AbstractCollaborative media refers to digital media where people outside the traditional media industries participate in production as well as infrastructural design. We argue that (1) people’s use of computers today increasingly comprise communicating in collaborative media, and that (2) designing collaborative media implies fundamental changes to design processes and designer roles, which in turn (3) forms a challenge to the proactive position of the CHI community in shaping future computer use.

Keywordscollaborative media; designing collaborative media.

ACM Classification KeywordsH.5.m [Information interfaces and presentation (e.g., HCI)]: Miscellaneous;

IntroductionTo start on a personal note, one of the present authors (Löwgren) started his academic career in the CHI com-munity and then moved away from active participa-tion around the mid 90s, following the community only remotely as an interested observer. One of the main reasons for this was a shift of direction towards bringing interaction design together with media and communica-tion studies. This is also where the other author (Reimer) came in, with his academic background in media and communication studies.

Jonas LöwgrenSchool of Arts and Communication (K3) and Medea Collaborative Media Initiative Malmö University 205 06 Malmö, Sweden jonas.lowgren@mah.se

Bo ReimerSchool of Arts and Communication (K3) and Medea Collaborative Media Initiative Malmö University 205 06 Malmö, Swedenbo.reimer@mah.se

Designing Collaborative Media: A Challenge for CHI?

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Specifically, in 1997 the two present authors and a handful of colleagues were offered the opportunity to create a new department at a new, to-be-inaugurated university. To simplify, the School of Arts and Communi-cation at Malmö University was envisioned as a “digital Bauhaus” (Ehn, 1998) based on the two core academic disciplines of interaction design and media and commu-nication studies. There was a reason for this: We were betting on the hope that society would gradually stop seeing computers mainly as tools and start seeing them mainly as communication media (cf. Kammersgaard, 1988). Subsequent developments in Internet penetra-tion, ubiquitous computing and most recently “social media” seem to indicate that this in fact did happen.

Over the years, our work has entailed numerous projects where interaction designers and media schol-ars have worked together with extramural actors in experimenting with new media formats and platforms. More precisely, our concern is what we call collabora-tive media. By this, we understand digital media where (1) people who previously only consumed can now also produce, and where (2) people both inside and outside the traditional media industries can participate in design-ing the tools and infrastructures that form the basis for future and ongoing media productions. Collaborative media span the whole range from enterprise-operated repositories for professional knowledge management and crowd-funded international machinima productions all the way to the most leisurely acts of content production through Facebook likes.

Our mission here is to discuss what the development towards collaborative media means for interaction design and for the CHI community. We do this by presenting in-depth examples of our own research, focusing on what they can tell us about the values and approaches of designing collaborative media. We have chosen two early

examples, since they illustrate quite well the implica-tions of moving from a perhaps more conventional CHI paradigm to a collaborative-media mindset.

Avatopia: Designing societal media for a narrow stakeholder groupAvatopia was an early experiment in combining mass media with collaborative media, and specifically broad-cast TV with a collaborative creative online environment, in order to create a cross-media platform for young activists who feel strongly about changing society (Gis-lén et al., 2008). In Sweden, there is a relatively small proportion of 13–17 year olds who are deeply engaged in societal issues such as environmental protection, gender equality, racial segregation, globalization and consumerism, social injustice, and co-determination and societal influence of young citizens. Many of them feel lonely and disempowered. In the year 2001, one of the present authors (Löwgren) noted a possible congruence between the young activist subculture and the intentions of the Swedish public service TV broadcaster. Swedish Television, or SvT for short, is an advertisement-free broadcaster funded by the state and by viewer fees. At the time, it was struggling with low ratings among the younger audiences as well as with the respectable task of redefining its position and public-service mission in a then-emerging landscape of new media and increasing TV competition from commercial broadcasters. We set up a joint project to explore the intersection of young teenagers wanting to change society and SvT wanting to experiment with new cross-media formats and new interpretations of their public-service mission.

The Avatopia project started with a preparatory phase involving knowledge surveys and exploratory fieldwork. Based on the preparation, we formulated a project vision that essentially amounted to a cross-media platform

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providing the social substrate for planning societal action and influencing public opinion on key issues. This was to be realized in the form of a collaborative online forum in conjunction with a daily or weekly TV show where the broadcasted material would be produced in the collab-orative forum by community members together with TV staff. The idea was for the two channels to form a posi-tive spiral of participation: The small collaborative forum produces material that is seen by a large TV audience, where some people are motivated by what they see to join the community by committing to action in the col-laborative forum. The Avatopia community was envi-sioned as a small and highly involved group, where the access to a national broadcast channel with exceptional reach and credibility would ensure appropriate potential for influencing public opinion.

