Exploring Challenging Environments: Contextual Research in the Car and the Factory Through an HCI Lens

Nontraditional environments offer a variety of methodological challenges when exploring cooperation under very specific contextual conditions. We understand contexts as challenging when they exhibit very specific/unique characteristics that need to be explored beyond traditional and already better-understood working/office settings. Moreover, these challenging environments are contexts in which human-human interaction mediated by computing systems and human-machine collaboration is hard to observe. In this paper, we focus on two challenging environments: the highly context-dependent automotive environment and the complex context of a semiconductor factory. Both contexts offer potential in a variety of ways for novel computer-supported cooperative work research, such as driver/codriver cooperation and operator-robot cooperation. In this book chapter, two exemplary contexts “car” and “factory” will be characterized in terms of (1) research challenges posed by the context, (2) performed exploratory studies, and (3) methodological implications for the two exemplary contexts, as well as for CSCW and HCI research practices in general.

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