Material Mediation in Collaborative Activity

The material qualities of technological mediators are vital to collaborative activity, but current paradigms for collaboration support leave the potential of material mediation largely untapped. The HCI literature addresses both material mediation for individuals and coordination between collaborators - but rarely does it discuss the more direct role of the material as standing between people: its communicative role. This paper unfolds a material/linguistic analysis of four empirical examples from previous work on collaborative writing to showcase how material qualities of both tools and the text-in-progress, used in both planned and improvised manners, help co-authors shift between levels of collaboration, from independent co-ordinated activity to highly collaborative co-constructive activity. On one hand, we see co-authors successfully collaborating through material means; on the other, we see frustrations resulting from limited material expressivity in current tools. This duality between the significance of material mediation and obstacles to drawing on its potential makes clear that our conception of materiality needs elaboration. We point to multimodality as one opportunity for this.