience can be enhanced with the introduction of mobile services. Two questions are addressed: Are there any design-openings for new services supporting groups at large-scale events? If so, what design challenges can be identified as important to consider in order to enhance the festival experience? Our conclusion is that there are several design-openings for new services supporting groups at large-scale events. We identify two different design challenges to address when designing new services; Supporting ad-hoc re-planning and shareability. The study contributes to better suited designs of services and technology in mobile settings as this music festival as well as for other large-scale events.

The field of our study takes place in the Swedish emergency service centre. The operators receiveemergency calls and are responsible for the coordination and dispatch of ambulances and rescue services.Emergency literature has treated its materials in the mode of catastrophe. Operators’ mundane work and technologicalenvironment for handling the unexpected changes have been often addressed in terms of error, mistakes, mishandling andother misunderstandings. Our paper wants to show that operator’s work practice sustained a comprehensive approach oftechnology use such as to keep full ability to handle unexpected change. This point is crucial to understand technology in action.It is precisely the good handling of technology that allows taking into account the most unexpected change with great success.Our paper shows how story eliciting is bounded to technological possibilities and as such is part of everyday professionalconduct of call taker and dispatchers. The challenge of this paper is to show that technology is a crucial part of their mode ofaction. As such, it cannot be separated from the on-going course of case handling. Our particular case is a story where a callerrequests an ambulance on behalf of an unconscious friend. The operator decides to proceed to the dispatch of an ambulance.In the sustained conversation with the caller, it turns out that the friend in question recovered her consciousness. We show inthis paper that the story elicitation, remote conversation and scenic background information, are working tools that keep accesswith the reality of the caller. The main point is that emergency can turn out to be health care advice without any major problems.We will show that all key access to the scenic feature of the caller are monitored through and through by technological artefactsthat will be examined