| dc.description.abstract | My thesis takes steps towards understanding the role technology can play in supporting multisession
creative collaborative work. This is achieved by exploring the relationship between the
outcomes of a session of work and the resources available within the environment where work
takes place. My domain of study is Joint Music Composition, which is a form of collaborative
work that requires participants to generate, share, develop and remember information about a
musical composition across a number of sessions. Although musical instrument and recording
technology have advanced, there appears to be little understanding of how technology can be
used to support collaboration in Joint Music Composition. To investigate this, I used the
Distributed Cognition framework (Hutchins, 1995a), which has traditionally been employed to
study work activities within socio-technological settings, to better understand how to support
collaboration and coordination within my domain of study.
The findings of my thesis are based on studies conducted in real life settings (i.e., field) and in
environments that I helped to organise (i.e., laboratory). Research from the field describes how
groups naturally organise their session, their physical setting, and their communication. It also
helps to highlight a number of issues relating to the cognitive burden associated with
compositions when they are in development. The first laboratory study illustrates the distributed
nature of problem solving in Joint Music Composition by giving examples of different ways
knowledge is shared within the group and across sessions. The second laboratory study
describes how a shared work space appears to change the way knowledge is represented and
distributed within two different rehearsal set-ups. Overall, the main insights that are applicable to
informing design relate to the way practitioners of Joint Music Composition manage the
distributed nature of problem solving using transient representations across multiple sessions of
work. | en_US |
