WELCOME TO THE CSC LAB
The Computer Supported Collaboration Lab (CSC Lab) is advancing theory and methods for understanding and planning design interventions for infrastructures, software ecosystems, and multiorganizational systems. The Principal Investigator of CSC Lab, Prof. Charlotte Lee, is an internationally recognized expert in coordination and collaboration for Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW). Our lab has particular expertise in the development, use, and maintenance of information infrastructures for multiorganizational and interdisciplinary scientific collaboration. We also do research in civic infrastructure, organizational resilience and pandemic response, scientific software development, and boundary negotiating artifacts/boundary objects for sensemaking and division of labor in small groups.
Our research pays careful attention to everyday practices of creating and using data and software and also to working, coordinating, and organizing with and through digital and analog artifacts. We are qualitative researchers, coordination theorists, information infrastructure intervention designers, and community helpers. We do qualitative, participation action research (PAR), and have also started to develop tools to help stakeholders make sense of and design for complex systems. Our initiative cuts vertically across units and levels of analysis and across the computational “stack” and is working towards notions of complex systems that include values, discourse, participation, and the agency of actors.
Ramifications of our research are wide ranging, including rethinking notions of “loops” and of people’s practices when it comes to AI/ML notions of “human-in-the loop” and augmenting our ability to understand how complex collaborative ecologies and data journeys interact and change over time to promote the co-creation of knowledge and communities of practice.
The CSC Lab is part of the Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering (HCDE) in the College of Engineering at the University of Washington in Seattle, WA.