The next step involved concept development and community building. To this end, the project set out to create a participatory design process involving 20–30 young teenagers in the dual tasks of contributing to the design of the cross-media platform, and adopting the roles of mentors and norm-carriers in the community once it was opened to the public. The group of teenag-ers was recruited in December 2001 and January 2002 by means of a Christmas gift and an initial workshop (Figure 1). The workshop participants spent two days over a weekend understanding the initial project vision, sketching initial ideas for the collaborative forum and for the social mechanisms of the community, and generally getting to know and trust each other.

The workshop ended with the formation of four task forces, committing to working together during the spring of 2002. The tasks comprised (i) the look and feel of the collaborative forum; (ii) the functions and features of the collaborative forum; (iii) the norms and values of the community, and ways of upholding them; and

(iv) formats for the TV show. It was understood already at this time that the work of the task forces would be deeply intertwined, even though it would be performed in a geographically distributed way since the partici-pants lived across most of southern Sweden, all went to high-school and thus had to work on the project in their spare time. All the task forces contained researchers and artists from the institutional project partners, who would take responsibility for coordinating the work.

Towards the summer of 2002, all task forces had reached substantial results. We synthesized the results into a coherent concept design focusing on the visual and functional aspects of the collaborative forum, and on strategies for building and sustaining a desirable set of values in the community. The collaborative forum was to become a 3D avatar world with a highly eclectic, collage-style visual quality. In order to create friction and en-ergy, the world would be quite limited with room for only a hundred avatars or so. The primary form of commu-nication in the collaborative forum would be chat-style typed text. In addition, there would be communicative tools for arranging hearings and other forms of public debate, for initiating and participating in forum-style text conversations, for creating propaganda-bots, for placing posters and flyers in the avatar world, and for collabora-tive creation of machinima-style avatar animations.

Concerning the social aspects of community building, it was clear that the young teenagers placed much faith in open and critical dialogue. Virtually all ideas on techni-cal enforcement of community rules, such as blocking and automatic monitoring, were ruled out by the task force in favor of an open democracy where every voice should be heard, even though some could then be thor-oughly refuted in dialogue. The overall social character of the community would be a collaborative environment

Figure 1. Design team members exploring the possibilities of online avatar worlds at the initial workshop.

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marked by tolerance and by judging proposals and posi-tions based on their merits rather than on who stated them. It was clear that the key to successful growth of the Avatopia community would be the creation of a shared core set of values and a way to carry those val-ues forward into a growing membership upon launch.

As part of the strategy for community building, we planned a series of half-hour TV programs to be broad-cast immediately prior to the public launch of the Avato-pia platform. The programs would feature a number of young teenagers from the design team, travelling around Sweden and initiating actions together with local people in large and small cities. The actions would address is-sues of interest to the Avatopia community and the final episode would contain strong lead-ins to the launch of the collaborative forum, where the teenagers featuring in the TV series would carry on their work by acting as mentors for the newcomers.

A rather extensive implementation phase followed, in which the participatory design team mainly engaged in validating aspects of the collaborative forum as it grew into a usable online platform. Another task for the design team during this phase concerned the format for the TV show complementing the collaborative forum.

Avatopia launched in September 2003 with four half-hour TV broadcast episodes of the travelling-activist series (Figure 2) leading into the public opening of the collaborative forum (Figure 3) and the inception of a weekly half-hour Avatopia show in SvT’s youth program-ming block at 7pm on Thursdays. The collaborative forum largely implemented the concept design described earlier. The three core community members from the activist series and a number of other members from the participatory design team assumed the roles of mentors in the collaborative forum, taking care to address new-

comers and share the Avatopia values and “methods” with them as they joined.

The launch plan predicted a small but steady growth in numbers of active members in the collaborative forum, and similarly a small but steady growth in the proportion of relevant topics addressed by the commu-nity (from an initial focus on how-to issues). A critical mass of 1,000 active members was expected at six months, at which time a longitudinal evaluation of social community practices and societal outcomes would start. The development of the community during the fall of 2003 adhered to the launch plan. However, the opera-tion of Avatopia entailed a small running cost to SvT for part-time editorial staff and server hosting. When SvT suffered an unexpected budget cut towards the end of 2003, it was decided that Avatopia was not part of core business and it was terminated in early 2004. Hence, no systematic evaluation was performed and no sustained societal impact was reached.

