Geraldine Fitzpatrick

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The Locales Framework

For my thesis work, I developed the Locales Framework aimed to be a coherent conceptual toolkit to help people trying to understand the nature of cooperative work and to design better ways to support that work (that may or may not include technology). The thesis was revised to become the first book publication under the Kluwer/Springer CSCW series (see also Amazon for ToC and sample chapter 1).

The key elements of the framework include the following:

·         It is based on locale as a metaphor of place ie locale as the place arising from the lived relationship between people and the spaces and resources they use for the collective activities.

·         The framework draws heavily on Anselm Strauss’ theory of action (hence use of ‘social world’ to describe people who share some commitment to collective action) as well as various concepts emerging from CSCW work over the years.

·         Notions of centres and peripheries and variable relationships (rather then fixed boundaries), and different perspectives (rather than one homogenous view of a group), are central framing concepts.

The framework is described under five ‘aspects’

·         Locale foundations identifies the social world of interest and the spaces and resources through which the people in the social world achieve their interaction – collectively a locale.

·         Civic structure identifies the relationship of this social world and its locales to the broader context, picking up on social, political, organisational, material, cultural, legislative, contractual, technological and other broader-sphere issues.

·         Individual view identifies the different perspectives that individuals might hold of the one locale, together with an individual’s aggregated view of the multiple locales in which they participate, as appropriate for the domain of interest.

·         Interaction trajectory is concerned with actions and courses of actions, identifying the dynamic and temporal aspects of the living social world and its interactions within and across locales—past, present and future.

·         Mutuality is concerned with awareness as an achieved outcome, identifying the mutual communicative processes through which awareness is achieved — the provision and perception of information for awareness. It considers how spaces and things are made available and accessible to people and how people and their activities are made available and accessible to others through the spaces and things they use as locale

Various locales papers are listed on the publications page.

The Locales framework has been used by people in both research and commercial contexts in a number of ways: as a framework for orienting fieldwork data collection and analysis; to develop heuristics for evaluating groupware; to develop guidelines to inform systems design; to frame activities in future workshop facilitation; as part of peace process negotiations.