Engaging with practices: Design case studies as a research framework in CSCW

Information and communications technology (ICT) pervades most aspects of our lives and changes everyday's practices in work and leisure time. When designing innovative ICTs, we need to engage with given practices, institutional arrangements, and technological infrastructures. We describe the research framework used at the University of Siegen. It is based on a collection of design case studies in particular fields of practice and identifies cross-cutting issues to compare and aggregate insights between these cases. To illustrate this framework, we describe our research activities and discuss three themes which became important in different design case studies.