Anticipation Work: Cultivating Vision in Collective Practice

Problems of temporality in distributed cooperative work have emerged as an important theme of CSCW and HCI work. This paper draws on ethnographic fieldwork into large-scale infrastructure development in ecology and ocean science and analyses of futurism in science and technology studies to call attention to "anticipation work": the practices that cultivate and channel expectations of the future, design pathways into those imaginations, and maintain those visions in the face of a dynamic world. We advance three basic claims: first, that long term technological development and sustainability in science is guided by complex and distributed forms of futurism; second, that all actors (both individual and collective) orient towards the future (at both temporally close and distant scales); and third, that actors engage in complex and skilled forms of anticipation work -- individual and collective, formal and informal -- that guide and shape the present character and experience of collaborative life.