The Avatopia project clearly “worked” in the sense that it engaged a group of highly committed and talented young teenagers over a sustained period of time. The joint efforts of the young participants and the institu-tional partners led to the successful deployment of an innovative media platform, which seemed to have some potential towards its aim of empowering societal change. From a CHI perspective, there were two main knowledge contributions from the project. The first is the notion of a positive participation spiral, which is a generative concept with a scope reaching into various cross-media design situations. More specifically, the work indicates the importance of coordinating the forms and practices of the different media channels involved in a cross-media platform to support production synergies. Another aspect of the positive participation spiral concept for cross-

Figure 3. A look inside the Avatopia online forum.

Figure 2. Still from one of the travelling activist TV episodes, where high-school students organize a cer-emony of grading the teachers.

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media is to select channels such that high reach and low engagement is combined with low reach and high engagement.

The second knowledge contribution concerns the community building strategy for a narrow stake-holder group characterized by strong shared commit-ment and geographical dispersion. Specifically, the contribution from Avatopia consists in the idea of setting up a participatory design process where the participants spend part of their time developing the community core in terms of values and practices, then transition into roles as mentors or exemplary members as the commu-nity is opened to the public (see also Jackson, 2009). It should be noted, of course, that this strategy is ex-tremely costly in terms of project resources and possibly not necessary for community building in settings where a wider audience is addressed and lower degrees of com-mitment are required.

Kliv: Designing workplace mediaOne way to understand Kliv is to look at the final re-sult: A system where medical staff at the intensive care unit (ICU) of Malmö University Hospital could share and develop their joint body of practical knowledge on how to carry out various work tasks, often concerning less frequently used medical equipment. The system was deployed around 2002 and was a sociotechnical one in the sense that its components consisted of digital media technology as well as work practices and procedures.

Specifically, Kliv was based on the idea of staff mem-bers making short video instructions on tasks they are familiar with. The video is recorded by a colleague using a simple consumer-grade video camera, and sometimes takes several attempts to get right. There is no editing apart from what the camera itself affords. When a video is recorded, it is reviewed by colleagues for quality and

relevance. If it is found useful, it is given a unique bar-code, which is printed on paper and placed in the work environment at a spot that the video talks about. It can now be played back as needed by any staff member car-rying a PDA augmented with a barcode scanner.

The Kliv system was an early and seminal example of designing collaborative media in a workplace setting, and it was successful in many ways: It was used for several years after deployment, it did facilitate professional learning, and it was recognized by professional commu-nities as a landmark concept. For the purposes of this paper, though, it may be more relevant to consider Kliv as an example of how a design process can be arranged appropriately for a collaborative media setting.

The Kliv project was a joint effort between Malmö University, Interactive Institute and Malmö University Hospital. It was run by PhD students Erling Björgvins-son and Per-Anders Hillgren who acted as designers in the conventional participatory-design sense of the word, planning and facilitating a design process where mem-bers of the medical staff at the ICU participated over a sustained period of time.

The project started when the ICU invited Björgvinsson and Hillgren to work with them as researchers/designers on ideas in the area of ICT support for competence de-velopment. Initially, the ICU was envisioning some sort of interactive training material, but the researchers were given free hands to start from scratch. After a phase of ethnographically inspired studies to familiarize them-selves with the environment and practices of the ICU, the researchers entered into a dialogue-oriented phase involving several workshops with the medical staff.

Some of these workshops entailed playing metaphor games in order to foster reflection on the work prac-tice and to create “generative collisions” between the designers’ observations and the staff members’ everyday

Figure 4. Members of the Kliv design team.

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practices. Another workshop was focused on technical possibilities, packaged as generic building blocks within a game set in a hospital ward. The building blocks were mainly inspired by ubiquitous computing, and since the researchers had noticed that the knowledge culture of the ICU was largely oral, there were also building blocks that had to do with digital audio and video. It turned out that the workshop participants saw the idea of linking digital information to the physical space as the most promising one, and it was decided to move further in the direction of digital video and physical tags overlaying digital information on the physical workspace (i.e., what would today be called location-based information).

