Juliane Busboom

According to recent research, the hybrid workspace should be recognized as a distinct "third space'' alongside the fully physical and fully remote workspace. However, the specific attributes of this third space remain uncertain. Following a research-through-design approach, this study seeks to explore the unique qualities of the hybrid cooperative space with a co-creative poster, that encourages a collaborative and speculative generation of such qualities. Based on the findings gathered at a research and art event, this study identifies three concrete affordances and qualities of the hybrid workspace and demonstrates the potential of looking beyond binary classification systems when designing for the hybrid cooperative space.

Hybrid work has become increasingly popular in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic. Despite its popularity, many organisations still strive to find an answer to "how to do hybrid cooperation right''. Enabling collaboration across digital and physical workspaces, participants, and practices is a great challenge, as it inevitably introduces asymmetric relations, incongruences in frames of reference, and misaligned ecosystems and technical infrastructures. The paper investigates approaches used to manage asymmetries in hybrid work settings and their impact on cooperation. Through a multi-sited ethnographic study, we reveal a prevalent reliance on mimicking tools and practices native to fully physical or fully digital settings in the hybrid space. These mimicking practices often arise because the hybrid work setting is viewed through a deficit lens, whereby it is perceived as lacking certain elements (e.g., body, voice, mobility) and access to modalities from especially the physical setting, thereby necessitating the need for compensation work. To provide vocabulary to conceptualize and articulate this type of practice, we introduce the concept compensation work, referring to work that is carried out to offset a deficiency or absence that has been identified, aiming to restore and re-establish a familiar state that has vanished. While compensating through mimicking is intuitive, such approaches assume that our known practices and interactions from the physical workspace can indeed be translated to another context, neglecting the fact that changing the medium inevitably impacts the message. Thus, cooperative practices and interactions taking place in the physical workspace do not remain the same when unfolding in the hybrid space. Finally, we suggest that in order to design technologies and practices that support hybrid cooperation we first need to acknowledge the hybrid workspace as a distinct "third space'' next to the fully remote and fully physical workspace. This includes following an experience-driven approach to hybrid cooperation, encouraging the design of innovative interactions that extend beyond merely compensating for asymmetries and leveraging the unique capabilities and affordances of these settings.

Designing new technologies to support synchronous interaction across distances has for many years focused on creating symmetry for participation between geographically distributed actors. Symmetry in synchronous interaction has, to some extent, been achieved technologically (while multiple social, historical, political, and hierarchical concerns continue to exist) and proven empirically in the increased use of remote-work technologies that were used during the pandemic. However, synchronous interaction in hybrid work is achieved differently, since the asymmetry produced by some participants being collocated while others geographically distributed introduces increased complexities for such interactions. Focusing on this challenge, we ask: To what extent can symmetry in cooperative work engagements be achieved in hybrid work contexts? We explore this question by interrogating multiple different empirical examples of synchronous hybrid interaction collected across different organizations, activities, and events. We found that the effort required to accomplish hybrid work includes additional articulation work necessary for bounding multiple intertwined artefacts across sites, devices, and applications. Further, the multiple artefacts setup across sites, combined with asymmetric collocation across participants, produce incongruence in technological frames of reference for each participant. All participants in hybrid work have only partial access to the hybrid setup, and no single person has access to the complete setup. The incongruence in technological frames produces insurmountable gaps in collaboration, causing all hybrid work situations to be characterized fundamentally by asymmetric relationships. We argue that symmetry in hybrid synchronous interaction is impossible to attain in attempts to solve this problem through design. Instead, we propose that designers of cooperative technologies for hybrid work shift towards developing artefact-ecologies supporting hybrid work, focusing on asymmetry as a necessary feature. Fundamentally, the design strategy should explore novel ways of taking advantage of the multiple different artefact-ecologies which serve as the foundation for the hybrid collaboration. Instead of striving for symmetry, we propose to feature asymmetric conditions in future technology designs for hybrid interaction.

Throughout the last years, but especially with the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, our workplaces and way of ’going to work’ has changed a lot. One might even claim that the nature of work is ’in limbo’, a transitional phase between the traditional on-site workplace and hybrid and remote work conditions. This overview of my doctoral research starts with a number of future oriented questions regarding collaboration and human interactions, embodied presence and socio-materiality in hybrid and remote work environments. The hypothesis is that a participatory futuring approach can engage stakeholders from different industries in a collective development of alternative futures and thereby inform the re-thinking process around remote and hybrid work conditions within and across industries. Hence, several empirical studies are proposed in order to (1) understand hybrid work settings and its challenges (2) create knowledge around possible futures of hybrid work and (3) investigate the strategic value of participatory futuring methods in industrial settings.