Shared Workspaces of the Digital Workplace: From Design for Coordination to Coordination for Flexible Design

Abstract

The emergence of new digital platforms and social software at work changes workplaces and how people coordinate their work. To date, coordination has only been minimally studied in the context of the social software enabled digital workplace. Through a qualitative analysis, we identify different coordination mechanisms (CM) in various practice areas as envisioned and used with the same collaboration platform by three healthcare workplace teams. The findings illustrate the flexibility of shared workspace designs of the digital workplace where CM cannot be anticipated a priori by researchers and software developers. We end with a discussion of the findings from a sociomaterial perspective to encourage studies that monitor the flexible and complex enactment of temporally emerging shared workspace designs.