Interactions - March/April 2011

gle individual, as with the Danish bloggers. CI is, furthermore, oriented toward change, regarding it as inevitable in IT practice.

CI is sympathetic to popular notions of appropriation and domestication of technology that permeates the literature, but at the same time, CI’s commitment to interrogating and conducting design, and accounting for powerful corporate and governmental institutions enmeshed in design activity, is paramount. In particular, providing academic resistance/dialogues to corporate and governmental interests is a key facet of CI’s critical attitude. End users and consumers constitute elements of a complex system to be apprehended through a logic in which institutional forces remain visible and potent.

Grounded comparisons have
clear design implications and
should shape discourse that
shapes design, even if compari-
sons do not indicate immediate
business strategies. A goal of
research is to open novel vistas
of thought and to populate them
with rich descriptive and analytic
materials that carry the capac-
ity to inform, provoke, and edify
discussions in arenas of practical
activity. CI can admirably serve
this role by underwriting reflec-
tion and analysis, heading off
scenarios in which we are liable
to uncritically export what is
taken for granted in the West (or
the U.S. or California) to the rest
of the world, lacking sensitivity
to geographies and other dimen-
sions of difference. By the same
token, just as universal design in
architecture and interior design
emerged from the specificities
of disability, grounded compari-
son potentiates the discovery of
new “universals” as it reports
and reveals precise, distinctive
human experience in diverse
arenas, experiences to tactically
appropriate in multiple contexts.

[ 3] Clemmensen, T. Regional styles of human-computer interaction. Proc. of the Third International Conference on Intercultural Collaboration (Copenhagen, Denmark, Aug. 19-20). ACM, New York, 2010, 219-222. [ 4] Card, S., Moran, T. P. and Newell, A. The Psychology of Human-Computer Interaction. LEA, Hillsdale, N, 1983. [ 5] Mantovani, G. Internet haze: Why new artifacts can enhance situation ambiguity. Culture and Psychology 8, 3 (2002), 307-326. [ 6] Ito, M., and Nakakoji, K. Impact of culture on user interface design. In E. D. Galdo and J. Nielsen (eds.), International User Interfaces Wiley, New York, 1996, 105-126. [ 7] Masaaki Kurosu at The Open University of Japan personal communication, October 2010. [ 8] Katre, D. S. A position paper on cross-cultural issues of bilingual (Hindi and English) mobile phones. Proc. of Indo-Danish HCI Research Symposium (Guwahati, India, May 14-15). 2006. [ 9] Gupta, R. Indian language support in Microsoft products, 2004; http://tdil.mit.gov.in/Oct_2004/ ILSMP- 11.pdf/ [ 10] Glamman, 2009. [ 11] Andersen, A. AE, Ø og Å på udanske computere De berejstes klub, 2005; http://www.berejst.dk/209/ Tastatur.htm/ [ 12] Kow, Y.M. and Nardi, B. Forget online communities? Revisit cooperative work! To appear in Proc. Conference on Computer-supported Cooperative Work. (2011). [ 13] Bryant, S., Forte, A. and Bruckman, A. Becoming Wikipedian: Transformation of participation in a collaborative online encyclopedia. Proc.of the 2005 International ACM SIGGROUP Conference on Supporting Group Work, GROUP’05. (Sanibel Island, FL, Nov. 6–9). ACM, New York, 2005, 1-10. [ 14] Hofstede, G. Culture’s Consequence: Comparing Values, Behaviours, Institutions and Organizations Across Nations Sage Publications, Thousand Oaks, CA, 1980

Acknowledgments

The First International Workshop on Comparative Informatics was convened at the Copenhagen Business School August 22–23, 2010. The Workshop was supported by a grant to Ravi Vatrapu under the First International Network Programme of the Danish Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation. The Workshop brought together an international group of ICT researchers to develop a CI agenda.

Participants were: Ravi Vatrapu, Torkil Clemmensen, and Janni Nielsen of the Copenhagen Business School; Ellen Christiansen of Aalborg University; Ruy Cervantes and Bonnie Nardi of the University of California, Irvine; Mara Miller and Scott Robertson of the University of Hawaii at Manoa; Zhengjie Liu of the Dalian Maritime University, China; and Yair Amichai-Hamburger of the Interdisciplinary Center, Herzliya, Israel.

END No TES

[ 1] Vatrapu, R. Explaining culture: An outline of a theory of socio-technical interactions. Proc. of the Third International Conference on Intercultural Collaboration (Copenhagen, Denmark, Aug. 19-20). ACM, New York, 2010, 111-120. [ 2] Vatrapu, R. Cultural considerations in computer supported collaborative learning. Research and Practice in Technology Enhanced Learning 3, 2 (2008),159-201.

About thE Authors
Bonnie Nardi is an anthropologist
in the School of Information and
Computer Science at the
University of California, Irvine. Her
research concerns online comput-
er games, ethnographic methods,
Ravi Vatrapu is an associate pro-
fessor of Applied ICT and director
of the Computational Social
Science Laboratory at the
Copenhagen Business School.
His current research focuses on
theory-based empirical studies of
socio-technical affordances.

Torkil Clemmensen is an associate
professor in the Department of
Informatics, Copenhagen
Business School, Denmark. His
research includes interests in vir-
tual communities and cultural-
cognitive perspectives on user
representations.