The next phase involved a range of explorative experi-ments in the workplace. In order to explore the idea of location-based information, a few staff members agreed to carry mockups of pocket screens during their regular work in order to come up with ideas on where and when they could use digital information on the fly. This experi-ment showed, among other things, the need for infor-mation on how to operate pieces of equipment that was only rarely used. Another set of experiments involved staff members who were considered particularly good at handling certain pieces of equipment. The researchers made a few videos where these staff members would talk without any special preparations about how to use the equipment in question. A large group of the medi-cal staff viewed the videos and the general reaction was pleasant surprise at how good they were.

Combining the insights, a further experiment was made where a nurse was asked to assemble a piece of equipment that was new to her. She was given a PDA (a brand-new Ipaq – the first commercially available model that could play video) with videos on it, in which her physiotherapist colleague explained the assembly proce-

dure and talked about her own experience of using it. It turned out that the nurse preferred the video format to written instructions and that the small screen of the PDA proved to be valuable as she could easily hold the device next to the real thing for comparison.

As the design team agreed that location-based videos featuring colleagues would be a valuable resource, the work proceeded into a phase of implementing the con-cept in the everyday organization and practices at the intensive care unit. The first task to be addressed was the production of the videos. The researchers recorded a collection of video clips showing staff members impro-vise the sharing of knowledge on various work tasks, and spent time in the staff lounge of the intensive care unit editing the material. Thanks to this move, staff mem-bers noted how successful the results were and learned about the production guidelines that the researchers had discovered, such as cutting only in the camera, avoid the zoom and instead move the camera close, let the people being filmed tell their stories at their own pace rather than interrupting with questions, and so on. The stage was thus set for staff members to take over the record-ing (Figure 5), and it was found that this handover led to several additional benefits: Joint dialogue and reflection between recorder and recordee on what the clip should contain; the recorder knowing the work and being able to capture its tangible aspects better on video; and a sense of comfort and security for the recordee when the recorder was a well-known colleague. The researchers moved on to organize meetings where the staff-pro-duced videos were reviewed and commented by col-leagues.

Another implementation aspect was to create ac-cessible tools for everyday use. Barcode scanners were purchased and connected to PDAs, and student pro-

Figure 5. Recording Kliv video.

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PDAs and barcode scanners to integrate production and consumption of video in the everyday work practices of non-media professionals. The scope of this concept goes beyond the specific technology used, and would be highly feasible even today using more contemporary components for location-based information.

Moreover, the project provided a rich understanding of the conditions under which a sociotechnical system for local management and development of organizational knowledge can grow into a sustainable element of every-day practice, as well as methodological and concep-tual contributions (Hillgren, 2006; Björgvinsson, 2007).

For our purposes here, the most important point con-cerns the congruence between the participatory nature of the design process and the participatory nature of the resulting collaborative media platform, i.e., the Kliv sys-tem. As we shall see below, this points in the direction of new relations between design, production and consump-tion – and these relations are of significant consequence to the CHI community.

CHI and collaborative mediaGoing back to the introduction, the broad categories of computer-as-tool and computer-as-medium have been with us for a very long time. Arguably, it would be fair to say that interaction design as an academic discipline, as well as the CHI community, emanate from an intellectual tradition of concentrating mainly on the computer as a tool (but certainly including all manners of stationary, mobile, embedded and ubiquitous digital devices in the notion of “computer”). More recent developments have included a turn towards experience and non-instrumen-tal aspects of computer use, and lately a growing body of studies on uses of “social media.”

In our view, however, a more serious challenge is starting to form for the CHI community. The way we see

grammers were enlisted to create a program to connect barcodes to video clips (Figure 6). In order to facilitate socialization of the specific technology into the organiza-tion, the researchers organized a training activity where the majority of the medical staff learned how to make videos and access them by scanning barcodes.

Finally, it was felt by the design team that a sustain-able implementation would require organizational sup-port. Even though the idea was that all staff members should be able to make a video, it was deemed neces-sary to assign formal responsibility for certain aspects of content production. Thus, a review group was appointed with the task of asserting the medical appropriateness and correctness of the videos. Moreover, a deployment group was made responsible for transferring videos to the PDAs and for producing barcodes.

At this point, the researchers withdrew from the process at the ICU and, as indicated earlier, the Kliv system took on a successful and comparatively long life of its own. In many ways, the project was a textbook example of participatory design at its best. Specifically, the researchers played the conventional designer role in that they facilitated the design process, managed its progress and planned next steps in a situated fashion, created design artifacts such as games and experiments to tease out the situated knowledge of the medical staff members, and contributed their own knowledge from the fields of interaction design, ubiquitous computing and digital media technology.

