Lasting Impact Award: Paul Luff and Christian Heath

This year’s CSCW Lasting Impact Award will be presented to Paul Luff and Christian Heath for their CSCW 1998 paper, Mobility in Collaboration. By exploring three diverse work domains – healthcare, construction and the London Underground – this work illustrated the importance of understanding movement of participants, and influenced future research agendas on mobile computing. Paul Luff will accept the award, and with a panel of discussants will reflect on the importance of this piece of work to our field.

Irene Greif, Moderator
Paul Luff, King’s College London
Barry Brown, Stockholm University
Aleksandra Sarcevic, Drexel University
Jaime Teevan, Microsoft Research

Mobility in Collaboration (1998)

Abstract from the 1998 paper:

This paper addresses an issue that has received little attention within CSCW - the requirements to support mobility within collaborative activities. By examining three quite different settings each with differing technological support, we examine the ways in which mobility is critical to collaborative work. We suggest that taking mobility seriously may not only contribute to our understanding of current support for collaboration, but raise more general issues concerning the requirements for mobile and other technologies.

Paul Luff

Paul Luff Image


Paul Luff is Professor of Organizations and Technology in the School of Management, King’s College London. His research involves the detailed analysis of work and interaction and draws upon video recordings of everyday human conduct. Over the past 25 years he has undertaken studies in a diverse variety of settings that include control rooms, news and broadcasting, healthcare, the financial industries, museums, galleries and science centres and within design, architecture and construction. All of these studies have also involved collaborations with computer scientists and engineers considering a wide range of technological innovations, including advanced media spaces, augmented technologies, image processing, mobile systems and different kinds of collaborative technologies. Paul has co-ordinated a number international, interdisciplinary projects that involve social scientists, computer scientists and practitioners collaborating to develop innovative technologies, particularly how mundane objects, like paper documents, and video systems can be enhanced to support work and interaction. He has written over 100 articles in the fields of CSCW, HCI, Requirements Engineering, Studies of Work Practices and Ubiquitous and Mobile Systems and he is co-author with Christian Heath of ‘Technology in Action’, published by Cambridge University Press.

Christian Heath

Christian Heath Image


Christian Heath is Professor of Work and Organisation in the School of Management, King’s College London. Drawing on Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis, he specialises in fine-grained, video-based field studies of social interaction, focusing in particular on the ways in which tools and technologies feature in everyday activities. He has undertaken projects in areas that include command and control, health care, markets, the cultural industries, as well as studies of more experimental technologies. He has held positions at the Universities of Manchester, Surrey, and Nottingham and visiting positions at Universities and industrial research laboratories in the UK and abroad. He is a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences (FAcSS), a member of the Worshipful Company of Art Scholars and a Freeman of the City of London. In 2015 was given the EUSSET-IISI Lifetime Achievement Award presented to scholars for an outstanding contribution to the reorientation of the fields of computing and Informatics. His publications more than hundred articles and nine books including: - The Dynamics of Auction: Social Interaction and the Sale of Fine Art and Antiques (Cambridge 2013: awarded the Best Book Award in 2014 by the International Society for Conversation Analysis), Video in Qualitative Research: Analysing Social Interaction in Everyday Life (Sage with Hindmarsh, J. & P. Luff, 2010), Technology in Action (with P. Luff, Cambridge 2000) and Body Movement and Speech in Medical Interaction (Cambridge 1986). With Roy Pea and Lucy Suchman he is editor of the book series Learning and Doing: Social Cognitive and Computational Perspectives (Cambridge).