Beyond Awareness: Boundary Objects as Reifications of Cooperation in a Papermill

Awareness support is increasingly receiving attention within CSCW research. The idea of awareness support is that systems provide members of a group with information about the behavior of other group members in order to create a notion of awareness of what others are doing. As in natural settings, peripheral monitoring and explicit display can be valuable resources for collaboration (Dourish, 1999). Many settings, however, require not only enhanced mutual perceptibility but also sustained visualisations of shared visions. In such settings, reifications involved exceed the expressiveness of the awareness vocabulary. In what follows, we discuss quality and energy management in a papermill to illustrate the point. Wenger’s book on “communities of practice” (Wenger, 1998) provides the vocabulary to meet the complexity of the setting and to nail down lessons learned.