Technologies for Cooperation, Interaction, and Knowledge, in Collectives

Coming from the disciplines of computer science and informatics, psychology, information sciences and communication, management science as well as sociology, the 16 members of the Tech-CICO research group are differently but unanimously confronted with technologies, being interested in the design of technical artefacts, the analysis of practices around these artefacts, or the use of these technologies as tools in their research.

The founding postulates that bring together the members of Tech-CICO are as follows:

• we can not separate the Human from the Technique; the activities are modeled by the technologies, and the latter are adapted or even transformed during their use, which allows their appropriation,
• the semantics of knowledge is dependent on the interactions between actors who manipulate this knowledge; the meaning is co-constructed by these different actors.

Tech-CICO is therefore interested in:

• the organization and instrumentation of cooperation between actors, rather than its substitutional automation,
• the modeling and articulation of contrasting points of view rather than the search for a universal ontology.

Tech-CICO is thus one of the very few French multidisciplinary groups whose domains are complementary in order to study distributed and reticular cooperative activities, and to design systems to support these activities.

This originality has been recognized for several years in national and international communities:

• for the empirical Study of distributed and reticular collaborative activities: Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC Studies) in the Field of Computer-Mediated Discourse Analysis and Internet Psychology, Sociology of Organizations, which finds an international resonance in the STS ("Science and Technology Studies"), Psychology of the Activity and its current variations (Scandinavian rereading of the Vygotsky-inspired Activity Theory, and ergonomic psychology of French-speaking tradition) ;
• with regard to the design of support systems for these activities: Engineering and Knowledge Management, Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) and Human-Computer Interaction (CHI).

Tech-CICO positions itself on major societal challenges: health, crisis management, industry 4.0, and the vast majority of research activities conducted at Tech-CICO are in collaboration with industrial or institutional partners.