From a CHI perspective, the Kliv project provides a number of early insights into how to design collabora-tive media for workplace use. The perhaps most obvi-ous result was the design concept or pattern of the Kliv system itself. The project showed a way in which consumer-grade video cameras could be combined with

Figure 6. Viewing Kliv video.

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might call live sketching, questioning the distinction between prototyping, testing and deployment.

This leads on to the more general notion of design-in-use. When designing for collaborative media, it seems more or less necessary to abandon the idea of a coherent and delimited design process leading up to delivery, acceptance test and deployment. Not only are production and consumption intertwined in collabora-tive media, but design seems to join the mix as well. This point was made over twenty years ago on more theoretical grounds (Henderson & Kyng, 1991), but in collaborative media it is a simple reality rather than a scholarly point of design philosophy. The recent interest in perpetual-beta approaches to development as cham-pioned by, e.g., Google is an illustrative case in point, as well as the attempts by Facebook to delicately balance habit and innovation in their ongoing re-design during live multi-million use.

If we view interaction design for collaborative media in this way, what becomes the role of the interaction designer? One metaphor with some leverage appears to be the designer as improv producer, who sets the stage, provides props, frames an initial plot and invites ac-tors to participate at opening night – at which time the producer joins the audience in anxiously watching how the improv unfolds (Löwgren, 2010). The most obvious shortcoming of this metaphor, however, is that improvs rarely spread organically to engage millions of partici-pants. Similar comments can be made for traditional notions of designer as orchestrator or facilitator in the participatory design literature. A more contemporary ap-proach would be to think of design as infrastructuring (Star & Ruhleder, 1996; Björgvinsson et al., 2010) which amounts to an ongoing process of juggling objects, pro-cesses and people in a sociomaterial structure.

it, people’s use of computers today increasingly consists of communicating in collaborative media. If the CHI com-munity wants to stay proactive in the sense of shaping the futures of computer use, then the issue of design-ing collaborative media will have to come to the fore. Our own work represents examples of interaction design-ers and media scholars experimenting with collaborative media in a research setting: What collaborative media practices and platforms could we envision, what would their properties and qualities be, and what would be the role of collaborative media designers? We feel that some of what we have learnt about designing collaborative media could be valuable to the CHI community.

It goes without saying in interaction design in general, as well as in CHI, that design includes sketching, prototyp-ing and testing. But this actually becomes problematic when you design collaborative media. How do you sketch a communicative process where substance and meaning are created in the moment of actual use within a social structure of critical mass and authentic communicative significance? To put it differently, if you user-tested a set of UI wireframes for key Facebook pages in 2003, what would you learn about the experience of using Facebook beyond the usability of command labels and buttons? As our examples show, it seems more apt to build design processes for collaborative media around participatory design techniques, collaborative experimentation and the deployment of readymades. Avatopia illustrates how a strategy for community building after launch draws on collaborative norm-building during early design stages and how the two phases are integrated through participation of primary stakeholders. Similarly, in Kliv, the prototyping strategy of deploying readymades in live experimentation illustrates a useful practice that we

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navigation. Yet, we predict that it is going to fail rather miserably simply because it does not tap into existing and emerging communicative practices. What it does, briefly, is to select items from RSS news streams based on what your tribe members have read – but it requires a separate action of checkup since it does not gener-ate outgoing RSS or any other mashable stream format. Moreover, as a member you cannot add news sources without sending an explicit request to the site own-ers. In effect, it is a standalone service in a mediascape increasingly marked by integration, streamlining and confluence. It is instructive to compare what Hearsay does with the Facebook “hack” of showing the reading of RSS items in the news feed – even though the Facebook version does not offer more than perhaps 20% of the features in Hearsay, it is likely to be the right 20% in terms of fluency and integration with established every-day practices.

