CSCW and the Internet of Things – Reflection

This paper discusses how CSCW concepts and approaches can help gain an understanding of IoT from a social and practice perspective. It raised concerns about designing technologies for the future. The authors argue that CSCW can make important contributions to the development of IoT technologies. The authors suggest the conceptualization of the cooperation between objects and spaces as cooperative work and of the IoT using key CSCW concepts.

 The authors go forward to describe a few key concepts: Coordination mechanisms: Where IoT is an evolving set of coordination mechanisms for different application areas. Many devices today already allow for coordination mechanisms to enable coordinated work, such as Google Home and Amazon Echo. Local Contexts and Common Information Spaces: Ways of understanding the ‘reasoning’ of interconnected objects or which aspects of their specific local contexts. This is true whenever we want to enable social interactions that are depended on context awareness, for example in the workplace. Finally, Awareness: Awareness is an IoT device’s ability to understand events and activities occurring in the physical world’. Knowing the surroundings and interactive elements around it, an IoT device can be more useful and enable more activities.

IoT devices are moving from large industrial sections of the world and into our homes. The integration of existing tech into the IoT world has enabled it to become an integral part of people’s lives. Seamless integrations into people’s daily lives using the 5 concepts described above can help create better collaborate and social environments using IoT.