Gloria Mark and Martha Feldman received
an award from the NSF titled Collaboration Resilience:
Restoring Human Infrastructure with Technology. Their
innovative research will provide a comprehensive and integrated
view of the role of technology in repairing human infrastructure
when the environment is disrupted. This is through NSF’s
Program “Information and Intelligent Systems: Advancing
Human-Centered Computing, Information Integration and Informatics,
and Robust Intelligence.” Below is a summary of their
three year project.
Project Summary
In recent years, we have experienced major events that have
disrupted the environment and infrastructures all over the
world: 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, natural disasters, terrorist
attacks, and numerous wars. These events have resulted in
huge work disruptions with substantial economic costs. A research
area that has received little attention to date is how the
human infrastructure can be repaired when the environment
is disrupted. By human infrastructure, we refer to the patterns
of relationships of people through various networks and social
arrangements. We argue that repairing human infrastructure
is an essential part of coping with disrupted environments.
Environmental disruptions are not new. What is new is that
we are now living in an age where Internet and mobile technologies
that enable people to share real time information and to communicate
across distance are nearly ubiquitous for many people worldwide.
We believe that this real time ubiquitious control of information
and communication critically affects how the human infrastructure
is repaired after an environmental disruption. In this proposal
we will investigate the following research questions:
- How can ubiquitious and current Internet technologies,
as well as technologies longer in use, help people in rebuilding
their human infrastructure when the environment is disrupted?
- What role do these technologies play in enabling people
to establish or reestablish the human infrastructure necessary
for collaborative work routines?
- How can organizations facilitate the ability of people
to make sensible innovations on work routines in disrupted
environments?
- What requirements can we identify that can be used to
develop technologies that can support collaboration resilience
when the environment is disrupted?
We will conduct an ethnographic study to investigate these
questions focusing on people’s experience with the recent
Israeli-Lebanon war. PI Mark and co-PI Feldman are an interdisciplinary
team with combined expertise in collaboration technologies
and organizational routines. From the ethnographic study we
will identify requirements for technologies to support people
in restoring their human infrastructure for accomplishing
work after an environmental disruption. We will partner with
IBM Haifa to research and develop such technologies.
Our research objectives are to:
- Conduct scientific research into how human infrastructure
is repaired in disruptions.
- Educate Ph.D. students with expertise in collaboration
and technology use.
- Identify the requirements for effective collaboration
when environments are disrupted.
- Design a collaborative system to support people when the
environment is disrupted.
- Communicate the research results to government, academia,
and policy makers.
 Depending
upon the state of the world, we may expand our research to
cover other sites where there are environmental disruptions
due to natural disasters, terrorist disruptions (e.g. like
9/11), or wars. The innovation in this research is that it
will provide a comprehensive and integrated view of the role
of technology in repairing human infrastructure when the environment
is disrupted. The current research is unique in that it focuses
on the interplay of the human and technical infrastructures.
Our study will provide numerous benefits to society. Effective
collaboration has a vital role in society and understanding
how human infrastructure can be repaired in the aftermath
of disruption will benefit people’s lives in very real
ways. Our results can also help organizations to develop effective
plans for restoring the human infrastructure for collaborative
work. We expect that our study will help define human infrastructure
as a research topic and will help shape the agenda on the
role of human infrastructure in large-scale technological
infrastructure developments.
(CRITO Research Spotlight, December 2007)
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