Moving on, the intersection between design and production is inherently complicated. It does not suffice to say by analogy that design shapes the video camera (infrastructure) and production uses the video camera to record material (content) for subsequent consump-tion. To the contrary, in collaborative media the notions of infrastructure and content do not map in convenient ways to professional roles such as designer and produc-er. An fine example might be the Twitter hashtag. When Twitter was originally designed and launched in 2006, there was no dedicated hashtag functionality. As Twitter grew in popularity, the need for metadata to search and group tweets was starting to be felt. Power user Chris Messina suggested the use of a special character (#) to prefix content markers, the idea caught on and a whole ecology of third-party services for aggregation, trend-spotting and micro-meme archiving started to grow around the #hashtag. Is the Twitter hashtag design or

To make this point a little more clear, we need to consid-er the three main perspectives of design, production and consumption (refer to Figure 7). When it comes to collaborative media, it turns out that none of these terms are easy to pin down, but an initial understanding could be that design creates the frames for communica-tive acts to be produced and consumed. More specifi-cally, design for collaborative media can be seen as infrastructuring to a great extent. It happens throughout production and consumption rather than before produc-tion and consumption. It can never prescribe produc-tion and consumption – there are no given tasks to be supported – but it can make certain things easier, other things harder. It can create gradients and incentives in terms of tools and platforms, and it can catalyze, sustain and influence communicative processes of production and consumption as illustrated in the examples above.

Looking more closely at the intersections between the three perspectives, we find that production/consump-tion essentially corresponds to the emerging studies on collaborative media in media and communication stud-ies, including concepts such as prosumers, produsage, pro-ams, Media Studies 2.0 and citizen journalism. The remaining two intersections, however, are less well-explored and have more significant implications for the design-oriented CHI community.

The intersection of design and consumption brings to attention the fact that collaborative media consump-tion happens not in a vacuum but rather in the context of extensive habits and confluences of everyday media streams. The main insight concerns the importance of designing with existing collaborative media practices in mind. A useful example might be hearsay.it, a recently launched news service that is apparently well-designed and builds on theoretically well-founded notions of tribal

Figure 7. The three main perspec-tives on, and in, collaborative media (cf. Löwgren & Reimer, forthcoming.)

Production Consumption

Design

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needs to start preparing for very different conceptions of design processes and designer roles in future practice and research.

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Ehn, P. (1998). Manifesto for a digital Bauhaus. Digital Creativity 9(4):207–216.

Gaver, B., Dunne, T., Pacenti, E. (1999). Design: Cultural probes. interactions 6(1):21–29.

Gislén, Y., Löwgren, J., Myrestam, U. (2008). Avatopia: A cross-media community for societal action. Personal & Ubiquitous Computing 12:289–297.

Henderson, A., Kyng, M. (1991). There’s no place like home: Continuing design in use. In Greenbaum, J., Kyng, M. (eds.) Design at work: Cooperative design of computer systems, pp. 219–240. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Hillgren, P.-A. (2006). Ready-Made-Media-Actions: Lokal produk-tion och användning av audiovisuella medier inom hälso- och sjukvården. Blekinge Institute of Technology, Sweden. Disser-tation 2006:07. (In Swedish.)

Jackson, L. (2009). Facilitating participatory audiences: Sociable media and PSM.” In Lowe, G. (ed.) The public in public ser-vice media, pp. 175–187. Göteborg: Nordicom.

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Löwgren, J. (2010). Designing for collaborative crossmedia creation. In Drotner, K., Schrøder, K. (eds.) Digital content creation: Perceptions, practices & perspectives, pp. 15–35. New York: Peter Lang.

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production? It is not part of the technical Twitter infra-structure, yet it is an essential part of the communica-tive Twitter infrastructure (with notable follow-on effects in other platforms, such as Yammer and even regular email). Is it infrastructure or contents? Such questions are more or less meaningless; what the Twitter example shows is rather how difficult it is to draw a firm line be-tween design and production when collaborative media are concerned, and how what we call infrastructuring engages “designers” as well as “producers” and “con-sumers.” A similar example of dispersed infrastructuring at the intersection of design and production might be the Facebook Platform, an architecture and a set of rules and principles for third-party apps. Those apps are not de-signed by the owners of the Facebook design/infrastruc-ture, yet they form part of the infrastructure-in-use and support engaging and varied forms of live communica-tive production and consumption for millions of members on a daily basis.

To conclude these deliberations on a more concise note, we return to the question suggested in the title of this paper: What does the challenge of designing collab-orative media mean for CHI?

• The “user-centered design process” turns into ongo-ing infrastructuring where design melts together with production and consumption. Time-honored design practices of sketching, prototyping and testing trans-form beyond recognition.

• The “interaction designer” role is diffused over mul-tiple stakeholder groups and constituencies within the ecosystem of the collaborative media platform in question, all empowered to engage in the ongoing infrastructuring in different ways.

In our view, computer-as-medium as predicted by Kam-mersgaard largely plays out as computer-as-collabora-tive-media in computer use today. The CHI community

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