Boundary Rogues in Cooperative Research Through Art: Keep That Potato Rolling

Abstract

We demonstrate how Research through Art (RtA) extends the CSCW agenda to include considerations of “work as a mental-emotional experience” complementing “work as a practice.” We do this by documenting how one art piece, Multiviews , was created in connection to a workplace and later displayed in different circumstances and contexts, producing the art piece as a sociomaterial entity. As a sociomaterial entity, Multiviews allowed organizational members to engage with the elusive phenomenon “the future of work” in novel ways, informing us as CSCW researchers about the importance of including the mental-emotional experience of work when designing cooperative technologies. Multiviews pushed the notion of “comfort” from a physical consideration on ergonomics and practicalities to bring the emotional experience of comfort into the center of attention, prompting people to imagine the workplace as a mental experience as well as a physical or digital place. Reflecting upon our unorthodox methods of collaborating with an artist in the CSCW study, and the role which the art piece played in the collaboration, we suggest extending CSCW research vocabulary on boundary objects in cooperative work with the concept of the boundary rogue to describe how the fundamental strangeness of the artwork as a sociomaterial entity made it function as a collaborative artifact uniquely productive across the multiple contexts: work, art, and research, providing new types of insights.