Melanie Duckert

Navigating the complexities of shared hybrid workspaces presents significant challenges, with a risk of producing problematic spatial dynamics. Drawing on an ethnographic study, we scrutinize how office workers produce and negotiate hybrid spatial arrangements and identify location multiplicity as a core challenge for reintroducing physical elements into hybrid office workspaces after the COVID-19 pandemic. From a temporal perspective, hybrid work represents multiple locations, separated across several 'homes' and office spaces. Location multiplicity emphasizes the mobility of individuals, introducing instability and unpredictability into cooperative work. To navigate the temporal nature of constellation change, our findings reveal workers rely on the stability of the digital space, while consequently disconnecting from the malleable physical space. Thus, the physical space risks becoming a lost opportunity for the collocated subgroup - a 'lost space' in hybrid work. We suggest that a CSCW design challenge for hybrid work is designing hybrid infrastructures that facilitate an experience of stability and predictability across temporal and spatial dimensions, with embedded affordances for integrating both physical and digital elements across multiple locations.

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.

In 1994, Jonathan Grudin wrote his famous paper Eight Challenges for Groupware Developers; The question is whether these challenges still persist, or have we moved on here 30 years later? We revisit the challenges empirically through ethnographic observations in two companies examining their work practices, organizational structure, and cooperative setups concerning their use of groupware technologies. Today, groupware is seamlessly integrated into organizations, considered essential infrastructure that becomes part of the daily work routine. Contextualizing the original challenges proposed by Grudin, we categorize them into cooperative challenges, social challenges, and organizational challenges, and refine their phrasings to reflect present and future considerations faced by developers of groupware technologies. While the main arguments of the social and organizational challenges remain consistent, we rephrase the cooperative challenges asemergent exception handlingandexaggerated accessibilityto reflect the emerging characteristics associated with the ubiquity and seamless integration of groupware.

Collaboration across distances is a core interest in CSCW. During the COVID-19 pandemic, most people were forced to work from home, and this long-term change in work conditions revealed both opportunities and challenges that continue to affect the post-pandemic future. While we do not know in which specific ways, we are certain that it will combine analog and digital work practices. Hybrid work consists of both collocated and distributed people whose collaboration is enabled by physical as well as digital artefacts. This PhD research aim to comprehend cooperative engagements across the spectrum of fully collocated and completely virtual, focusing the placement of hybrid work. We study how hybrid work can be conceptualized within the research field of CSCW. This conceptual grounding is vital for understanding the extent and implications of hybrid work in designing technologies to support future work practices

After the pandemic, it is urgently important to explore the special challenges which arise with hybrid work. Through cross-case analyses of published papers, we propose collocated distance as a design challenge uniquely relevant for hybrid cooperative technologies. We identify and conceptualize collocated distance as a design challenge that arises in hybrid work situations, where at least three actors are mutually dependent in their work while being located within fewer contexts than the number of actors. Collocated distance reminds us that when designing hybrid technologies, we must not only focus on creating technologies that support the work across geographical locations but equally pay attention to the relations and possible disconnections which exist locally between collocated actors. When designing cooperative technologies supporting distributed work, often focus is on the boundaries between geographical contexts – however, in hybrid work, we must not forget to pay attention to the collocated boundaries within the same context.