Analysing and Supporting Cooperative Practices: An Interdisciplinary Approach

In this chapter we present an approach that aims at the development of a research program that entails a theoretical-empirical and a technological dimension simultaneously. The objective is both to contribute to the understanding of the socio-cognitive phenomena that underpin cooperation and collaboration in context and to contribute to the sustainable development of society by designing services that fulfil societal needs in a selected set of domains (e.g. risk and crisis management, social support for the disabled and the elderly, ecological sustainability and energy savings). One of the distinctive points of our approach is that it involves a set of researchers coming from different disciplines and working in a single team on the same empirical-theoretical and technological objects: mediated communication, cooperative practices and cooperative technologies. This approach has different but complementary faces: the naturalistic analysis of cooperative practices in different contexts, the design of services to support cooperative practices and the design of technological models, architectures and platforms that provide an infrastructure to support the cooperative services.