Traces, Breadcrumbs, and Patina: Exploring and Designing with Traces of Activity

This one-day workshop invites members of the CSCW community with a research interest in activity traces to jointly explore and refine the currently ill-defined concept of traces. Traces are an important means for people to remember and interpret the state of things, not least when navigating collaborative situations. However, although traces and related concepts have turned up in CSCW and HCI literature over at least three decades, work has been sporadic and has not been consolidated – as evidenced, for example, by a proliferation of terms, from “traces” to “footprints” and “DNA”. As a consequence, our field does not have a good conceptual apparatus for dealing with traces, whether empirically or as a resource in design. This workshop will offer a structured forum for developing traces as a concept for use in both empirical and design work. The workshop aims to recruit broadly, from those who design with traces or build systems that use or create traces, to those who seek to understand traces empirically or theoretically. Outcomes of the workshop will include a crowd-sourced catalog of traces and one or more initial definition(s) and/or a typology of traces, both of which will be available to participants after the workshop.