What Is an Activity? Appropriating an Activity-Centric System

Activity-Centric Computing (ACC) systems seek to address the fragmentation of office work across tools and documents by allowing users to organize work around the computational construct of an Activity. Defining and structuring appropriate Activities within a system poses a challenge for users that must be overcome in order to benefit from ACC support. We know little about how knowledge workers appropriate the Activity construct. To address this, we studied users’ appropriation of a production-quality ACC system, Lotus Activities, for everyday work by employees in a large corporation. We contribute to a better understanding of how users articulate their individual and collaborative work in the system by providing empirical evidence of their patterns of appropriation. We conclude by discussing how our findings can inform the design of other ACC systems for the workplace.